As a recent graduate, I have pondered my journey to completion and what it actually took to get here. Even though the Louisville Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute hours applied toward my coursework, my official entrance into the doctoral program came the fall of 2011 with a seminar course. For many students, I can imagine, their initial experiences in a program can determine their trajectory for the remainder of their studies.
This seminar introduction to deciphering qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods; writing literature reviews; and developing a path for research was akin to mental Olympics. I felt pushed, pulled, and stretched in new, very demanding directions. For the first time in a very long time, my brain felt out of shape. For over seven years I had attended professional development, created innovative lessons, crunched impossible amounts of data, and learned how to be a more effective teacher, but none of these experiences trained me to run this marathon.
During that first semester, I remember wondering if I would ever learn it all. Would or could I learn enough to earn a doctorate? Fortunately, our professor named our fears and welcomed them. He encouraged us to wrangle literature and make sense of published data. My brain hurt. I felt, well, dumb, and may have said as much to my classmates (and professor). By the end of the semester, though more knowledgeable, we all had glazed eyes with expressions of "what the hell have I gotten myself into?!" plastered on our faces.
When I think about some of my attempts with data collection and analysis even closer to the end of my coursework a few years ago, I realize now the incredible patience my professors must have had. For instance, only experienced researchers should attempt to record and analyze unstructured interview conversations and try to make sense of their contextual significance or explain that significance in class. Thankfully, I learned from these experiences. With guidance and understanding (surely everyone has early researcher mistake stories), my professors modeled what I hoped to become.
Being a student influenced my teacher lens in my middle school classroom. I hope I became more sensitive to students' struggles, more flexible with my instructional approaches, clearer in my expectations. At the minimum, I hope I found ways to stretch my students' brains. For that reason, I encourage teachers to pursue higher education--a master's degree, endorsement or certification, or doctorate. Enroll in MOOCs or a study group to which you are accountable in some way. Be a student again. Yes, we have well over eighteen years under our belts as students, but (sigh) that is the same argument we hear with members of legislature. Becoming a student after being a teacher revealed insights I never would have discovered otherwise. I promise it was worth it.
For me, my journey as a student continues even as I celebrate my 63rd birthday. I dropped out of high school at 17 and earned my GED. I graduated from law school at the age of 40 and earned my bachelors in English Literature and Language at age 60. I recently graduated with my Masters in Education and will begin my Ph.d in literacy at St. Johns University in the Fall of 2017. I did earn my teaching credentials in secondary English but never took a job in the school system. Instead I joined AmeriCorps and work with struggling elementary schools and their students in the area of reading. This summer I developed and will teach a summer reading program in an underserved community.
ReplyDeleteMy journey has taught me that anything is possible if you want it enough and I continually pass that message on to the students I work with. Being a student keeps me focused on the fact that school requires determination and self-directed motivation. No teacher can "make" you learn, but they can inspire and support. That is what I try to take with me into a classroom.
My approach to the Ph.d program will be decidedly different than the norm. I have no interest in writing a paper that only other ph.d students or researchers will read. My life as a lawyer taught me the value of "plain English" and I intend at all cost to avoid edu-babble and psycho-babble in my writing. My research will be straight forward and geared towards something that teachers can understand and use. I also want to be a "disruptive" agent in my school district and my state.
I feel like anything I can learn that will help me better serve the children struggling to read in my county is worth my time and effort.
Sharon Kinsey
AMERICORPS
Halifax County, Va.
sharonkinsey@gmail.com
You inspire me! Being a student kept me in tune with the needs my own students might have in the classroom. When I struggled and my classmates and professors encouraged me, I felt the responsibility to be a teacher like that for my own students. Hopefully, I succeeded.
DeleteBest wishes as you enter a new phase of learning. My Ph.D. program introduced me to new ways of thinking and writing, which is why my dissertation took a creative turn. Narrative inquiry was my way of giving voice to teachers and students alike. I look forward to hearing more about your journey!
I think it is very important that we teachers continuously take coursework (for credit or not) in our fields. Every graduate level English class I've taken -- 20th century American lit, narrative nonfiction, the Harlem Renaissance -- has given me material to bring back into my own classroom, whether content or strategy. I've brought back ideas for creative writing, new resources to teach certain books, and in particular, I've adjusted how I teach expository writing after realizing that the pedagogy my department was using was not actually how I as a student developed my ideas and wrote papers. Coursework offers us an experience that allows us to grow beyond the typical in-district PD and helps us conceive of ourselves as intellectuals!
ReplyDeleteBeing able to conceive of ourselves as intellectuals is so valuable! We can also create knowledge to share. I learned about "teacher as writer and researcher" through the National Writing Project (specifically the Louisville Writing Project in Kentucky). Really inquiring into my work and investigating the strategies and materials I used in my classroom pushed me into a more reflective and analytical space. And being a student helped me be more empathetic to my students' situations. Teaching is so much more than opening a textbook, isn't it?
DeleteFunny you should ask that question about being a learner again. After more than 50 years of thinking I was "bad at math," I decided I wanted to learn to code and was accepted into a free advanced and accelerated 16-week programming class sponsored by a couple of local nonprofit organizations using Harvard's online computer science class. My brain hurts. I'm exhausted. There are times I don't think I can understand it. And then I am so exhilarated when I complete an assignment correctly. I am learning how important a support network and collaboration are for success when working outside my comfort zone. Recently I sat down for a social hour at school with the math and science faculty and could converse with them semi-intelligently. I'm not bad at math. It just took me half a century to start learning it.
ReplyDeleteStepping outside of our comfort zones is scary, but as you said, with a supportive network we can take on most any risk. There is nothing quite like the exhilaration of climbing that learning wall and reaching the other side.
DeleteThanks for this prompt. I write from Cairo, Egypt, where I just completed (though I have a few more papers to read today) an intensive graduate course for K-12 Egyptian teachers who teach in English-oriented schools. The course was Content Literacy, so we addressed strategies for reading comprehension in a variety of disciplines and genre, but we also used Writers' Workshop process to explore the connections between writing and reading. The teachers wrote such heart-filled narratives and such brave and logical persuasive manuscripts. I learned so much! One of the ways that I was stretched in this course is in the area of second language learning. In the USA, there is strong consideration to have Spanish-speaking (and maybe some other dominant minority languages such as Chinese, but not the many other 1st languages of children in the USA--such as the 240 languages of students enrolled in public schools in Northern Virginia, where I live) learn to read in their first language. The Cairenes point out that spoken Arabic and written Arabic--at least in Egypt--is dramatically different. The analogy one of the teachers made was if we were taught to read in Shakespearean English, wouldn't it be quite a stretch? Thus, the middle and upper class (and maybe the lower class--but I have still to confirm this)children learn to read in English, French, or German, their 2nd language. Most learn a third language, also, starting in the primary grades.
ReplyDeleteI do want to make the point that teaching a course--just as taking a course--can be a place for great learning.
Happy journeys!
B. Laster
You are so right! I have learned so much during my teaching experiences. Often I felt like I was getting far more than I was giving.
ReplyDeleteHow fascinating the differences in how reading and writing in second languages are taught (and quite the area for more research). Interesting, too, is that other countries often teach at least two languages from an early age. I have wondered what that says about literacy (and how it affects literacy) in the United States if many of our children have limited access to multiple languages from early ages.