budding scholar

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?

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)

One of my dream jobs is to work for the Stanford in Madrid program, which is starting up for the first time this year. Coordinate cultural activities, guide undergraduates through language and cross-cultural experiences, and teach. When the announcement went out to one of the Stanford lists earlier this year looking for a director, I thought, “this is my job in 5 years!”, and saved it on my desktop to follow up and see if I could begin contributing in some way now. Haven’t followed up yet, but was excited to see they’re starting it this year, and am already thinking about what connections I might be able to offer them (internships for students? talks at Stanford to promote the program?).

Between the China trip earlier in the summer (interesting posts about the schools I saw there another time!), and taking a vacation in Mexico, the settling-into-home-and-having-more-time part of summer didn’t happen until July. Then a relaxing month, where having *only* a full-time job felt like a vacation. But it also felt like a chance to let the year percolate in my mind, let the new ideas learned settle. Now I am beginning to feel ready to take on my intellectual work wholeheartedly again.

Like plants or trees, this graduate school intellectual growth continues to happen even when unattended. I feel ready to go back to the cultivating, pulling weeds again, grappling with where I want to end up, and weathering the storms of work and school combined.

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.

One thing checked off the list in my countdown to not living in a bubble for a few months! Turned in my sociology paper this afternoon. Calculated that I spent about 50 hours on it in the last week. I wasn’t thrilled with the last section of the paper, but felt good about the majority. The effort to bring in segmented assimilation literature at the end of a paper that summarizes the research on Latinos in higher education didn’t quite work, but it is something I continue thinking about, so am happy to have attempted it. Grappling with questions is the point in grad school, right?

Am getting more and more excited about planning the trip to China. Turns out one of my closest friends is going to visit her brother there, so we’ll get to travel together! Wild that it’s worked out, and really gives me something to look forward to. Motivation to get through the next set of work, starting with working on my statistics lab projects tonight. Luckily I had a great break with Juanjo this evening after turning in my paper, including a walk and a delicious dinner outside on a rare warm San Francisco evening. Kiwi margaritas tasted especially good! Another glimpse of normal life beyond the crunch…

Writing my sociology paper synthesizing the research on Latinos in higher education is pushing my thinking about the quality of research. I’ve learned that it can be quite easy to do a so-so study and package it with reputable research and get it published in any of the multitude of journals out there. As I write my class paper, I keep wanting to systematically review the methods of the studies I’m reading, since it doesn’t feel right to just toss in citations from studies of such varying quality. Yet the purpose of the paper is not to assess the quality of the research, but rather to find out what people are saying about the topic.

I realize how easy it is to make whichever argument you want, and why it’s hard to definitively “prove” anything. It takes high levels of knowledge about statistics and research methods to have even an inckling of whether a study is well-done and trust-worthy, and few lay people have this. I’m barely getting it myself and I’m finishing my first year of a doctoral program!

Today I spent the entire day working on my paper. Yesterday as well. Thank god for coffee and coffee shops, as they fueled the writing in the flagging hot Sunday afternoon hours. It was over 85 degrees in San Francisco today! Juanjo and I just took a walk up around Dolores Park, and it was still warm out. Couples were everywhere, the park still full of people enjoying the warm weather. Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter.

Back to the paper for now. Looking forward to wearing a skirt and sandles tomorrow, and enjoying the warm summer weather, despite knowing I’m going to be exhausted!

– 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.

I have the bulk of two papers to write in the next two weeks. We were told at the beginning of the year (in orientation I think) that writing the same paper for two classes was not cheating, but a smart way of doing things. I tried for it but it didn’t quite work out that way in my History of American Education class, and my Power and Inequality in Higher Education sociology class.

For History I’m writing about responses to immigration in schools for the past 100 years. How have the changing purposes of education more broadly impacted the way that immigrants are integrated into public schools? Are immigrants different today than they were 100 years ago?

For Sociology I am writing about Latinos in higher education. Who are Latinos, and what do trends for college look like for them (compared to other groups, and comparing different Latino groups, like Cubans and Mexicans)? What is the role of higher education in integrating or assimilating immigrants into a new culture?

I write best in the morning, so plan to spend time each morning from now until I turn these in really working on my writing. Trying to break out of the academic bad writing that is so prevelant in academia in general, crafting my prose a little more carefully. I’d like to take some writing classes at some point, to improve my writing for professional purposes and because I have always wanted to take some creative writing classes.

When I finish the semester at last I will be going to China! At the end of May I have a trip for work. Also hope to buy a new bike (ours were stolen a week ago), and start riding up Twin Peaks again. Looking forward to having only one job again for a time…having time to spend with the people I love, read some novels, and enjoy some of the movies I’ve missed in the last 9 months, like The Namesake. Also looking forward to cooking!