budding scholar

Part of my dissertation project involves interviewing lots of people about their work in schools and education policy, and I hear a whole lot about change. How the kids changed with immigration, how they have a lower level than they used to. How policies that have no concept of how things really work in schools come down and make people do things differently. How immigrants from some people refuse to change. How immigrants from others have changed too much, lost contact with their home cultures. How people here want all newcomers to change and be like them. How the teachers need to change, or the students, or the parents, or the whole system.

Hearing all this talk about what people think here has me thinking a lot about change. We all agree that things change over time. We live it, see it in the people we know. But at the same time we see how things stay the same. Inside ourselves, in the people around us, in our communities. The push and pull between feeling things change, and feeling they never will, fascinates me. Do people change? Do places like schools? How does change work? How does one person make another change?

When you close your eyes and think about it, do you believe in change? In yourself, in the world around you? Why or why not?

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?

(1) Book Group

It’s a plan, we’ll do a book group, starting with reading Three Cups of Tea in December. I’ll do the job of finding a medium to discuss it, taking all your suggestions. And if we find after December that we peter out, well then it will be a one-book group. But if we find we the virtual, multi-country group works for us, well then we’ll keep it going.  Get your hands on a copy of the book (I just ordered mine from Amazon in the UK!) and let me know if you haven’t already that you want to participate. I’ll be in touch about it come December 1st!

(2) Government and Identity?

Anyone else read this article from the this past weekend’s NYT about Jewish schools in the UK? It’s about a lawsuit currently in the Supreme Court there brought by the parents of a boy who was denied admission to a Jewish school because he wasn’t Jewish according to Orthodox laws (his mother converted to Judaism, but in a progressive synagogue). I’m not Jewish, nor am I British, but I found this article very interesting for the questions it raises about culture, government, and education. Who gets to decide the boundaries of a cultural group? Who draws borders around who “we” (as Jews, as Latinos, as Muslims, as Americans) are, and who is included or excluded? What does it mean when the government is making rulings that shape who’s in and who’s out? Should a private religious school be able to exclude someone because they’re not ____ enough (in this case Jewish)?

I sit and work on interview questionnaires. Organizing categories of questions, writing an introduction, translating English to Spanish. I consider different ways of asking people about their work, their ideas about immigrant integration in schools.

And my mind races ahead. This should have been done a month ago. What’s it going to be like to ask real people these questions? What if I can’t find schools to do my research in? What if my project changes? What if my project stays the same? How will I ever publish anything? Who will support my work? And on. And on.

Why is it so difficult to be in the present moment in my work? To have this be all. The act of sitting at my desk, thinking about my research questions, and putting together questionnaires. Thinking about these ideas I’m so interested in. Learning how to do my own study, learning how the day to day of research feels. Why does my mind take me straight over a precipice of worry? Tumble over dreams of future work, far away people, someday family? Rush over stones of expectation and shoulds about how I spend my time?

Is this part of doing creative or original work? Part of using the mind for work? A rite of passage of graduate school? Or just human nature?

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.

That my efforts this year will not be enough. That this churning attempt to do a project on my own will fail. That this academic track I’m on is not meaningful enough in the real world. That making a contribution to academia and making a contribution to the world are very different things. That the excitement for asking questions and seeking meaning eludes me. That I will not find a story, a study, worthy of a dissertation. That I won’t figure out how to own my work, care about it enough to carry it forward. That I will forever struggle to meet deadlines. That I’m not sure what the questions are I’m studying. That I’ll waste time trying to figure it out.

I feel passionately about making the world a better place for children, youth and families. About intercultural understanding and peace. About the plight of women and girls in Afghanistan and other places where they are similarly oppressed. About understanding peoples’ stories. About education and teaching as something that inspires growth, new ideas, community. And I worry that these things I care about are not central enough to the work I’m doing. That the academics won’t contribute to these things in meaningful ways.

Tomorrow I trust I’ll have insight. Probably feel more convinced about what I’m doing. Perhaps find new inspiration in my project.  But today I worry, and wonder how to bring together these things I care about with this academic path I’m on.

Photo by Jim Wilson at the NYT

Who looks after elder immigrants? How do they meet people, get out of the house, make a new life? Is anyone studying their experiences? An article in the New York Times yesterday looked at older immigrants from India and Afghanistan mostly, in Fremont, California. According to the article, one in three seniors is foreign-born in California, and nationwide, about 11% of recently arrived immigrants are over age 65. To my knowledge, no researchers in immigration studies are looking at this population. Traditionally immigration studies has focused on adult workers, and recently there’s been a lot of emphasis on studying the experiences of the second generation. But perhaps I’ll focus my next project (post graduate school!) on studying the integration experiences and challenges of older immigrants. Perhaps I could convince people who fund research on the elderly (which is a growing population, and area of research) to fund a study of older immigrants, and/or one of my graduate students could study their experiences.

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?

Education is multidisciplinary and as a result we end up knowing bits of things from many different disciplines. Anthropology, political science, sociology, economics, and myriad crossover disciplines like public policy. This can make it more difficult to figure out our intellectual identity in education, especially if we are more academic than practice-oriented.

Immigration studies is an interdisciplinary field as well, pulling from the traditional disciplines much like education. Most scholars have training in one of the traditional disciplines.

Where does someone trained in education fit in terms of disciplines? I struggle with this sometimes. Figuring out where my contribution will be.

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?…