I heard from the Spencer Foundation, didn’t get it this year. Big disappointment, lasted for a few days.
A friend made her goal, and inspired the rest of us to think about how we can make big dreams happen.
In sum: doubting myself, and believing in others. And feeling amazed it’s May, and so much has happened, and hasn’t, and it’s all about to change again.
Have you heard of William Kamkwamba, the boy from Malawi who built a windmill using books from a small library at his school? I’d heard of him but never seen his book. Today I helped my younger sister with a writing critique of it, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, and it inspired me to look up his TED talk. WOW. What a courageous, inventive, inspiring person who makes us think about education and inborn talent and what development can be. Thanks, Lethy, I can’t wait to read the book and learn more about him!
Christina has been an artist and writer as long as I’ve known her. We met at a pottery class in the summer before 6th grade, and became friends as we learned to push and pull terra cotta clay into small bowls and cups. In high school, we wrote letters to each other at night and she drew me pictures I still have. When I went over to her house, I remember admiring her art table, in a corner of the living room. One sister played the cello, the other painted too, and I was jealous and wanted to be like her. In college she inspired me with her writing, her stories, essays, papers. She also marched me to the computer lab after finding me in tears with scribbled piles of papers, and showed me how to use Word to write myself. We took a class together our last year where we wrote “mini-ethnographies”, and explored writing, identity, and the moments of life that thread together into stories.
In the years we’ve been friends, Christina has always believed in me, pushed me to tap my own creativity. When I ask her for advice, or just complain about what’s bothering me, she has this uncanny ability to ask questions that get at the heart of things, nudge at the edges of self doubt and gently make me see what I’ve been kind of ignoring all along. Most recently, we were talking on the phone and I was telling her about my project in Barcelona, complaining about how I couldn’t seem to get away from national identity, but that I was so tired of thinking about nationalism. And she started with her questions: What does it mean to people, really mean, to live with these language and identity issues? What part of the human experience is this about, this identity struggle between Catalan and Spanish? And what’s your story in this? Maybe there’s a story beyond your dissertation, beyond the academic story. As you can probably imagine, it was her questions and encouragement that got me writing again, and pushed me towards the eureka moment I wrote about the other day.
When Christina started her blog five years ago, I remember thinking “great, a way to read her writing more often!”. In the years since, as she’s continued writing, publishing, painting, photographing, I’ve seen how her creative work touches people far and wide. How she writes, what she sees, who she notices. She inspires all she touches, and I’ve never believed in her more.
Which is why I’m writing this post, now, on a clear, cold, February day in Toledo. Last week, Christina launched A Field Guide to Now on Kickstarter, an innovative site where people can get support for creative projects. She is seeking backers, small and large alike, to help fund her time and materials while she finishes her first book, a collection of essays and art. Her goal is $10,000 by May 15th. I hope you’ll pledge ($1 or more), and maybe tell a friend or two. Because this is a person whose work inspires all it touches. One day you will walk to your gate in an airport, or come across a paperback on a vacation, or notice someone reading one of her books on the train, and will be able to say “I helped Christina Rosalie publish her first book!”.
Thank you for considering, for reading, for supporting a writer, artist, friend.
Like the sudden way I notice the contours of stone through the camera lens, I notice the way a conversation about coffee can become a discussion of national identity. And like the layers of mountains fading across the end of Spain and into France, I notice layers of questions and future projects in my daily fieldwork with schools and education policy in Barcelona.
What does it mean to belong as a new immigrant in a school? What does the work of governments and policies have to do with belonging to a place, our identity as “people from here”? When do we belong to a place, and when do we know someone doesn’t belong? How do people navigate the small interactions across cultural boundaries that happen in cities, schools, trains, marketplaces? Does government action have anything to do with how we interact with each other?
A page has turned with my work. I’ve been writing a lot, about what I see in schools, what I learn in interviews, and all kinds of other things. I am speaking better and better Catalan, and with this comes more insight into the way people think here, how they see these questions. A dissertation, a study, something that will become a real body of work still feels far away. But the project is beginning to feel like it has legs and might someday walk.
And another thing is happening, a surprising and exciting shift. Put simply, I’ve realized that a dissertation is not all that will come out of this work I’m doing. The Ph.D. is important training, and it’s helping me do a project with all kinds of good things like strong research methods. But I’m taking more than academic papers from this. The questions I’m uncovering, encountering–about identity, culture, language, and crossing boundaries of difference–they will be braided into my dissertation. But they can also become other writing projects (non-academic work? op-eds? future blog posts?) , or art, or advocacy work, or something else entirely. In other words, the thesis and the contribution I make to academia as a result of this year is not the sum total of what I can take from having spent this time in Barcelona. There are other stories, other meanings, other ways to work with what I’m uncovering here as I watch and listen and learn.
It’s wonderful to feel such creative possibility in this work. Welcome after months of plodding, wondering, trying, failing.
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Where are you with your creative projects? If you’re plodding, or trying, or failing, what keeps you going? How does the feeling of creative possibility spark to life for you?
The most inspired moments of my undergraduate education happened in the last semester, when I took a class on “ethnography and human development” (I was a human development major), and did a study of an afterschool program for Hispanic children in an elementary school near my college. My teacher pushed all of us to observe, to question our participation in what we saw, to reflect on our position as researchers, to strive to understand what we saw from the perspective of those we studied. This professor was the first one to say “have you thought about graduate school?”, and to tell me my “mini-ethnography” of the afterschool program could become worthy of publication with some more work. There was a spark in that project that helped bring me to my current project today. It nourished my ambition, my belief that I had something to say, that my involvement with education and knowledge could go beyond teaching elementary school (my career plan at that time).
Today I know for sure that being a Ph.D. student is not quite what I imagined back when I wrote that term paper in my final semester of college. I know that part of what inspired me so much was the experience of connecting my own life, what I saw, and the things I read about in books. I was inspired to advocate for change in education, to push for better opportunities in schools like the one where I did my research. I was excited to write, to find (make) meaning through this writing. I wanted to find better ways of teaching literacy, teaching English to Spanish-speakers, making schools support their learning.
And here I am today, riding the waves of frustration, procrastination, hard work, and sometimes inspiration that come along with doing a Ph.D. dissertation study. An independent research study (there’s a lot of emphasis in Ph.D. programs on the fact that the dissertation is study is done independently). What does what I’m doing today have to do with those early sparks? What does it mean to dedicate my professional life to being a professor? How does my study, my writing, this career of research and teaching…how do or will they matter, and to whom?
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What questions do you have about what you do? How was it sparked by early learning? How does that spark relate to where you are now?
For my project I am interviewing education people in all 10 municipal districts in Barcelona. I visited two neighborhoods today, and brought along the camera as a way of noticing more as I walked around the new places before and after my meetings. And notice I did. Whenever I’m taking pictures I start seeing more and more possibilities, seeing details and framing images that I would have walked past if the camera weren’t in my hand, especially in the city. I love the idea of a picture a day with the 365 project. Perhaps using the camera lens to notice this city in new ways will help me find my way into my research project, into seeing peoples’ understandings of immigration, integration, and how schools are changing.
I’ve been thinking about seeing, but not really seeing things, how this can happen more in a city. The buildings are unchanging, and there are a lot of them, and I have somewhere to be. I’m lost in my head and my to-do list and worrying over my project. The other day I picked up my professor and her family at the airport, and one of the first things she said when we got into town was “I love all the wrought iron balconies”. And I said, “me too”, and then thought to myself, “have I ever really noticed them?”. And I hadn’t. Not really. Today, I stood on a corner, looking up at the iron balconies of the building across the street above my metro stop. Really seeing them for the first time. How they stood out against the dull gray stone building. How they only started on the second or third floor level, above the trees. How different buildings swirl and wrap their iron in different ways. How my day, my project, my to-do list felt more tangible and possible once I forgot about it for a few moments.
What did you see, or (not) see, today?
On the last Friday of every month, Maria Kalman posts a unique artistic story on her New York Times blog. Back in August, the topic was immigration, and how people got to America. I posted about it. Back in April, a piece about women on the Supreme Court. More recently, there was a piece about Thanksgiving, and going back to the land. I love her style, the way she’s taken the medium of a webpage and made it into a story, a way of displaying her art. How she mixes painting and photography, and complicated topics. An inspiration for sure.
Missing conversations with friends over coffee today. An hour here or there, fellow Ph.D. students or other smart friends, coffees are a regular way to get together back home. This was a big way I connected with friends at Berkeley, and we always talked about our work, school, or just life. I’ve had it a few times here, but not much yet. I think I’ll seek out more people to talk with over coffee in Barcelona.
So there are several of us interested in reading Three Cups of Tea. I was just reading a blog I visit sometimes, of an aid worker (formerly) working in Afghanistan, and she just read it. And then one of her commenters also had written a review about it. And I had an idea: let’s start a book group together! We’ll read Three Cups of Tea first, in December or January, and go from there. I love the idea of a book group focused on nonfiction books like Three Cups of Tea, but am open to other inspirations too. And maybe we could talk about it through emails, or through a discussion group of some kind, or even all get together on the phone or Skype. How many of you have been in a book group before? I’ve always wanted to, but never found (or started) the right group.
What do you think?
