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!)

Is my study about the implementation of civic education policy, or policy responses to the integration of first and second generation immigrants in school? The project as currently designed has an emphasis on citizenship, and compares immigrant and non-immigrant schools. But this brings into focus issues of implementation of the policy with native-born children, making the project de-emphasize the questions of immigration I care so much about.

What is this project about, and how should I focus it as I move forward? I know I’ll ask myself this question a thousand times over this year (and then a thousand times again as I write the dissertation, and then when I turn it into a book one day…). And as with all writing, indeed, all creative work, the answer will never be the “right” one, or the only one.

As I played with the camera yesterday, sipping my coffee and peoplewatching, I was thinking a lot about focus, and framing. Is this photo more about leaves, or the church? What about if I look at it from another angle? What if the light changes?

I think the questions I ask of my research project are similar. Is this project more about the children of immigrants, or the implementation of (education) policy in general? What about if I think about the future job talks I’ll give, and application of my work? What about if I look at it from the perspective of what is more feasible? Of what I care about most? Of which stories I care more about telling?

In the end, click, click, you take the picture. You make decisions about your project. You move forward. Perhaps later you make a collage, or crop a photo, or file it away and forget about it. Or perhaps within the series there’s a gem, and you show people, and study it, and try and go out and photograph more. And so with research studies like mine. Snap, click, time to take the next step. Move forward. Continue the creative process of finding the story within this study. Focus one way, knowing that I will end up with a collage of interviews and observations called data.

And remembering that, within those, there might be bits and pieces that will soon be forgotten, or a gem of new understandings about my topic. Or something else entirely that no one has imagined yet.

At UAB today (the Autonoma University of Barcelona), working on interview guides and thinking about blogging here. Writing in this space has become a way of tracking my progress in a way, of putting out into the world my thoughts about the process of working through the Ph.D. Being in a Ph.D. is such an all-consuming, independent, isolating process that it’s easy to have one’s progress become the whole focus (I know with my school friends that can be a lot of what we talk about!).

Being here, essentially on my own work-wise, owning my own project more completely than I’ve owned any of my work yet, I’m compelled to make the blog into something more as well. Just getting through milestones was such a huge part of the first years at Berkeley. First-year orals, position papers, required courses, and ‘real’ orals. But I’m through them now, and the final, huge, ultimate milestone of the dissertation is different from the others.  It is, in a way, writing a book on a topic of my choosing, grounded in the ideas and knowledge I’ve acquired since starting my program.

I’m working on the research for a book, a scholarly book that will be the first piece of work of my career. It’s going to require marching through milestones of progress, of course, but it’s also going to require so much more. Creativity, in-depth reading, playing with ideas, questions and more questions, talking with a lot of people, delving deeply into my topic until the story emerges. Thus, it’s time to get beyond the more procedural parts of the Ph.D. that have dominated my writing on this blog, and open it up to these other parts of the process. It feels like a risk, of course. To put ideas out there, ideas which feel nascent still, that I know will change. But getting more comfortable testing ideas and putting them out there is an early step in writing this manuscript that will be my entry into scholarship. And what better place to do this then a blog with as modest a readership as this one?

So, beginning today, I’m going to bring more of my ideas, my questions, my ruminations here. I’m going to think of this as a space to not only “track  progress” for myself, but as a place to test out ideas, ask questions, and put myself out there as a ‘sociologist of immigration, education, and policy’.

What are the ways you’d like to grow in your work? How do you struggle with ‘putting yourself out there’?

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?

We went to Barcelona. Found a house. Came back to Toledo. And next week we move. While in Barcelona looking for houses I heard one person talk about schools as being good, with the first reason being there were no immigrants. I had heard of this as a criteria for “good” schools in Spain these days. Though a special report in the Vanguardia newspaper of Barcelona talks about  the fact that most Spaniards actually have very little contact with immigrants, many hold strong negative feelings towards them. I wonder how this compares to what we find in other new destinations of immigration, for example the South in the United States, or Italy. Or what differences we might see by class background of the parents. Or how language plays into the issue of judging the quality of schools.

Little interactions like this one make me want to do a larger study of relations between immigrants and natives, and look beyond the school. But to do a good dissertation involves drawing on theory and basing my work in planning that is flexible, but at the same time draws on previous research. So my third goal for the rest of this month is to work on planning, to try and finish reworking my dissertation research plan, while also working on planning each work day to be as focused as possible. Because once I’m in the field I’m going to see a thousand paths and questions like the one above, and doing good work involves having a larger plan I’m following, while also having routines that include planned time for writing up fieldnotes, and synthesis memos.

We arrived in Spain last night, to wide open plains, blue sky stained with spots of clouds, and the quiet of suburban life. We’ll be staying with my in-laws for two weeks while we look for a place to live and though we’ll be working (I plan to work half days most days and a few full days) it feels like a vacation. After months of preparing this trip, we’re finally here. Sitting and listening to birds sing, sprinklers make their rounds, and the breeze moving through the poplar trees next door.

I’d been craving quiet, outdoor space all summer. Wanting a break from city life and most of all city noise. So here we are. And my goal to accompany these two weeks is to sit outside, with this view of brown grass, red buildings, wide open skies, and write each day. In the morning, before the heat of the day. Or at night, when the sweltering heat has passed. This year will be about collecting dissertation data, and writing time will be taken up by memos and fieldnotes most days. But for the next two weeks I’m still in scholarship, still drawing more from the books than the field, still reading more than talking with people, and I want to use the expansive quiet space I have in this house for writing about it. So, a 30 minute walk each day, and an hour of writing.

Black lines on swirls of green concrete floor. Traffic, voices echoing up through the windows from the parked cars below, one floor down. Three years of looking at these buildings, of hearing these street sounds. Three years as a student at Berkeley working my way through milestones, books, articles. A transition point now. I defended my dissertation proposal on Thursday last week, and Friday we moved out of our apartment in preparation for the year in Spain. How appropriate that this milestone would happen the day before our last day in this loft, which fit our lives so perfectly until now (mostly because of the proximity to BART and ease of getting to Berkeley).

A month of transition now, before we’re settled in a new place in Barcelona. Inspired by a friend thinking big, I’m going to take this month as an opportunity to try for a little more, take risks myself, think bigger, share more of the process here. For a while I’ve kept another document on my computer, also called “budding scholar”, where I keep track of ups and downs of the Ph.D. process. Whenever I’m stuck in my work, or inspired, or anything in between, I write there. This month I’m going to bring more of that into the blog, risk sharing it with whomever happens upon this space.

I’m starting with that. But I like bigger goals too, being a goal-oriented kind of person. So I’m thinking about what else to try for this August, in this transitional moment.

Any ideas?

We’ve begun packing up the house for the year in Spain, selling things on Craigslist, giving things away, making lists of new owners for our belongings.

If only preparing my study were as straightforward. Instead I spend day after day mucking around, reading, writing, talking with people, but not feeling like I make real progress.

The main thing keeping me from being excited about the year away at this point is not knowing what my project is going to look like. I work every day, but don’t finish anything. And yet, yesterday as I talked with a former student of my adviser about my dissertation dilemmas, I felt closer.

The challenge is there are so many decisions to make. Which discipline I’m most closely aligned with, since education is multidisciplinary (sociology, some political science, I think)? Which one or two theories to use (assimilation/integration, social networks, boundaries, policy implementation…)? How to sample? Whether to focus more on immigrant students or teachers of immigrants (have decided the students I think)? Two cities or one in Spain (depends on the research questions)? And the list goes on…

Any thoughts?