Connecting now to then.
Today I drove home with a friend from the program who also lives in San Francisco, and as is wont to happen, we talked about school. But rather than discussing the minutia of day-to-day life in classes and the GSE as we often do, we talked about our program, what we want to get out of it, how we want to shape our studies and coursework to be meaningful in the real world.
Clear blue sky, late-evening sun hanging low over the horizon as we drove across the Bay Bridge back into the city, we talked about what matters to us in this program. Where we’d like to go with it. What we want to have had by the time we finish. She thinks about working for a district. I think about being employable in Spain. We both want our Ph.D.s to be more than theoretical, to be applied to the real world, and relevant to the real-world problems surfacing in education each day. We want our Ph.D.s to be applied, and readily accessible in some ways to people beyond academics.
“I don’t want to be one of those people who comes out of the Ph.D. with a dissertation that doesn’t apply to anything in real life”, she said. “There are skills and expertise that I want to develop, to have mastered, that can be applied”. I soundly agreed. Statistics and research design. Sociological theory. The realities of policy-making and policy implementation. Teachers and real-world schools. These are pieces of the Ph.D. that are important to keep alive.
This is why we are in a school of education policy program–because we care about looking at the real world of education, how things are working or not working, and what action can be taken to improve what we do there. It can be so easy in the academic environment to get mired in interesting ideas and theories that have little practical application in the real world of schools and education policy. Who we choose as our advisers, the classes we decide to take, and the paper topics we choose to write will all steer us in one way or another toward a more theoretical or applied endzone. I’d like to keep aiming for the applied.
I came straight to the computer when I got home to post about the conversation, to keep its energy and bits of inspiration alive a few moments longer. I need to focus on the goal, what I want to get out of this program, what I want to do in the real world with what I’m learning in school.