budding scholar

Working on the last of my class final papers, hopefully ever! Classes will be done next semester. It actually already feels like my work is on its own path regardless of classes.

At the last minute I decided to abandon the empirical paper I was writing for my Immigration Studies class and polish up a proposal I wrote last month that drew heavily on the class. Found my statistics skills weren’t all there yet, and that the dataset had a few major flaws for answering my questions.

So I’m revising this proposal, and am excited to get my professor’s feedback on it. Although I want to keep exploring some more before comitting myself to a dissertation project, I think I have a good idea, and that the proposal has some very good writing in it. I’m excited about improving it.

Failing in the statistical effort (or at least, suffering a setback), despite quite a bit of work, makes me wonder about the process for writing these kind of papers. Do people usually do most of the analysis, then go write up the theory? I feel like I needed to have done more of the analysis before I could really sit down and write the paper, yet the design for the study draws heavily on the literature. Perhaps if the dataset had not had such a paucity of variables for answering my questions it would have worked too.

For the moment, I’m working on the proposal. Have a regular writing schedule set up for this week to keep going on the other project (and a deadline for the statistics project which should help with the statistical analysis piece). I know where I’m trying to get to, just not sure of how yet. The only way to figure it out is to keep working.

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.

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.

Wrote this morning, got up and sat at the keyboard with bleary eyes searching for quotes and ideas in the texts I’ve read for my Language and Identity class. It feels good to write in this way, taking on small chunks at a time, not pressured, not worrying about perfection but simply putting placeholders with the ideas to come back to.

This is a beginning, writing consistently for classes. In many ways the assignment for the Language and Identity class is ideal, as it’s about creating responses to the readings that could be useful to us later (including summaries, quotes, connections, critiques). Tonight, I will write again in this way, drawing on the concrete task of a class assignment, working on it well in advance as a way of learning more and overcoming the writing blocks that happen as the deadline nears.

The next step will be to begin writing for my own work, my own self. What is my voice in this academic work? What contributions will my work make? Who do I seek to serve with the academic work I do?

Literacy Class 10/17/07

Discussion about David Olson, great divide theory of literacy.

No class excites me intellectually quite as much as this class. How meaning is made. How we draw meaning from text. What it means to know, to communicate what we know.

What implications do the things I’m learning have for my larger school trajectory? What are the implications for policy of what I am learning in this class? For immigrants and language policy? I feel like answering this question will get me over a hump in terms of my commitment to and excitement about my own learning and knowledge-building.

Maybe I should do what Liz is doing and share programs–go half and half with policy and literacy.

Found on a scrap of notebook paper from last semester (dated 10/30):

“Conceptions/notions of literacy matter because of decisions about how we education, social kids, how we conceive of who and where they are as non-literates and where that takes them once they get to school”.

Haven’t posted here in a while. Anyone reading?

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.

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?

My friend who’s spent most of her Ph.D. becoming expert in statistical analysis recommends taking a statistics course of some kind every semester, to keep it fresh. I know I’m never going to be an expert, but I do want to be better than I am, and more comfortable doing complicated regression analyses on my own. So here are some possible recommended courses at Berkeley:

Education 275G, Professor Rabe-Hesketh
Hierarchical and Longitudinal Modeling
Syllabus

Sociology 271C, Professors Hout and Petersen
Methods of Sociological Research III
Political Science 233, Professor Brady
Psychometric and Econometric Methods

Public Health 242C, Professors Jewell and Hubbard
Longitudinal Data Analysis

Political Science 236, Tu 4-7pm, Professor Sekhon
The Statistics of Causal Inference in the Social Sciences
Syllabus
Public Health C240A, TuTh 12:30-2pm Professors Jewell and Hubbard
Biostatistical Methods: Advanced Categorical Data Analysis

Public Policy 240A, MW 2-4pm, Professor Glaser
Decision Analysis, Modeling, and Quantitative Methods
(Not usually open to students from other departments)