Statement of Emerging Research Interest

So I’m approaching my annual review, which is when the faculty of my program sit together and review my coursework and my program of study and my plans for research.  I’m supposed to compile a portfolio for their review, part of which is a Statement of Emerging Research Interest.

I hate everything almost everything about this task.  (I do love the organizing of documents into folders.  Green folders, of course.)

I have this issue with trying to fit all the things I’ve been thinking about and struggling with and worrying about and frustrated by into a one-page document with well-structured paragraphs.  And so I figured I’d share what I’ve come up with so far to a much more sympathetic audience.  I welcome comments and questions, particularly from all you teachers out there.

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In his colloquium with doctoral students this term, Bill Ayers encouraged us to reconsider the phrase “I’m interested in…” as a means of introducing our topics (which he called “phenomena of interest”).  Rather he encouraged us to think of our work as being engaged with a particular issue, seriously and rigorously engaged.  I’m going to take his advice in framing this statement.

I am engaged with the issue of how to nurture and sustain teachers’ self-cultivation, a term I’m borrowing from a paper session at AERA.  Self-cultivation, it should be noted, understands the self not as an isolated individual, but as a center of relatedness.  My initial interest in reflective practice, and using a particular type of writing exercise to cultivate it, has become troublesome to me in several ways.  First, reflective writing without the context of a writing group easily becomes an isolated and isolating practice.  Second, not everyone finds writing a provocative tool for reflection.  Finally, reflection in and of itself is not adequate, perhaps particularly for teachers, who must be engaged in a certain kind of relatedness with students and classrooms and content.

Of course, the assignment to write a Statement of Emerging Research Interest came just as what I thought I wanted to be engaged with dissolved into confusion.  So to manage my confusion, I’ve made a list of the phenomena of interest I’m preoccupied with these days.

1. I can’t wrap my mind around the project of training teachers.  What is it that we think they need to know before they stand in a classroom?  And how do we know what they need to know?  I am engaged in an exploration of the teacher knowledge literature, and I want to trouble the notion that we can teach teachers in university classrooms.  I am grappling with the question that maybe teachers can only learn about teaching while they are doing it.  Though I know it’s impolite to say so, some of the best teachers I’ve worked with were not certified in traditional teacher education programs.  I’m curious about how they came to their “teacher knowledge.”
2. I’m intrigued by the possibility of a multiple objectivity, particularly as developed by Donna Harraway in her theory of diffraction, which is at the top of my summer reading list.  Several speakers at AERA mentioned “diffractive analysis” as a necessary complication to reflective practice.  I’m hoping it is a complication that moves me to an understanding of “teacher knowledge” that resonates with my own experience of classrooms.
3. Speaking of my own experience of classrooms, until recently I’ve struggled to identify the central and meaningful components of what I would loosely call my teaching philosophy.  In trying to figure out what “teacher knowledge” is, I began with trying to figure out what I think I know about teaching.  And what I came to, knowing that any conclusion is contingent and revisable (thank you, Charles Peirce), is that I didn’t know anything.  What was known in my classroom was co-constructed by me and my students and the text we were working with and the classroom space we were working in.  And it was never the same twice.  That is, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” was not the same poem A period (with A period students, first thing in the morning, in the classroom with the National Poetry Month poster of his face) and E period (with E period students, right after lunch, outside in the arbor because the weather was nice).  And the lesson wasn’t the same, and what students “learned” wasn’t the same, and what I thought about the poem wasn’t the same.  What was the same were the intentions I carried into the space: 1) when students seem to be settled in their understanding, ask troubling questions until they accuse you of making their brains bleed, and 2) invite students to be the best version of themselves and to operate in a manner that invites the best versions of their colleagues.  So what kind of “teacher knowledge” is that?  And how do we teach it to pre-service teachers?
4. I dream about writing a story collection as a dissertation.  I’d like to collect the stories of nontraditionally certified and non-certified teachers around this question of teacher knowledge, and turn them into parables or essays or interlocking short stories.  Stories that would be of use to teachers in rethinking their own teaching.  Stories that would make space for teachers to remember what they love about teaching.  Stories that would charge teachers up to change things.  I think I could write stories like that.  Maybe.

It occurs to me both that I’ve gone past my one-page limit, and that perhaps I should apologize for the unusual format of this statement of turning towards a phenomenon of interest.  And yet I don’t feel remorseful.  Bill also asked us to consider what we are willing to examine about our own contradictions, about what we believe.  What are we willing to explain?  And so these are the things I am committed to examining and would like to try to explain.

and we’re back

A confession: I am not as fond of the Beats as I think I am supposed to be.  I mean, they are fine and all, and I can recite the requisite lines from “Howl” and I like the occasional Ferlinghetti poem (this one in particular: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171598) and I’ve read The Dharma Bums.  And in all, I am not so impressed.  They are so male and so disenchanted and so inebriated.  I am none of these things, except very occasionally.

But then I read Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques about Prose and Life, and I thought I’d share my favorites, you know, in honor of National Poetry Month and this long overdue blog post and writing in general, and because I am a sucker for a good list.

Seven Ideas Worth Stealing from Jack Kerouac:

#1  Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

#4  Be in love with yr life

#13  Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

#17  Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

#20  Believe in the holy contour of life

#24  No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

#30  You’re a Genius all the time

You can read the rest of the list here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/22/jack-kerouac-belief-and-technique-for-modern-prose/

Happy spring, friends!

consider: be suspicious of anything that sounds like dogma

So it turns out that I will likely be doing some dissertation research about writing, about how it is a process of discovery.  Rather than something we do in order to communicate what we know to others, writing is what we do to figure out what we know and that we know it.  To see if I can teach pre-service teachers to use writing to reflect on their teaching, I’ve been practicing, reflecting on and writing about some of the ideas I’ve been asked to consider this term.  And I thought I’d share, perhaps as a series.  Yes.  The consider: series.  I’ll give you the triggering idea as the title, in this case a piece of advice from my advisor on Day 1.

Consider: be suspicious of anything that sounds like dogma.

Several years ago, at the request of one of the smartest women I know, I went to an information session about Landmark Education.  I went because she asked, and because it was clearly difficult for her to ask, though at the time I could not even guess why.  I went because it was important to her, just like I go to church occasionally with my mom.  It’s about respect for the asker, not necessarily for the task.  Because it’s important to know about what’s important to the people who are important to me.

There’s a lot of bad press about Landmark Education—when I first Googled it, the critics came up before the official website did, but that’s not the case these days—most of it by “smart people” who dismiss Landmark as yet another way for people to opt out of thinking for themselves.  They make the same argument about organized religion and certain recovery programs.  And no doubt, there are folks involved in all these programs/systems/institutions who are involved in order to avoid thinking.  But that is not the intended audience, I would argue, for any of them.

If the critics (of Landmark, of religion, of AA) were being honest, they would also admit that they don’t want to give up being miserable.  We can’t possibly give up being miserable.  The economy would collapse.

Also, in this modern landscape that foregrounds cynicism, we are not supposed to admit either that we want to be happy or that we might need some help to be so.  We are not supposed to admit to needing any help at all, particularly help that comes with a hard sell and is delivered in a three-day seminar to 150 people.  Help is not supposed to come with uncomfortable chairs and fluorescent lights; it is not supposed to be occasionally combative.

Nonetheless, my weekend at Landmark was not only helpful, but profoundly so.  I would not be sitting in this coffee shop in Eugene, procrastinating about the one last paper I have to write before I can officially be done with this term, without the work I did at Landmark Education.  Not because terrible, horrible, no good things would have become of me.  But because I would be doing the same damn thing I had been doing for years before that uncomfortable, fluorescent weekend.

Any ideology—or “technology” as it is called at Landmark—is only meaningful or effective if you accept its essential assertions, its first principles.  The instructor in my Research Design course opened the class by asserting her position as a positivist; she believes that the world is fundamentally knowable and, thus, measureable, and so she makes sense of the world, she tells its story, with factor analysis and multiple regression.  And this is the prevailing view in the research programs at the University of Oregon.

The only part of her positivist ontology that makes any sense to me is that we are trying to understand the world by telling a story about it, seeking the best-fit narrative, adjusting along the way to accommodate new data or plot twists.  I’ve been preoccupied with narrative for years, how it is constructed, how it is deployed to make meaning in the world.  And this is why Landmark’s technology resonated with me so instantly.  One of its first principles is that we construct ourselves in the world using a particular narrative.  We understand the plot trajectory (we believe that trajectory is inevitable given the previous plot points we’ve lived through), and we understand it to be progressing toward some climax (some moment at which the plot points converge into life as we want to live it).  We seek out characters and settings and events that fit into the trajectory, and we largely ignore those that don’t.  The world becomes fodder for the writer, who selects the details she believes advance the plot.  She won’t, for example, insert space aliens into a romantic comedy.  And so we live, plodding along predictably, collecting details that forward our stories, ignoring many, many possible twists and tangents, unfamiliar scenarios, space aliens.  We become so insistent on forwarding the plot that we lose sight of the fact that we’re writing a story.  The author and the act of authoring recede so far into the background as to disappear from the tale altogether, and we forget that there is a vantage point from outside the narrative, that this is but one of many possible narratives.

As Susanne Langer explains about how new ideas sometimes take on a life of their own: “They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they also seem to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues.”  They are snapped up, she says, “crowding out almost everything else for a while.”  Over time, she asserts, we start to see where the explanation doesn’t fit.  We see that it explains certain things very well, other things less well, and some things not at all.  If we are flexible thinkers, we will use it where it works and not where it doesn’t, rather than becoming theory evangelicals, proselytizing where we are not welcome.

Dogma is dangerous, mostly because it is so comfortable.  We snuggle right down into it and settle in.  And any time we catch ourselves getting comfortable, we should be nervous.

 

a whole different kind of tired

I had the best intentions.  Don’t we usually?  I started off my first term as a doctoral student with a workout plan (I signed up for a Halloween 5K sometime in early September, and copied the couch-to-5K training plan into my calendar), a writing plan (I signed up for NaNoWriMo), and a reading plan (I carried a non-school-related book on the bus each day).

Now I am only one presentation (ready to go this afternoon) and one paper (first draft mostly done) away from the end of my first term.  I finished the 5K, went out for one more run, and then left my tennies on the floor by the front door for the entire month of November.  I began my NaNoWriMo project and wrote diligently for a week, then sporadically for another week, nearly reaching the 20,000 word mark.  And then my brain went dead for three whole days, and I spent the next two weeks catching up on my schoolwork.  I read half of Lorrie Moore’s The Gate at the Stairs before I had to use the bus ride to finish reading for class; I’m not even sure where Lorrie is at the moment.

Don’t misunderstand, this is the best work-life balance I’ve ever achieved.  In October, John and I did lots of cooking and a bit of hiking, though by the second week of November he’d pretty much taken over cleaning and cooking and grocery shopping, with my very occasional help with a load of laundry or a batch of cookies.  And I made an awesome (if I do say so myself) advent calendar for my BFF, Nishta, read the His Dark Materials trilogy, and made some progress on a knitting project while we watched a few mindless action movies.

Here’s what I’ve learned.  Cooking and crafting, in small doses, are sanity-savers, and I feel better when I make things.  I need to replace my stack of intellectually challenging novels with lighter fare (recommendations are welcome!) so that I can save my brain for high theory and statistics.  And I’m going to sign up for the Hagg Lake sprint triathlon in June as soon as the registration opens, and copy the training schedule into my calendar.  Since we are moving to campus in a few weeks, I can take advantage of the gym facilities and stop using the cold raininess as an excuse.

Here’s what else I’ve learned.  I need to think about things—for a longer time that we generally get to do so in this program—and I’ve accumulated many things that need to be thought about.  Notes I jotted in class or while reading, bookmarked websites, shelf serendipity discoveries from the library, phrases that I want to write about.  So that’s what you have to look forward to, dear readers, in the coming weeks.

After one last presentation, and one last paper.

spooky

It seems I’ve been caught in some sort of time-suckage field into which all of October has vanished.

But as a fabulous spin instructor once yelled repeatedly into his headset-microphone contraption: Don’t be skeered!

November is NaNoWriMo time.  The panopticon.  Skinner boxes.  30-day challenges.

It’s going to be meta.

listicle #1

I learned the term ‘listicle’ from this article on GOOD, http://www.good.is/post/the-top-5-things-that-bother-me-about-this-headline/.  In it, Alissa Walker poses intriguing and mostly disturbing queries about the nature of writing in the age of content creation.  Enjoy, ponder, deliberate, etc. at your convenience, but I have moved on already, grateful that my experiences today now have their own genre.

7 Things I Saw On the Way To or From School Today (or: Welcome to Eugene)

1.   A black and white spotted dog in the bed of a red pickup truck.  The dog had escaped its kennel and had its front paws on the side of the bed to maximize that wind-in-the-face thing dogs love so much.  The driver/dog owner was similarly sticking his head into the wind, trying to reason with the dog, pleading with it to pleasepleaseplease get back in its kennel or else he’d have to stop again and they would be late.  Like the dog was going to voluntarily forgo its momentary wind-in-the-face liberation in favor of being on time.
2. A man dressed like Gandalf—or possibly Dumbledore—pulling a wire utility cart behind him with one hand and punctuating each step with a huge walking stick in the other.
3. Three high school boys on their way to school in a clearly borrowed-from-dad BMW 3-series, all the windows down and music playing loudly, ensuring that the greatest possible number of people would notice that they were driving daddy’s BMW.
4. A Craftsman house, bluish grey with slightly darker bluish grey trim, its front porch littered with hundreds, maybe thousands, of discarded 16-ounce red plastic cups.  Several of the cups had made their way drunkenly up the street and stumbled into various neighbors’ shrubbery to pass out.
5. A very pregnant, heavily tattooed woman walking a tortoiseshell cat on a pink leash.
6. A woman in a business suit and stack-heeled pumps cycling very determinedly in the bike lane.  She was trying to keep her handbag balanced behind her, but it kept slipping around her waist toward the handlebars; each time she pushed it back, her course would waver, each time toward traffic.  She was not wearing a helmet.
7. Two young women with identically poufy hair and identically pouty red lips wearing bitsy black dresses of the one-shoulder club-going variety and very high peep-toe heels walking towards campus.  At 1:30 in the afternoon.

That is all.

can I get an amen?

I know exactly when I fell in love with gospel music—and I fell in spite of my ambivalence about most things religious.  It was when I first heard Sweet Honey in the Rock’s version of “Wade in the Water” (you can listen here, and please know that I have no idea what this song has to do with Grey’s Anatomy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1-Bksnqh_4).  Like many classic gospel songs, this one explicates a Bible verse, in this case, John 5:4, which, when it is included in the scripture, reads “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.”  It is perhaps ironic (or perhaps simply apt) that this is one of many passages that some translations and editions omit because it has murky origins; it is in the manuscripts used to produce the King James translation, but it is not in much older manuscripts discovered between the production of the King James version and the production of the New International version (NIV), considered by many scholars to be a much more accurate rendering of the original text because of how much newly discovered material was available to the scholars and translators who produced it.  And so the NIV left the verse out.  In the edition on my shelf, which I acquired many years ago as an undergraduate and so may be changed in subsequent publications, it is not even included as a footnote.

One of the central tenants that keeps me from being anything but ambivalent about religion is the idea that a text, any text, is infallible.  As a student of words and texts, I know how many mistakes are introduced during the printing process and reproduced in edition after edition until a scholar goes back to original manuscripts and proposes corrections, which are no more than his or her best guesses about what the notes in the margins and the scratchings out and pencilings in really mean.  And how difficult it is to translate any language into any other language, even if both are still living, and so how impossible it must be to work with languages long dead, or languages whose modern versions are so distant from their scriptural predecessors.  And how much diction matters, how much meaning is created when “virgin” is selected from the possible meanings rather than “young woman.”  You know, just as an example.

This business of being sure about things is hard for me.

Which brings us back to gospel music.  It makes me cry.  There is nothing in my reaction that makes sense, nothing that is explainable in terms of logic, nothing in my life experiences that can elucidate how or why the music of a faith tradition in which I profess little belief and of which I have many doubts moves me to tears.  Every time I hear it.

But yesterday I had the exact same reaction to an entirely different stimulus, the director of the program I’m starting on Monday confessing to its ten newest participants that “we’re just a bunch of troublemakers.”  It made me cry.

Everything about orientation made me feel like I was in exactly the right place, including the fact that I would never have labeled it an orientation.  While we did spend a few minutes in logistics, looking through the program of study, noting websites and documents where we could find answers to any possible questions, meeting professors and colleagues, I am anything but oriented.  In fact, the central theme was more about remaining untethered—to previously held ideas about what we want to study, to any particular theoretical frame, to anything, in the words of my advisor, that smacks of dogma—more about cultivating openness and curiosity.  The program director, CHiXapkaid, is a tradition-bearer for the Salish people, and he opened our gathering by chanting to invoke the spirit, making our work sacred, and closed by asking us to join hands in a moment of reflection.  And what could easily have devolved into new-agey kitsch was authentically felt and experienced by the hugely diverse group of professors and students sitting around laminate tables in a fluorescently-lit classroom, the whir of the projected PowerPoint presentation as accompaniment.  It was effortless, this creating of community.

So, for the first time, I am a troublemaker in a community that holds troublemakers in highest regard.  I can tell the truth about what I believe—about teaching and schools and equity and social justice—without having to tone it down for fear of scaring my listeners or being called a troublemaker as though that is something to avoid.  And I am sure about this, in the same way I’m sure that God (or whatever one calls the larger forces at work in the world) is going to trouble the water: walking through the trouble is exactly what one is supposed to do.

I’m wading in, friends.   Hallelujah.