budding scholar

Christina has been an artist and writer as long as I’ve known her. We met at a pottery class in the summer before 6th grade, and became friends as we learned to push and pull terra cotta clay into small bowls and cups. In high school, we wrote letters to each other at night and she drew me pictures I still have. When I went over to her house, I remember admiring her art table, in a corner of the living room. One sister played the cello, the other painted too, and I was jealous and wanted to be like her. In college she inspired me with her writing, her stories, essays, papers. She also marched me to the computer lab after finding me in tears with scribbled piles of papers, and showed me how to use Word to write myself. We took a class together our last year where we wrote “mini-ethnographies”, and explored writing, identity, and the moments of life that thread together into stories.

In the years we’ve been friends, Christina has always believed in me, pushed me to tap my own creativity. When I ask her for advice, or just complain about what’s bothering me, she has this uncanny ability to ask questions that get at the heart of things, nudge at the edges of self doubt and gently make me see what I’ve been kind of ignoring all along. Most recently, we were talking on the phone and I was telling her about my project in Barcelona, complaining about how I couldn’t seem to get away from national identity, but that I was so tired of thinking about nationalism. And she started with her questions: What does it mean to people, really mean, to live with these language and identity issues? What part of the human experience is this about, this identity struggle between Catalan and Spanish? And what’s your story in this? Maybe there’s a story beyond your dissertation, beyond the academic story. As you can probably imagine, it was her questions and encouragement that got me writing again, and pushed me towards the eureka moment I wrote about the other day.

When Christina started her blog five years ago, I remember thinking “great, a way to read her writing more often!”. In the years since, as she’s continued writing, publishing, painting, photographing, I’ve seen how her creative work touches people far and wide. How she writes, what she sees, who she notices. She inspires all she touches, and I’ve never believed in her more.

Which is why I’m writing this post, now, on a clear, cold, February day in Toledo. Last week, Christina launched A Field Guide to Now on Kickstarter, an innovative site where people can get support for creative projects. She is seeking backers, small and large alike, to help fund her time and materials while she finishes her first book, a collection of essays and art. Her goal is $10,000 by May 15th. I hope you’ll pledge ($1 or more), and maybe tell a friend or two. Because this is a person whose work inspires all it touches. One day you will walk to your gate in an airport, or come across a paperback on a vacation, or notice someone reading one of her books on the train, and will be able to say “I helped Christina Rosalie publish her first book!”.

Thank you for considering, for reading, for supporting a writer, artist, friend.

Like the sudden way I notice the contours of stone through the camera lens, I notice the way a conversation about coffee can become a discussion of national identity. And like the layers of mountains fading across the end of Spain and into France, I notice layers of questions and future projects in my daily fieldwork with schools and education policy in Barcelona.

What does it mean to belong as a new immigrant in a school? What does the work of governments and policies have to do with belonging to a place, our identity as “people from here”? When do we belong to a place, and when do we know someone doesn’t belong? How do people navigate the small interactions across cultural boundaries that happen in cities, schools, trains, marketplaces? Does government action have anything to do with how we interact with each other?

A page has turned with my work. I’ve been writing a lot, about what I see in schools, what I learn in interviews, and all kinds of other things. I am speaking better and better Catalan, and with this comes more insight into the way people think here, how they see these questions. A dissertation, a study, something that will become a real body of work still feels far away. But the project is beginning to feel like it has legs and might someday walk.

And another thing is happening, a surprising and exciting shift. Put simply, I’ve realized that a dissertation is not all that will come out of this work I’m doing. The Ph.D. is important training, and it’s helping me do a project with all kinds of good things like strong research methods. But I’m taking more than academic papers from this. The questions I’m uncovering, encountering–about identity, culture, language, and crossing boundaries of difference–they will be braided into my dissertation. But they can also become other writing projects (non-academic work? op-eds? future blog posts?) , or art, or advocacy work, or something else entirely. In other words, the thesis and the contribution I make to academia as a result of this year is not the sum total of what I can take from having spent this time in Barcelona. There are other stories, other meanings, other ways to work with what I’m uncovering here as I watch and listen and learn.

It’s wonderful to feel such creative possibility in this work. Welcome after months of plodding, wondering, trying, failing.

***

Where are you with your creative projects? If you’re plodding, or trying, or failing, what keeps you going? How does the feeling of creative possibility spark to life for you?

I pick up the phone and call again, the fourth time I’ve tried to reach these people. I call three more numbers and it rings and rings. The next morning, I am doing an interview across town, and I run into someone from another office, set up an interview. When I’m doing these interviews now, I ask people for recommendations of who else to talk to, and people make suggestions that lead places, to new appointments. After months of struggling to meet people and explain my project, it’s a revelation to have the pieces coming together so easily.

The truth is, one of the most unexpectedly challenging parts of this Fulbright year has been making connections and gaining access to schools where I could do my research. I knew it would be difficult, but never imagined just how hard. Just figuring out who to talk to, which offices to visit, where to call, took days. And then getting over my own nervousness took time too, getting better at cold calling places, explaining myself and my project, and making apointments with people.

I’ve been thinking about writing up a piece on gaining access as a graduate, Fulbright or other researcher. I’ve learned a few things in these months that could be helpful for others. Indeed, as I think about it more, really anyone doing a creative, self-promoted project has to go through this rite of passage of making themselves known, talking to a lot of people, getting enough buy-in that people will talk to you. Maybe the things I’ve learned could help others.

***

What have been your experiences with gaining access or making connections? How long have you found it takes in a new place? What advice would you give for people trying to figure it out for the first time?

The birds swoop over our heads as we walk by, diving towards bread tossed from the small boy’s hand. They fly down and linger a moment, trying to fill their bellies with bits of bread. The bread blankets the beach, and the birds must quickly find as many grains of sand as crumbs of bread because they sail back to the breaking edges of waves and settle down upon the water again. But their bellies call them again, and the instinct to seek food, and once again they burst toward the bread and peck away in the sand.

We walk with shoes off, toes curling around pink, gray and brown rocks that spot the grainy sand. My nose is filled with the smell of fried food, myseriously blanketing the beach though I see no fast food joint in sight. The smell, and the loud roar of traffic in the distance remind us that we are on an urban beach, on the edge of a teaming city.

I hold my breath, stare into the foam, feel the cold Mediterranean water on my toes, and hope to follow the birds this week, bursting forth again and again, pecking in the sand, flying on inertia and instinct. My bread is my research. I am here, in this city, knocking on doors, calling for interviews, looking for people who will talk with me and share their stories. Like the smell of fast food as we walked down the beach, the weight of the project is ever present, nagging at me, sometimes scraping and grinding, sometimes sparkling into inspiration. I wonder what I’ll find in the sand this week.

***

How’s the week looking to you, dear readers? Thank you for your thoughts, reactions, comments. I love hearing what my writing and photos bring to mind for you.

I leave for the metro at 7:30am. The day is young, air still cold, the sky just growing light in the distance. I pass a mother carrying loaves of bread, and I see a line has already formed at the bakery. A man talks on his phone, sitting next to a bucket in front of a hotel, hand lightly resting on the window-cleaning brush. The grocery store, pharmacy, bank, and produce stand are all still dark, most not opening until 9 or 10. I stop at a crosswalk and the buzz of motorcycles taking off fills my ears, while I fumble in my pockets for gloves. I hear a train just leaving as I walk down the metro stairs, and the platform is empty of people. No one taking the train this time of day, I think. Then the next train roars up, the doors open, and I have to slide my bag down my arm to fit in the car, my gray wool coat crushing against the blacks and browns and whites of other winter coats.

My days are colored by these pieces of city life. The first thing I see out the window when I wake up are which windows in the loop of apartments outside have light. When we go to sleep late, I notice which windows still have light. There are too many to keep track of which ones have light from day to day, so I invent stories about anyone and everyone. On the weekends, I see people hanging their laundry on drying racks that take up half the balcony, covering them with plastic when the sky threatens rain. The traffic is a distant roar, punctuated by the honk of sirens during rush hour. The elevator takes my attention more when I’m home, and the distant rumble of a train 8 or 9 floors down under the ground, and the hum of the neighbor’s motorized shutter. Quiet, compared with our apartment in San Francisco.

And yet, all I crave today is open space, somewhere else. A different kind of noise. The sound of wind in pines, or rain soaked leaves whipping the windows at night. Birds singing, or the silence of fresh snow. Perhaps the slap of waves on a lake shore, or the roar of a river. After five years and two different cities, I’ve never yearned for trees and water the way I do now.

Yet here I am, in this city, at my desk in a windowless spare room, hearing the elevator gears and clink of a neighbor’s dishes. I sip peppermint tea and turn my thoughts to tomorrow’s school visit and interviews.

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What are the sounds of “here” for you right now? Is this where you want to be?

This year in my work is about data collection. Gathering the stories, interviews, statistics, fieldnotes, curriculum that I will analyze for my dissertation. It’s hard to imagine what all of this will look like when finished. The time here in Barcelona has been a very good start on it though, and it’s getting better by the day, as I gain confidence and access to schools. And who knows, maybe between now and May I’ll finish, and I can make new goals for the rest of 2010. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?!

A new year has arrived, one with a blue moon on New Year’s Eve, and family visits that kept me busy and gave me a break from worrying over my project for 10 days. I really needed the break, the complete focus on being an aunt. The fact that you never really disconnect has been one of the most challenging things about doing a Ph.D. for me. I know people doing startups, or writing novels, or becoming artists, or doing other original work probably face this too. Your work is with you all the time, and feels all tied up in who you are, in your identity in the world. How the work is going seems to matter more for for how you feel about yourself than in other jobs where you’re not trying to create something new. The rewards feel few and far between.

It often makes me miss teaching, the satisfaction of knowing you’re helping people learn every day. When I taught I had days where I was exhausted, my home life was a mess, and I didn’t know where I would find the energy to go to work. But then I got there, and the connection with my students was so rewarding that it made the problems pale in importance. I can’t wait to have this connection with students at the college level, in classes on culture and education, immigration, language policy, qualitative methods, and social networks. One of the most rewarding experiences in my life is helping people learn, mentoring them, supporting and encouraging their growth. I just need to get past this milestone/rite of passage of the dissertation!

A post soon about my goals for the new year. I’ve seen others do some last year/this coming year reflecting on their blogs and it’s inspired me. I haven’t made new years’ goals in years, but feel like it would help with the next stage of my study.

The most inspired moments of my undergraduate education happened in the last semester, when I took a class on “ethnography and human development” (I was a human development major), and did a study of an afterschool program for Hispanic children in an elementary school near my college. My teacher pushed all of us to observe, to question our participation in what we saw, to reflect on our position as researchers, to strive to understand what we saw from the perspective of those we studied. This professor was the first one to say “have you thought about graduate school?”, and to tell me my “mini-ethnography” of the afterschool program could become worthy of publication with some more work. There was a spark in that project that helped bring me to my current project today. It nourished my ambition, my belief that I had something to say, that my involvement with education and knowledge could go beyond teaching elementary school (my career plan at that time).

Today I know for sure that being a Ph.D. student is not quite what I imagined back when I wrote that term paper in my final semester of college. I know that part of what inspired me so much was the experience of connecting my own life, what I saw, and the things I read about in books. I was inspired to advocate for change in education, to push for better opportunities in schools like the one where I did my research. I was excited to write, to find (make) meaning through this writing. I wanted to find better ways of teaching literacy, teaching English to Spanish-speakers, making schools support their learning.

And here I am today, riding the waves of frustration, procrastination, hard work, and sometimes inspiration that come along with doing a Ph.D. dissertation study. An independent research study (there’s a lot of emphasis in Ph.D. programs on the fact that the dissertation is study is done independently). What does what I’m doing today have to do with those early sparks? What does it mean to dedicate my professional life to being a professor? How does my study, my writing, this career of research and teaching…how do or will they matter, and to whom?

***

What questions do you have about what you do? How was it sparked by early learning? How does that spark relate to where you are now?

There’s a prevalent myth in the world of academia that it’s possible to get work, and especially writing, done during the holidays. It feels like this wide open time, full of whole days that can be spent writing. And then the holidays come, and they’re full of family and food and perhaps catching up on email. So in an effort to make my holiday time productive, I’m spending my mornings at the library in Toledo this week. I hope to write up all my fieldnotes, get through email, transcribe two interviews, and plan out writing projects for January. Mixed in with these work things, I hope to start finding some excitement about the holidays themselves, possibly by making Christmas cards.

As an aside, have you seen this preview? With the babies and culture of different places, it’s the perfect movie for a grad student working away on research into cultural integration while dreaming about life with kids.

For my project I am interviewing education people in all 10 municipal districts in Barcelona. I visited two neighborhoods today, and brought along the camera as a way of noticing more as I walked around the new places before and after my meetings. And notice I did. Whenever I’m taking pictures I start seeing more and more possibilities, seeing details and framing images that I would have walked past if the camera weren’t in my hand, especially in the city.  I love the idea of a picture a day with the 365 project. Perhaps using the camera lens to notice this city in new ways will help me find my way into my research project, into seeing peoples’ understandings of immigration, integration, and how schools are changing.