budding scholar

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!)

Did a mock with 4 of my friends today and it was really hard! Got me feeling anxious and worried about how much more work I need to do. Felt like I talked in circles a fair amount of the time, though I know it wasn’t that bad. Was too tired–didn’t get enough sleep last night. Have a lot of practicing to do to streamline my answers so that each one actually has a real point, not just tangential bits of information connecting to what I’ve read. It’s really hard! And it’s different from first year orals, when we were all going through it together with the same material. Am glad I still have time left. Plan for the next week:

• Practice making my answers shorter.
• Write out answers to the questions I’ve put down on the lists.
• Make each answer have 3-4 main points, and draw on readings strategically to make the points not randomly to show I’ve read them.
• Think about each piece of reading and how it connects to my larger areas of specialization.
• Defining key terms, laying out central tensions and debates.
• Practice, practice, practice.

Working hard on papers and orals lists. It feels good to be framing my questions in terms of reading lists. I can’t help being nervous about my second paper, but I feel really good about the first one. Overall, although it’s stressful, I’m glad to be doing orals this semester. There’s something satisfying about working this hard, having moments this focused day after day. Different from pressure of classes in the past. I feel like I completely own this pressure, I decided to do things this way, to do so many milestones in one semester.

If I could just get past this hurdle with the second paper things would start to feel much more manageable. It’s about the analysis, not the writing, which is a nice change I suppose, after agonizing over the writing of the first paper for weeks.

I spend a lot of time writing in my various brainstorm and journaling spaces on my computer. Here’s a taste–this was brainstorming the text that will tie my three areas of specialization together:

…The core issue I’m interested in is how schools are playing a role in the integration of immigrants in Spain. How does immigrant integration work? What is the role of education policy? How are schools and education policies part of immigrant integration? How are schools changing to respond to new populations of immigrants?…

During my walk (gorgeous break in the rain, up and down my favorite hills in Noe Valley, unusual cold biting my ears and refreshing my spirit), I realized something about what I’ve been working on. My whole idea of immigrants and the contexts of reception, and teachers within them, hinges on an assumption that segmented assimilation theory holds some water in the European context. Some people have argued it doesn’t. But those analyses do not include Spain. So I need to spend some time writing about what’s been said about segmented assimilation in the European context. Indeed, I need a paper that’s just theories of assimilation in the U.S., and theories of assimilation in Europe. Then speculation about Spain, what’s known there, and what might be still to learn. How Spain might be similar to the rest of Europe or not. This is where my first position paper is currently headed.

Several more things I’m interested in learning more about:

• Comparative research of schools. Still think about doing a comparative study for my dissertation.
• Race and ethnicity theories. Ideas of social boundaries, social cohesion. Perhaps something in here should be my third area of specialization?
• Teachers as socializers of children.

Writing more is helping a lot in thinking more about the ideas I’m reading about, and how I will make a contribution. The goal I’m currently working on is sticking to a regular writing schedule. At the beginning of the week I think about when I’m going to be able to do my 2 hours (two 45 minute periods of writing, 30 minutes of professional reading in the middle), and put them in the calendar. So far so good this week.

Part of making progress in this path I’m on is to continuously carry around a basic set of questions, to have driving interests, clearly articulated, that continuously inform my work. They need to be both narrow and broad, to include specific questions while linking with bigger topics. This is what the reading should inform, what I ask questions about and make links to as I read.

Here is a stab towards articulating mine (hopefully as successful as this cake stabbing with a sword at our wedding :-)). The basic problems I’m interested in are:

• education and social integration in diverse societies
• teachers and changing student demographics
• equity in educational outcomes
• policy implementation, especially language and education policy

The harder pieces to settle on are methodology, specific, researchable questions related to these basic problems, and theory.

The question of which conversation to join makes sense as a way of thinking about how to specialize on this Ph.D. path. Five or ten years from now, what conversations do I want to be a part of? What kinds of things do I want to know about?

Thinking back over the last five years, I’ve learned about a lot of things that are useful, but been a part of many conversations that held only some interest for me. Now, back in school, I have the opportunity to forge a path that is really about my own passions and interests. The basic problem I’m interested in studying is integration in countries receiving immigrants. I’m interested in how government handles this at multiple levels (EU, country, region, city). I’m also interested in the dynamics of social interaction, language change, and how they play out at the school level.

The following conversations interest me greatly:

• Immigration policies aimed at integration, and the role of education in that.
• Policy making, implementation, and evaluation, especially policies related to immigration and language issues in schools (e.g., bilingual schooling, language acquisition, foreign language teaching).
• Research methods, designing studies.
• Theories of assimilation, social change over time, histories of social change.
• Language, immigration, diversity as governance issues.
• What else? Topics or issues from my master’s?

I know for sure I’m not interested in instructional policy, pedagogy (i.e. how to teach…don’t feel I know enough from teaching myself). I don’t want to write curriculum. I can see myself teaching at the university level, or running a study abroad program with research projects on the side. Or simply working for a research organization. Or working for the government. Or perhaps heading the research division for a foundation or education NGO.

While I don’t feel 100% certain of whether the interests I have now will lead me down these paths, I do feel like I’m ready to commit to a research direction. This is exciting. So much of grad school for the last two years has been about waffling uncertainty. I’m ready for a committed focus!

I read an article recently about how people make choices, and that we never want to choose something that shuts us off to other options. I feel this so strongly in choosing how to specialize in the Ph.D. program. We need to pick 3 areas of specialization, and somehow committing with them involves an overwhelming number of maybes and what-ifs. What about faculty advisers? The areas should match people I will have on my dissertation committee. What about future jobs? The areas are going to send me down certain paths and not others, which will shut off some job options.

How to choose? What criteria to use? One person told me to think of it as “what conversations do you want to be a part of?”. Do I want to be in government advising on education policy? Or in academia developing theory and advancing knowledge in my area? I could see both of these being viable options for me.

But the contingencies are not the point in a way. Making the choice is. Because I can’t have it all, no one can. And by choosing, I’ll then open up other options and new avenues for choice. A door will close but 3 might open. If I’m choosing based on what I care about, want to study, am really interested in, then the rest will follow, right?

For my Language and Immigration Reading Group today we talked about the book “Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration” by Richard Alba and Victor Nee. The scholarship in the book inspires us toward being better scholars ourselves, and our conversation pushes my intellectual borders more than many other experiences at Berkeley so far.

What would it look like to apply the ideas about assimilation and social integration to education? How might the (sociological) theory in the book be a tool for studying what happens to immigrants in schools? How can studying schools relate to the broader ideas Alba and Nee present? In the real world, people still expect immigrants to assimilate in the old way, adjusting to the dominant culture. In Spain, right now, people don’t want or expect their own culture to change as a result of immigration. In fact, they are resentful of immigrants’ efforts to change schools to incorporate their own cultures. But change of the receiving culture is a fact of migration.

How can these broad theoretical interests and basic questions about the problem of integration in societies with large numbers of immigrants be fashioned into a set of research questions based in education?

This is the view from my office at school this afternoon. That’s the San Francisco Bay and Marin hills in the distance.

Am thinking a lot about my new and inspired idea about what I can do with my Ph.d. career. If I pursue this idea of a cross-country study of teacher education policy responses to immigration, what would make sense to specialize in? We are required to have 3 areas of specialization in our program, and they should grow out of my research question. Potential ideas are:

• Immigration and education
• Policy formation/implementation/evaluation
• Teacher education
• Multiculturalism in education
• Bilingualism/Second language learning
• A research methodology?

I got one of the sociology classes I was interested in, on race and ethnic relations, so now my schedule for the semester is settled. It’s an extremely heavy reading class, but I expect to enjoy the material and learn a lot about history and current theories of race and ethnicity.

I introduced myself at the beginning of class, and for the first time ever, someone asked me whether I was a student of my advisor, and I felt what it’s like to begin to take on and be associated with someone’s research and way of thinking about education questions. I also felt, as I described what I’m interested in first in the measurement class, and then in the sociology class, how rusty I am at ruminating on and describing my own interests. Yet this is what it’s all about, what I need to focus on this year: how do my interests coalesce into 3 areas of specialization and one basic question?

I am thinking about applying for a Fulbright to go to Spain next year and do research on education policy responses to immigration.