budding scholar

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.

***

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?

I think I’ve settled at last, found the fruit of my study. After days of flip-flopping again, soul searching about what I really care about spending the next three years understanding, I’ve made a decision to focus on specific programs that target integration for newcomers to Spanish schools, and drop the citizenship education focus. This is the opposite of where I thought I’d end up, but I think it makes sense. It allows me to study the broad questions that have been driving my work since I started graduate school. And it avoids the problem of veering too far from issues of immigration, cultural integration, and school interactions. As much as the citizenship education part would be interesting, it takes me too far away from the questions I care the most about. Questions like:

• How do educators, integration programs define integration in Catalonia and Madrid?
• What is taught in these programs?
• What interactions are there between teachers of newcomer programs and mainstream classes?
• How about interactions between students in these programs and the rest of the school?

The next steps are to re-write my study design, tweak the theoretical framing, and start making calls for data collection. (That is, if I don’t flip-flop once again. Hmmm, I hope not!)

After a final trip this weekend into the Castilla La Mancha countryside for another wedding, I’m sitting down to my desk on this Monday knowing that the whirlwind move out of San Francisco/trips/start the Fulbright/get settled in Barcelona is over. Fall is here. My time is my own for a while now. No obligations to any other projects, just my dissertation research, a little bit blurry in my head, waiting to take shape and define the landscape of my year here.

Goals for this first week of full time work on my project in Barcelona:

• Return to daily writing.
• Create a schedule.
• Make my way through my list of contacts.
• Find a language class.
• Background reading.

Tomorrow the Fulbright year officially begins, with the orientation in Madrid. After 3 weeks in Toledo, working on finishing projects ranging from editing/commenting on a book and a paper with my adviser, I’m now going to turn to my own work. The dissertation research that brought me here. The group of people I’ll meet through the research. The year of managing my own work, carrying out my own independent research project. I have a plan, but it will surely change. How much can I expect the project to change? Who will help me with the project? How will the second part of the project work out?

I’m filled with anticipation and nervous uncertainty as I look ahead to the year. Worried because the 3 weeks in Toledo haven’t focused enough on my own work. But knowing at the same time that that’s because they needed to focus on other things (family, tying up other loose ends of work, a couple days off here and there). So now, starting tomorrow, my focus is on my project (with a little more vacation in there for two friends’ weddings…).

Goals for the year, as I sit thinking in the slant of late evening sun setting over the Castilian plains:

• Meet and talk with as many people as I can, break through my natural shyness and go deep into getting to know the people in my project.
• Be ambitious with the project, both in terms of methods and in terms of the time I dedicate to it.
• Write as I go, working on fellowship applications for the dissertation year, and synthesizing the findings of my work to improve on what I’m doing throughout the project.
• Learn some academic (written) Spanish, and conversational Catalan.
• Attend some classes, lectures, conferences, talks on immigration and schooling in Spain.

What are your goals for the year? In what ways are you facing unknowns in the months ahead?

A New York Times article this Sunday talks about Somali-Americans in Minneapolis choosing to go back to Somalia to fight for an Al Qaeda-affiliated group that is trying to overthrow the government in Somalia. One of their teachers talks about their reasons for joining as being a “crisis of belonging”.  These young boys, who had come to the U.S. as teenagers or been born here to immigrant parents, felt disconnected from both their homeland and to their new country. Many of them had done well in school, gone on to college, but still felt they did not belong. Fighting for this group in their homeland gives them a feeling of purpose and belonging.

Belonging is important. Feeling that we have a place in the world, a meaningful place with others. I wonder about belonging for the many immigrant youth in Spain. I wonder about studying it here in the U.S.  I wonder whether anyone is studying the links between belonging and policy, how school policies might make a difference for youth experiences of belonging. Could the schools where these boys went in Minneapolis have handled things differently? What about the communities? What can schools do to teach people to be tied to their new country? What, if anything, should they do?  And what about policy implementation–does the policy matter if it’s not implemented?

A lot of discussion of language and multicultural policy talks about this very issue, with people having differing opinions about what schools should be doing to foster belonging to the country. I am curious what they actually do, under current policies. And what experiences immigrant youth are having. Perhaps this will be one focus of my dissertation.

What do you feel you belong to? What, if anything, have your schooling experiences had to do with your feelings of belonging?

An ongoing series of the New York Times on immigrants and their impact on institutions in the United States brings home how timely my project is. There’s so much to figure out about how social integration works, and the role of schools, and relations between different groups. Interesting how so much is happening in the suburbs now, rather than the cities. I wonder what this means for the social institutions like schools that serve immigrants and their children. And what about debates about language? What do all of these questions look like in Spain? What would a similar series of investigative reporting uncover?

Another article in the same series has a quote about teachers: ” Teachers set the tone. In their classrooms, some tiptoed around the immigration debate or avoided it altogether. Advisers to student groups created to examine pressing issues — including the school newspaper, the Model United Nations and the World of Difference Club — similarly ignored the matter. And the teachers for those learning English made little effort to organize activities that would bring them and mainstream students together.”

High school is especially difficult because it’s the gateway into college and the labor market, into being on one’s own. I’m reminded of the time I spent working with a newcomer program while I was at Stanford. The local high school was unprepared for so many newcomers, and created separate classes for them, as well as structures to support them in mainstream classes. Tension with native-born Mexican students was often high, as were relations with Black students. Many of the students were undocumented.

How can policy support these teachers, these students, these schools?

……….…………

I just got news this morning that I made the first major cut in the selection process for doing a Fulbright in Spain next year! I submitted my application back in September, it went through an on-campus Berkeley review, and then it went to the Fulbright commission in New York. The odds in that round were about 16%; they accepted 27 out of 167 applications last year. I did my best on the application but that’s a lot of competition! So now that I’ve made this first cut my application goes to Spain and the committee there reviews it. According to the program they take 2 of every 3 they receive, so my odds just got much better!

Whether I get it or not, I feel really good at this point. Just making it past this point feels like a huge accomplishment, and doing the application at the beginning of this year helped me immensely in focusing my work this year. Whether I get it or not I’m now planning to do my dissertation research in Spain next year.

The holidays are *almost* over (they last until the 6th of January here), and I’m more than ready to get back to work. My goal of finishing a draft of one of my pre-qualifying papers while here is an important one for the progress toward my larger goals this year.

Yesterday I got excited about some interviews I can do here with policy makers and teachers, a kind of pilot project. Immigration is less of an issue in Castilla La Mancha, but it does exists, and I’m curious about the changes being made to the education system. Language courses? New tracks? These are just two of the most typical ones.

It’s going to be an incredibly busy spring, with finishing these two pre-qualifying papers, writing a dissertation proposal, studying for orals, and in the personal realm, two very dear (and local) girlfriends’ weddings. Not to mention planning a honeymoon for next summer (we still haven’t taken one!), and looking into buying a house.

The good thing about holidays is that I feel rested and ready to get to work again!

The semester is almost over. Another year completed. Next year at this time I hope to have completed my orals, and have a dissertation project designed. There’s a lot to do between now and then!

Feeling the anxiety of the end, pressing into my head and making me drink three times more tea or coffee than I usually do and spend hours at my desk at home. Two more big papers to write or finish writing, and one set of reading responses to finish, and then the class part of the semester is over!

Am excited for my summer research project as well. Three weeks to get to know academics in Spain, interview people about education and immigration, and do a lot of reading and writing for my theoretical position paper.

Smells like progress.