budding scholar

Ways of changing what teachers do in their classrooms and how they teach or perceive their students include:

•  teacher training programs
• professional development
• school reform initiatives
• leadership
• standards, testing (forcing a change by testing it)
• curriculum

I keep thinking about the issue of teachers and demographic change among their students, and how, from the standpoint of policy, we can understand and change what they do with students. One way of thinking about it is policy levers, or policy tools. Another way is social movements.

The basic issue for me centers on understanding teacher reactions to the composition of their classroom changing year to year, and how policy can make a difference in how they teach immigrant students. What do they need to feel confident teaching these students? What do they need to attain the kind of results we all want to see?

How many professional development (PD) programs are happening right now, having to do with language and immigration (in California? Other states? US? Spain?) Who participates? How is it decided who participates? What is the curriculum? Who teaches it? What research is done on teachers’ experiences?

A look at this kind of PD would fit into a larger look at PD, research on how it does and does not effect practice and student learning. PD is the most common tool for trying to change teachers’ practice using policy, very popular under systemic reform initiatives, the quick answer to needs to change what teachers do or the results they achieve. What does the research tell us about PD in areas of language and immigration?

Are there any reviews of research in these areas in the big journals (Review of Educational Research, for example)?

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.

In other words, what are we doing here? A discussion in Language and Identity class that started with a study of undergraduate writing turned to a debate about what academia is supposed to do, especially in Schools of Education. What is our voice supposed to be in universities? When we’re writing for an academic audience, what are the constraints and expectations re how we express ourselves?

Our teacher describes the purpose of academia as defining problems. She also said, academic papers are supposed to build and extend a field. Academic writing is about having texts speak to each other. Writing is such a significant part of the identity you learn in academia. Who are you as a writer, how are you drawing on others’ writing? At the same time, who are you as a thinker, how are you drawing on others’ thinking?

The class I’m taking on Language and Identity had an interesting guest speaker today, talking about womens’ identity and how it changes (as does their partner’s) when they deal with breast cancer. She is a linguist, so she studies language, conversation, narrative–how identity is expressed and comes about through language. Her dissertation work was on Alzheimer’s, and how people grapple with their own personal narratives as they lose their memory. Very interesting work. During the Q&A afterwards we got into a conversation about how diagnosis of disease is a cultural practice, which was fascinating. We live inside the box of our rational, western medicine, yet how we address sickness and disease is a cultural act. Yes it’s based on some good science some of the time. But there is much more than “pure science” in how we address disease.

I’m interested in the idea of identity, especially in classrooms and schools. But I am not a linguist and never will be. Are there other good ways of studying identity besides discourse analysis? Analyzing the language itself is exceedingly interesting, but I’m more inclined to sociological methods of study, such as ethnography, surveys, interviews. But it seems like studies of identity are all too often strong on philosophy and weak on actual evidence and empirical work. What are some exemplary studies of identity, especially nationalism and the identity of immigrants? With a bit of luck, my final paper for the class will lead me to some of these studies.

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?

Yes, a clump of onions are a good metaphor for where my inspiration and ideas for Ph.D. study are right now.

When I was a Master’s student I had a golden moment during the final presentation of my project on language policy in Spain, where I knew I had attained a level of understanding of the literatures I was drawing on, and the problems of my topic, that were on par with scholarly levels of work. The associate dean of the School of Ed at Stanford asked me a question which was beyond the scope of my topic, but I remember I gave a thoughtful answer based on what I knew from my study, and he joked that I would be able to explore his question in my Ph.D. studies. At that point I was completely committed, after having spent a year LOVING graduate school and scholarship, to return to school to work on a Ph.D. I knew what I wanted to study, too.

Now, in my second year at Berkeley, I am revisiting my reasons for taking on a Ph.D. What was I hoping to get out of it back then? What drove me to work so hard and be so motivated to come back to school? In many ways, the most difficult part is I now see the limitations of the perspective that I once wished to belong to, yet at the same time have not found an intellectual home for where I am now. It’s a matter of finding people who care about the questions and issues I care about. I’ve found some, but not enough. Where are the rest? Who should I turn to for professional advice? Who shares my interests topically? Who has the methods I know I want to learn? What makes sense at this point?

I have a habit of writing in notebooks, something I in part picked up from my dear childhood friend who now lives in Vermont. They sit on my desk upstairs, the place I so often resist spending time working. Today I picked one up and read what I wrote from 2 years ago, when I was just gearing up to apply to Berkeley for graduate school.

It’s incredible how much I convince myself things have changed on a daily basis, yet when I get down to the core of it, little has changed. The same things satisfied me about my job. The same things left me dissatisfied.

Perhaps this is because my attention has not been on the core of myself, my dreams, my ambitions. What is that core? What’s driven me to where I am now? Where do I want to go from here? Only by identifying this can I work towards my dreams every day. Otherwise, what am I working towards anyhow?

Yes, it’s November, it’s fall, it’s the second year of my Ph.D. program, and it’s time to take stock.

I am struggling with how to spend focused time on my own research, in the midst of all this work and classes. I know the pieces I’m learning in the classes will relate, but don’t know how yet. And it feels like the fact that I’m not focusing on my own reading and research at all this semester (haven’t had to, in fact, since my classes have their own self-contained assignments for the most part) means that I’m less inclined to make the connections with the kinds of questions I really care about.

What are those questions? This is perhaps the part of my development that is crying for attention. What do I care about now, and what do I want to study related to that?

Across countries, how have localities and governments responded to new communities of immigrants and their unique education needs? Specifically, what policies have been created to train teachers (preservice as well as professional development) to manage the needs of these students? At the teacher level, how much of this policy has helped, and how do they feel about their role helping immigrant students (they are, after all, on the “front lines”)? I’m interested in exploring education policy responses to immigration, specifically with regard to training and supporting teachers. Spain, the U.S., perhaps France, Germany, England. Possibly bringing in Asian countries that have had influxes of immigrants. What have policy responses been, especially with regard to teachers? What would good policy look like?