budding scholar

Part of my dissertation project involves interviewing lots of people about their work in schools and education policy, and I hear a whole lot about change. How the kids changed with immigration, how they have a lower level than they used to. How policies that have no concept of how things really work in schools come down and make people do things differently. How immigrants from some people refuse to change. How immigrants from others have changed too much, lost contact with their home cultures. How people here want all newcomers to change and be like them. How the teachers need to change, or the students, or the parents, or the whole system.

Hearing all this talk about what people think here has me thinking a lot about change. We all agree that things change over time. We live it, see it in the people we know. But at the same time we see how things stay the same. Inside ourselves, in the people around us, in our communities. The push and pull between feeling things change, and feeling they never will, fascinates me. Do people change? Do places like schools? How does change work? How does one person make another change?

When you close your eyes and think about it, do you believe in change? In yourself, in the world around you? Why or why not?

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?

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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?