Asset appreciation – Page 6

Realization

By admin | May 26, 2011 - 3:48 pm | Asset appreciation, Blog, Child's play, Family dynamics, Narrative, New media literacies, Participatory culture & learning, Social and emotional learning

Leave a comment

I am now four days post-quals and the whole experience seems like a dream, a Dali-esque portrait of vibrant images stitched together crazily… The scene it describes is of a Western/technologized rite of passage whose equivalent is stripping you naked, feeding you peyote, and sending you out in the desert to channel strange visions and, hopefully, survive.

I’m still sleep-deprived but for different reasons: play, travel, and circadian rhythm compromise. I’m energized, though, to be among smart and friendly scholars in familiar Boston. Maybe this PhD is a bit like my 2003-2006 Boston experience — exciting in anticipation, surprisingly challenging in acclimation, depressing and identity-rocking at times, and ultimately, home.

Below, you’ll find what I wrote yesterday and perhaps appreciate, as I do now, how feelings can be ephemeral and how meaning-making is a continuous process…
__________________

I did it.

The thing is, I’m not sure what “it” is. Just what did I do? Here is an itemized list:

-worked from the moment I woke up until the time I went to sleep;
(-except for when I watched Top Chef: Season 4 – Chicago during my breakfast, lunch, and dinner + dishwashing breaks;)
-wrote a paper for two solid days*, then moved on to the next, despite the fact that the last section of the previous paper was unfinished and I hate leaving things unfinished, because I couldn’t risk getting bogged down and figured a slapdash last section to one (or several) papers was better than a non-existent or mostly inadequate paper in its entirety;
-went for a daily, two block walk for a cup of coffee to go;
-experienced two of the 10 days feeling cloudy-brained due to sleep deprivation, sympathizing with the concussed, strategizing work-arounds – making detailed notes since my silly cerebrum couldn’t hold a thought, going for a walk to the mailbox (can’t trust my postal carrier and your lack of Valentines is the reason – I mailed em, people), catching quick semi-naps, re-jiggering my 10-day plan;
-communicated with my beloved mother, my champion, daily;
-compromised my body’s structural integrity, perhaps (by the end of the experience, got the distinct impression that my posture kept tilting to the right – that ain’t ergonomic, and neither is my Ikea couch);
-rubbed the ends of my hair to frayed, eroded stumps;
-opted for loose dresses and my most generous jeans;
-managed to make it to yoga on both Sundays;
-got bites across my infernally expanding belly from some critter (a flea?) that I hope doesn’t live in my furniture;
-surprised myself by some of the routes that the papers took – hadn’t anticipated needing to get into X or Y topic, but realized I couldn’t speak about Z without foregrounding X and Y;
-cursed myself for these deviations from the plan because they necessitated searching for literature and adding the new citations to my stupid reference section;
-marveled at the sheer length of these documents, born of my ignorance that it would take so many pages to explain some fundamentals before I could even get into more of the “meat”;
-wondered…………..

Here’s the philosophical part and I’m warning you now, it’s not pretty. I wondered:

-if the fundamentals are the meat, if the point is to prove one’s mastery of theory and research methods;
-if the fundamentals aren’t the meat, if the point is to explore something novel, synthesize, make more of a contribution;
-who decides the point anyway – who is this for? While my professors may read these papers (I say “may” intentionally – I take nothing for granted, especially since I forked over behemoths), I’m not driven to please them necessarily, or other people in general, and doubt that honoring my own agenda will dissatisfy them, or anyone (and if it does cause dissatisfaction, tend to think that the refuseniks are in the wrong);
-then, if this is for me, how am I benefiting again? Where is the value in writing a paper in two days, on the back of another two day paper, another two day paper, another two day paper? Does that generate products of value? Are my papers any good?
-if it’s not about the product, it’s about the process, then is this nose-to-the-grindstone process one that confers any take-aways? Do I want to practice this, get better at this, this process of masochism and social disconnect? That doesn’t sound sustainable or qualify-of-life-y…
-if there’s something to be said about learning how to write on demand? Maaaaaaaybe, because procrastination and overcommitment can and has and will inspire two-day paper writing (I have a book chapter due next week, for example, and a conference and another deadline in the interim). But. Ugh. And that’s still just one or maybe two two-day papers, not four. And one or maybe two two-day papers, that I’ve done. I like to call that “finals.” So does doing four build up a muscle that makes two seem like cake? Like after a marathon, a 15-mile run is a breeze? If so, how long does that muscle last? It can’t be permanent – nothing is permanent. What will I have to do to maintain it? Is whatever that is worth it?
-if this is less of a body and muscle game, more of a brain and story game – maybe this builds up confidence or stokes a sense of self-image, as in “I can, I am — I can put something scholarly together, I am a scholar.” But can I, am I? What does middling performance prove? Whose standard are we using? Do I compare myself to professionals or am I still just a student? At the age of 31, when is my work legitimate? What is my work? Who defines legitimacy?
-Will any of these papers make a difference for me or anyone?
-Will any of my work make a difference for me or anyone? Does anyone know anything, or are we all just feeling around in the dark? If it’s the latter, then that would make my darkness-groping okay, or normative at least… But then how can we ever get anywhere? Stroke of luck? This isn’t about luck, this is about science. To what extent is it naïve to impose science’s order on the complexity of real life — dynamic systems, flesh-and-blood-and-mind-and-spirit people?
HOW DO I HELP PEOPLE?
How do I help myself? What am I doing?

To be honest, most of this emerged amorphously, intuitively, as it dawned on me that I couldn’t muster the energy to proof my papers and wondered what was the point of having worked so hard to perfect the reference sections (which no one will read) if the content is grammatically-challenged and flabby? This led me down the recrimination highway (Why hadn’t I uploaded everything to Zotero way back when and anytime since? (I know why. Time. (Why don’t I have any time? What am I doing wrong?))) and, sending the papers anyway, smashed headfirst into an existential crisis.

I cried.

Sobbing, I called my parents (as they kept running into neighbors at the Jewel, bless em), who sagely determined that I was overtired and would benefit from a good night’s sleep. True. Good point. But it was 7 pm. And I had grown accustomed to staying up until 2.

I took a walk down to the mailbox, downing seltzer from a travel mug because I thought maybe the sharp pain in my stomach that had been troubling me for hours was due to the fact that all I’d drank all day was that single cup of coffee to go… I continued on to Bricks & Scones, where there were no sesame chewy rolls, and maybe it was just as well. I trudged back home, wishing I felt better in every way, brainstorming…

The story ends well. Basically. I ended up dashing to an 8:10 pm show of Bridesmaids, where I ate an embezzled rice cake and granola bar in the dark and drank in the (synthesized?) Midwest, laughing at the broad comedy and recognizing another seasoned woman’s search for it all.

But we weren’t exactly the same, this character and me. I wear longer dresses, for starters, and I hadn’t hit rock bottom… right? I had finished my exams. I’m sure I’ll pass the defense. I wrote scads more than was expected (to our collective detriment?). I have read more than I cited (a mistake?) and still cited up a storm (the less interesting things?). I rediscovered pdf’s and hard copies of articles and books with my underlining + margin scribbling + Post It flagging, like gifts from a fairy godmother who was me, me, me leaving myself presents, Past Me to Future Me, taking care of me, three years in the making…

I don’t know. I don’t know what it was for. At least I can keep going on in this program. That’s good, to not be stranded along the PhD highway, surviving humiliation and a six-month waiting period before being permitted to sit for quals again. It’s good not to fail (although we’re supposed to celebrate mistakes, right, “teachable moments,” risk failure, seek failure, isn’t that part of the value-added in learning through gaming? – but failure feels different outside of games, it just does, and I know people who regret losing games anyway. This was a good bullet-dodge for my ego, not failing. (Am I being presumptuous? I haven’t passed the defense yet!)). I know, at least, that when it comes time to hunker down and focus and do, I can. I did. (What did I do again?)

My friends made me laugh. ☺ Via IM, email, telephone, text, postcard, face-to-face… Old friends, dear friends, good friends who I’ve been through the war with, even who I’ve warred with, busy but still finding the time to care, not just to show up in whichever mode availed but to bring their hearts with them and connect…

My family. My family is so generous, and I am so privileged, in every way.

The hell in my head, I created. I create. I know. It consists of phantasms and tricks of light. It can be blown away, like spun sugar, with a single burst of optimism, or humor, or gratitude. It can be transformed by looking at it from a different angle, a perspective shift. I know. I know.

You believe in me. I should believe in your good judgment. I deserve some slack, I guess. And a little more faith…

My intentions are pure. I just want it to matter. I don’t know about all of this work business. But I do know about all of you. You matter. I love you.

*note, I qualified the days as solid, not the papers… but if anyone would like to read one or any of the papers, here are the links:

Participation and play: Modes of learning for today and tomorrow
“Almost as necessary as bread”: Why we need narrative and what makes it work
The origin of everything?: Empathy in theory and practice
Present promise, future potential: Positive Deviance and complementary theory

Vision

By admin | May 11, 2011 - 3:26 pm | Asset appreciation, Child's play, Narrative, New media literacies, Participatory culture & learning, Social and emotional learning

2 Comments

On Friday the 13th (no joke), I will begin to write my qualifying exams. This process, a 10-day rite of passage, separates the first part of PhD work (classes) from the second (independent research and writing). Then my five-person committee that consists of at least three members of my department and at least one member from an outside department will gather at my oral defense which is to be held at least two weeks after delivery of the written exam (in my case, scheduled for much later — Thursday, August 25) to determine whether I am qualified to begin dissertation research. If so, I will be awarded a Master of Arts in Communication, entitled to a title change (from doctoral student to doctoral candidate (also known as ABD, or “all but dissertation”)), allowed to teach stand-alone courses, required to submit a dissertation prospectus within 30 days of the oral defense, and expected to get quite drunk (with joy!).

The exams have students choose four or five areas to bracket, investigate, and write about. This work is intended to create/demonstrate the student’s mastery of each area, clearly delineating discrete areas of expertise. The first step is selecting a professor to supervise an area. The second step is drawing up a reading list, or a bibliography of journal articles and books that a person must read in order to become an expert in this area. The third step is reading, note-taking, thinking, etc. The fourth step is writing the exams (which consist of one essay per area, each answering a question written by that area’s supervising professor, delivered via email to the student on the first day of the 10-day writing period). The fifth step is defending these exam essays.

Theoretically, at the end of this process, the student should be able to teach a course about each area, with each reading list inspiring a syllabus. Some students select well-trod areas (such as “framing and agenda-setting” or “quantitative research methods”) while some students create their own unique groupings of scholarship (that’s me). Some students choose areas that will directly inform their dissertation projects and, in the most efficient case scenario,turn each area’s essay into a chapter in their dissertation’s literature review.

Such was my attempt in identifying my four qualifying exam areas. I would love to “work smart” and make my essays count for more than bureaucratic exercise. Moreover, my overarching goal is to make a difference. That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out how to do through my coursework, and that’s what my dissertation is going to try to figure out how to do too. I read a bunch of stuff, put together some ideas, try em out, see what happened, report back. (The “see what happened” and “report back” parts are lacking for me — I’ve got reams of unanalyzed data and an anorexic publication record, but everybody’s gotta start somewhere.) So, my exams reflect this mission, my attempt to figure out how to make a difference. What makes people tick? How do we support people’s healthy development? How do we optimize our learning potential? How do we make the world a better place? These are my deep-seated questions, my North Star. Should be simple to take em on, no?

Here is my vision:

These qualifying exam essays will examine how people learn, arguing that this process occurs in community, via participation, guided by emotion, and organized as stories. As such, change-making endeavors (e.g., curriculum launches, campaigns and interventions, reform policies) must leverage community context, work-related skills, individuals’ character and feelings, and storytelling/meaning-making. Each essay will: explore several interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks; synthesize these academically separate yet philosophically complementary theories by constructing tables or models identifying consistent categories/patterns; review relevant case studies; and offer a set of recommendations for enriching theory and praxis. Case studies will range from formal and informal educational initiatives in classroom and after-school contexts, to community development and community-based youth development projects, to entertainment-education programs. Separately, each essay will provide a deep dive into a specific (albeit interdisciplinary) area – respectively, community and youth development, participatory learning, empathy, and narrative. Holistically, these essays will chart a course for future research and practice aimed at making – in whichever way possible, however large or small – the world a better place.

Here is the supervisor and working title of each (as yet unwritten) essay:

Michael Cody & Doe Mayer: Participatory community development and development in participatory communities

Henry Jenkins (Chair): Participatory learning: Philosophies and models of education for today and tomorrow

Stacy Smith: The origin of everything?: Empathy in theory and practice

Sheila Murphy: “Almost as necessary as bread”: Why we need narrative and what makes it work

Assessment

By admin | April 3, 2011 - 12:57 am | Asset appreciation, New media literacies, Participatory culture & learning, Social and emotional learning

Leave a comment

(originally written June 24, 2010)

How do we know that we know what we know?

If you’re a Senegalese shopkeeper eager to prove the freshness of your bread, you grab a loaf in your unwashed hand and give it a squeeze. “See?” the non-crumbling, slow-rising crust proclaims. “Not stale!”

“Yep,” I nod, exchanging the coin in my hand for the bread in the shopkeeper’s. “So I’ll taste…”

It’s assessment, folks. It all boils down to assessment. In this case, the proof was in the pudding (or, more precisely, the yeast). But behavioral assessment, as we saw with the bread’s impressive acrobatics, is less commonly used than paper-and-pencil quizzes. Normally, we just ask people what they know. In fact, I had asked the shopkeeper what he knew — I inquired whether the bread was from yesterday. A simple, “No, it’s good,” would have satisfied me. I would’ve taken his word for it. Getting up close and personal with my future sandwich was a test I didn’t need the shopkeeper to take. Ah, but therein we celebrate cultural difference. Not everybody’s so squeamish, nor prays to the gods of plastic wrap. And you know what? Between us? I ate the bread anyway. Gobbled it. Tasted just fine. (Maybe better! I could find out by sampling a non-squeezed and freshly-squeezed roll in a side-by-side taste test, but let’s keep our eyes on the prize, shall we?)

So usually, when it comes to assessment, we ask people what they know. Then we label it and measure it. Ah, but how do we measure it? We need some metric, right? We could compare ourselves against others. We usually do… which isn’t necessarily healthy. Nor is it necessarily fair, because we’re all little snowflakes in very special snowglobes. Who knows if someone’s snowglobe was recently rocked, or whether someone else’s snowglobe was made out of double-insulated glass? Is it fair to compare Hawaiian snowglobes and Arctic snowglobes? Does everybody get where this belabored metaphor is going?

It’s best to compare ourselves against ourselves. We’re our real competition. We’re our best yard stick. How have we grown? What do we know now that we didn’t know before? That speaks to meaningful change and, hopefully, to cast it in terms of science, significant change — because this PhD shebang isn’t just a neato thing to do on a free afternoon or 1,825… I’m gunning for big kid, philosophical status. That’s DR. Felt to you earthlings, thank you very much. This is science. I better hope it’s science, otherwise this intervention is just an exercise in well-intentioned-kumbaya-guitar-strumming — super-sweet but ain’t got no legs. With no idea what worked, why, or how, it’s impossible to extract the essential elements and work its magic elsewhere. In which case it’s “Good luck, ‘social problems,’ someone else will have to solve you! But if you want to send your kid to a really fun 6-week communication camp, come on down!”

Unh-uh. Not on my watch.

So, assessment, mes amis. Assessment. This should occur pre- and post-intervention, right, so we can quantify how our participants have changed. Good. But changed according to what? Yes. Knowledge, attitude, and practice, I was thinking. Great. In terms of what? Mhmm. So we drew up a list of objectives — things that, by the end of our journey together, we want our students to know, believe, and do. These are the things we’ll need to measure, so we’ll be able to tell whether we’ve achieved our objectives.

Famous! Splendid! So I wrote some questions pertaining to those objectives. But that’s not the end of the story.

Why? Because it wouldn’t make a very good blog post… Because some of those things don’t belong on a pre-test. I don’t think. Why? Well, the knowledge items are lesson-oriented. For example, by the end of the message development lesson, we want them to know the elements of an effective message. Super. Should that go on the general pre-test? Well, it could, but we have 12 lessons, you know, so that’d make for a really long pre-test. Also, some items need to be on the pretest, Day One, before we’ve sunk deep our benevolent claws and changed the state of our participant pool. So unless we just test the living daylights out of the kids on Day One, we’ve gotta save those specific, lesson-oriented questions for their own day.

Terrific.

Or maybe… we avoid asking the questions entirely. Ah ha. This is what I want to do in terms of measuring practice. We observe. (Observe how? Do we just watch, do we videotape?) We judge performance, let participants show us what they know and can do. (What is performance? Classroom behavior (not that they’re in school, per se), completed activities?) Hmm. And how do we assess this? How much do we pre-determine (etic, like checking off a checklist) and how much do we allow to emerge (emic, like just taking notes and seeing what’s there)? Exactly.

And who should do the judging? Us? Surely not me, the white girl from the States who’s in and out in 8 weeks flat and won’t even be here for most (all?) of the training? My Canadian camarade de chambre who will arrive Sunday? The teachers as they’re teaching? The other teachers while they aren’t teaching? Other staff members? What about the participants themselves? This is a program that prizes interaction, participation, self-expression, emancipation, defiant possession of one’s own learning. Kindred spirit program Global Kids (might I be so audacious as to claim this association? All hail, Global Kids!) utilizes alternative assessment models to empower youth-directed learning. Awesome. Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’m hoping to crib that from ‘em. Dig the badges.

But then, what about the participants playing a role in the research process as well? Oh yeah, right… That seems conceptually harmonious and, more importantly, moral. There happens to be a rich body of literature pertaining to youth as research participants. So… guess we should do that, somehow…

Meanwhile, we have to add in some contextual stuff — self-efficacy, the origin of all things, whose scale I lifted from a previous study; demographics, e.g., age, grade, parents’ professions; communication behaviors, e.g., access to devices and ways of using them. Questions pertaining to the latter two categories I appropriated from the Kaiser Family Foundation’s M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds Report, which recently published its third wave of data.

And then there’s the SEL stuff — where participants are at in terms of their social-emotional health, what they know about the five SEL competencies (self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making), their attitudes in terms of the importance of these things, their practices. Good, wrote those. Do we want them to know the definitions or be able to identify the phenomena? Right. Identify. So make those questions “find the best example.” All righty.

Ditto the NML stuff — what they know about the 12 NML skills (play, performance, appropriation, multi-tasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, negotiation, simulation, visualization), their attitudes, and practices.

Then there’s the stuff that I think, and research supports, is important too: intrinsic motivation, which is associated with possible selves, which can link up with resilience, that has implications for asset-based community development, which dovetails with positive deviance, which seems awfully similar to appreciative inquiry. Collectively, all of this argues for the necessity of requesting:

asset inventories;
community maps;
communication networks; &
learning ecologies.

So… that’s cool… to write… in French… and give to Senegalese youths to fill out… in French… when their native language is Wolof… and they’re burned out on school (which lets out July 2)… and they just wanted to learn how to use a camera… (is that true? what do they want to get out of the program? what did they think it’d be about? good questions…)

So I wrote it. The first draft. And now the team just has to sift through the pages of Q’s, and weigh each item’s importance, revise with respect to cultural appropriateness, slash and reconstruct in light of grammatical atrocity, and come to some consensus. That’s what we’ve been doing (in between my last-minute dashes home to receive (or not) the Internet repairmen, who have finally deduced that my problem is due to my second-class, pre-paid service citizenship, and can only be fixed via upgrade (read: price-doubling), which I hope to suck up and purchase tomorrow morning, a 7h30). That’s what we’ll continue to do (quickly — but not too quickly — but quickly, because time’s a-tickin…).

But let’s step back and survey the big picture here: When all of this is said and done, will we know how the participants have changed? Yes, to that, I think, the answer is Yes. Good. But here comes the thornier question:

Will we truly know which theory, from this potpourri of Yes We Can scholarship, was the one that did the trick? How do we render this phenomenon of particularity — this summer assemblage of snowflakes from very special snowglobes — into transportable universality?

THAT’s what I really want — not for the sake of adding to theory, although that’d help a bookwormy brotha out, and I’d love to do him a solid. No. This isn’t a me-show (I proclaim, on my self-aggrrandizing blog…) It’s so we can say, “Here you go, ‘social problems,’ we’ve got a silver (or, okay, a little humility, bronze, or copper) bullet that we think’s gonna knock you out.”

I’m here to make the world a better place, people. I ain’t playin.

I just finished 20th grade. I’ve gone to school for YEARS in order to know so little. Ah, but maybe from knowing what you don’t know, you can begin to learn the all-important things you must?

As they say in Senegal, Insha’Allah.