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.

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?