budding scholar

My wedding is less than two months away, and more and more it feels like I need to focus on crossing things off that to-do list, but the semester is not yet over and final papers loom large. Can’t help wishing for a normal job where you are forced to go to work in the morning, and leave it all behind at the end of the day. In theory I have more time to work on wedding stuff, but it feels like time stolen from school gets increasingly stressful as the end of the semester nears, yet there are things that need to be done before the semester ends in the middle of May.

It’s stressful just seeing my own writing! How did Sarah do it last year–in our first year no less?

Am about as far from reaching my goals with writing as I was high in the sky when I took this photo. I feel like I shoot myself in the foot again and again with writing, never leaving enough time to do things I’m satisfied with. Especially when I have small assignments, 5 pages or less, it’s easy to think they’re an easy task, and before I know it the deadline is nearly here and I haven’t left enough time to do a good job. The only way of getting around this I think is to have a steady routine of times I write. This was working for a while, but like all good habits, as soon as my focus wavered, it faded into the vague list of things I don’t quite get to each day.

The thing about good habits is they take cultivation, time, to instill, including multiple tries. At least for me. I can’t seem to pick up new good habits very easily.

There is also the small issue of planning a wedding, which is fun and exciting and easily takes away loads of my free time away from me as it did this weekend.

Excuses, excuses. Time to focus on writing the best paper I can with the time I have.

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.

The opportunity to work on research projects during the Ph.D. program is an important way of learning about how research works, how academic research works, etc. It is also a way of learning up close about methods for doing research tasks, like making sense of interviews using codes. Overall, I’ve been very lucky in the work opportunities I’ve had at school while at Berkeley. They have given me research and teaching experience, exposed me to interesting projects, and taught me a lot about managing (and failing to manage) my own time.

What kind of work opportunities have you had in school? Have they been satisfying? Why or why not? How has it been for you to independently manage your time doing research, if you’ve had that?

My sister had a heart surgery today, scheduled at the last minute (was supposed to be next week). Things went well, and I’m glad I could be there. I was looking forward to talking about where I am in my trajectory at school, and getting feedback my colleagues in my Policy Implementation Research Group. But I needed to be there for my sister, felt I had to postpone my own stuff. And it makes me think about the future, having kids, a family of my own. When work is structured independently, as so much of grad school is (an many jobs a Ph.D. leads into), and you guilt trip yourself so much about not getting work done, it can be hard to strike the right balance with being there when needed for family… It’s not the same as taking off from the office, when it feels like the responsibility can be left at your desk. It’s always there with you.

What will this be like with my own children? How will I strike the right balance between work and family? I don’t want to not be able to put work down when needed, but I also don’t want work to suffer too much.

This weekend, I’m going to get a lot of work done. Big plans! The weather is supposed to be almost 80 degrees (in San Francisco! in April!), so we’ll for sure go on a bike ride and perhaps a good run. But the rest of the time I’m going to focus on catching up on work.

The question of which conversation to join makes sense as a way of thinking about how to specialize on this Ph.D. path. Five or ten years from now, what conversations do I want to be a part of? What kinds of things do I want to know about?

Thinking back over the last five years, I’ve learned about a lot of things that are useful, but been a part of many conversations that held only some interest for me. Now, back in school, I have the opportunity to forge a path that is really about my own passions and interests. The basic problem I’m interested in studying is integration in countries receiving immigrants. I’m interested in how government handles this at multiple levels (EU, country, region, city). I’m also interested in the dynamics of social interaction, language change, and how they play out at the school level.

The following conversations interest me greatly:

• Immigration policies aimed at integration, and the role of education in that.
• Policy making, implementation, and evaluation, especially policies related to immigration and language issues in schools (e.g., bilingual schooling, language acquisition, foreign language teaching).
• Research methods, designing studies.
• Theories of assimilation, social change over time, histories of social change.
• Language, immigration, diversity as governance issues.
• What else? Topics or issues from my master’s?

I know for sure I’m not interested in instructional policy, pedagogy (i.e. how to teach…don’t feel I know enough from teaching myself). I don’t want to write curriculum. I can see myself teaching at the university level, or running a study abroad program with research projects on the side. Or simply working for a research organization. Or working for the government. Or perhaps heading the research division for a foundation or education NGO.

While I don’t feel 100% certain of whether the interests I have now will lead me down these paths, I do feel like I’m ready to commit to a research direction. This is exciting. So much of grad school for the last two years has been about waffling uncertainty. I’m ready for a committed focus!

I read an article recently about how people make choices, and that we never want to choose something that shuts us off to other options. I feel this so strongly in choosing how to specialize in the Ph.D. program. We need to pick 3 areas of specialization, and somehow committing with them involves an overwhelming number of maybes and what-ifs. What about faculty advisers? The areas should match people I will have on my dissertation committee. What about future jobs? The areas are going to send me down certain paths and not others, which will shut off some job options.

How to choose? What criteria to use? One person told me to think of it as “what conversations do you want to be a part of?”. Do I want to be in government advising on education policy? Or in academia developing theory and advancing knowledge in my area? I could see both of these being viable options for me.

But the contingencies are not the point in a way. Making the choice is. Because I can’t have it all, no one can. And by choosing, I’ll then open up other options and new avenues for choice. A door will close but 3 might open. If I’m choosing based on what I care about, want to study, am really interested in, then the rest will follow, right?

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?

The authority relations in schools between teachers and students matter for what students learn and how they become citizens in society. Judith L. Pace did a job talk at Berkeley today discussing authority as a lens for understanding schools and their role in a democracy. She started out the talk justifying her focus on authority by saying that “learning is voluntary, it cannot be coerced”. This is a simple but powerful way of looking at the importance of studying and understanding authority relations in schools. She used sociological (organization) theory, as well as much historical and theoretical work in education.

What are the authority relations between students and teachers? What drives teachers’ approaches to and uses of authority? How might this look different for immigrant students/in immigrant communities? What about when teachers come from different countries? Different socioeconomic backgrounds from students (very common in U.S. schools).

Here’s an interesting op-ed she wrote about the need to focus on social studies in elementary schools.

Just read an article from the Berkeley NewsCenter covering the immigration one-day conference I attended a couple of weeks ago. Irene Bloemraad, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, was interviewed for the article. Several other professors are mentioned who might be worth me meeting and learning more about, including Sarah Song and Taeku Lee from political science, Cybelle Fox from sociology, and Leti Volpp from the law school.

No one mentioned from education, unfortunately. Is no one at the GSE doing work on immigration and connected with the rest of campus?