budding scholar

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.

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.

Classes start tomorrow. The beginning of Year 2. The first two years will be mostly coursework, and then starting next year my class load will be much lighter, so I’ve only got 1 more year of this. It makes me nervous to be starting school again, to be back in the mode of working more than I should. Yet the overall goal makes it all worth it, so I shall continue.

I’m going to take a measurement class, organizational theory with my advisor, theories of literacy, and either a sociology or evaluation class, depending on whether I get into one of the sociology classes or not.

Time to hunker down and focus on developing my focus more closely. As always, my job helps with building research skills and gaining experience in a variety of areas, but the point of graduate school is to build my own research focus/agenda. How will each one of the classes this semester contribute to building that focus?

We had 3 questions to choose from, which was less than we were expecting (we’d been told we’d have 5). They were harder than we expected based on all the practice questions we’d been given. I read through them initially and had a moment of panic, thinking that none of the preparation I’d done fit nicely into any of them. The first option was about the connection between research and policy, and the possibilities of research for guiding policy. The second one was about teacher quality, and policy involving teachers. And the third question was about charter schools, vouchers, and the decentralization/centralization debate.

I chose the first, thinking that it would be the best one for marshalling what I know, and it went well! I started talking about schools as social institutions, then talked about the purposes of education, then gave examples of research informing policy through the courts (the doll experiments ) in Brown v. Board of Education). Looking back at my notes now, I can’t believe I talked for more than 1/2 hour based on just these few lines–a few names, years, studies, and nothing else!

Afterwards we went to lunch with the whole POME faculty at the Berkeley faculty club, and then went for drinks at Triple Rock. We debriefed, talked about how we had done, which questions we’d answered, whether we felt like the questions reflected the coursework we had done this year (consensus: they didn’t). All in all preparing for them was the real value, not the exam itself. While this gave us some validation that we’re on the right track with our intellectual development, the real learning was studying together.

Hopefully the real orals can be as good of an experience. The next major program milestone will be the qualifying orals that we do after about 3 years. The first-year orals were just practice, a chance to talk under pressure, build relationships with classmates as we practiced, and show what we’d learned in this first year of the doctoral program.

One more thing done before heading to see this…

One last day of studying for Orals. Tomorrow is the big day! Today Melissa and I met at Tartine Bakery for breakfast and practiced, then went and got lunch and sat in Mission-Dolores park practicing some more. The sun was hot and we delved deeply into how sociologists, economists, historians talk about the role of schools in society.

We focused a lot of our discussion on the purposes of education, and how those have played out over time. Individual vs. community. Equality vs. individual oppportunity. Preparation for work vs. learning for knowledge/learning’s sake (this second one is something we agreed our program doesn’t tend to focus on very much). Historically, the role education has played in U.S. society, the political debates over these different purposes, and how the people we have read implicitly or explicitly talk about them.

I think we’re ready for orals! The preparation has helped bring together the different classes we’ve had this year, and cemented a broad and deep understanding of the history, policies, and institution of education, schools, and learning. Talking through the questions with classmates, debating about what the authors we’ve read mean, and how they fit together–it’s been an invaluable learning process. This is why people do study groups! Hopefully this collective learning will continue with our cohort after the first year, as we embark on our own projects and begin specializing our interests beyond the core classes of our program.

– Orals, one week from tomorrow.

-Sociology paper, due Monday.

-Statistics projects, due Tuesday.

And so on. It feels that this time in the semester turns to lists, lists, lists. A constant “comiendome la cabeza” (the Spanish collocquial way of saying worry about things) about what needs to be done. Even as I am learning so much from the experience of writing and studying for orals, it gets harder to step back and reflect on the new knowledge and ways of thinking I have developed this year. Mostly I feel busy and happy to be where I am, with the privilege of studying again in such an expansive way.

Tonight Sarah and I did our first orals rehearsal. First–we went to dinner at Ti Couz and had yummy crepes and fresh lemonade. It was delicious! I hadn’t been there in a long time.

Then we came home to my house and did one practice question each. It was very nerve-racking for both of us, and made us both realize that far beyond the summarizing and reviewing of this year’s reading that we’ve been doing–we need to practice practice practice the public speaking piece. Figure out how to TALK about what we know, what we’ve learned this year, and how it all connects to the history and practice of education.

A few other strategies came to mind as we practiced: 1) it’s important to define the key terms in the question, and talk about how the people we’ve read have talked about and defined them–thus, if the question asks about reforms that are intended to address equity, as mine did, it’s important to start my answer with a discussion of what reform is, how it happens generally, and what we mean when we talk about equity in schooling–then get into details of the specific reform (bilingual education, in my case); 2) starting with a historical context can be a helpful way of framing what we’re going to talk about–where did the reform come from, what did we have before, what reoccuring problems of education is it related to; and 3) give a context for the readings we bring in–our examiners may not have read them recently, or ever, so talk about the kind of perspective the reading provides.

Whew! Oral exams are difficult–and these are just a practice-run really for the big orals that come in Year 3 or 4. In search of Ph.D. humor after Sarah left, I then went to the most reliable source I know, and cracked up at this comic:

In about 5 weeks on May 10th we have our first-year oral exam! I’ve been emailing with a student from last year to get sample questions to supplement those sent to us by our professor, and here are a few:

1. What are the prospects of one of the following reforms for improving, reconceptualizing, and/or reforming how school is practiced and its outcomes in the United States?
a. Charter schools
b. Small schools
c. Accountability policy

2. There is a tension in national accountability legislation like NCLB between centralizing control of education and yet leaving elements of implementation and articulation of standards and appropriate tests to the state and local level decision makers. How do you explain this tension and how it came to be?

3. How do you explain the policy to practice divide (aka the “Great Divide”)? Why don’t policies turn out according to plan? Choose a reform with which you are familiar and discuss.

4. Choose a particular era of school reform from American educational history and discuss what kind of lasting legacy this reform has had on how education is practiced today?

5. Given multiple purposes of education, what are mechanisms for handling/accommodating/reconciling conflicts over these purposes? Which of these methods do you believe holds the most promise and why?

6. What types of policies – federal, state, and local – attempt to influence approaches to teaching within the classroom? Under what conditions would you expect each of them to have any effect on what teachers do?

Later, a post sketching out an answer to one of these questions! It is sure to reveal how much studying I still need to do to link themes from my different reading this year.

First, we drank grapefruit mimosas, called “lilosas”, standing around the bar at my house while I finished making the salad. It was hot yesterday, unseasonably hot, and everyone was parched and worn out from the week when they arrived. Six women in grad school, aged 26 to 31, coming together on a Friday evening to study for orals exams. There was a moment of heady, champagne-induced giddiness when, laughing, we considered not studying at all, just spending the evening like this. But then we settled in to take on the task, feeling the weight of responsibility hang heavier than the need to have fun together.

We talked through topics we’ve studied this year, discussing how the theories and articles we read fit together, what they tell us about the larger themes and historical tapestry of American education. What distinguishes the Common School Movement of the 1800s from the Progressive movement that came after it in the late 1800s and early 1900s? How do the theories we’ve learned this year vary, and how are they similar? Going forward, what do we need to know about class conflict theory, Durkheim, and rational utilitarian theory? What vision of the world does each of these theories represent, how do they explain society and education’s place in society?

My assignment is to look at the history of the Common School Movement and compare and contrast it with the Progressives. Much of the foundation of what our education system looks like today was laid back during these two major periods. Stay tuned, as I’ll work through the ideas here!