Note: Long time no-see here on the blog. Such is PhD student life.
I had a conversation with my advisor yesterday in which I asked him what the unifying idea that runs through his research is. Roy has studied math, writing, science, and a host of other topics in his research, and has been at times a philosopher, at times a psychologist, and at times something resembling an ethnographer. He's a guru of video data analysis, but that's far from his only analytical methodology. In short, he's as multi-faceted as they come, and among his current advisees alone there is a huge range of interests and projects.
It should come as no surprise, however, that he could condense his work into a single sentence. He studies the way that emerging symbols and representations of knowledge can change student learning and understanding (that's not exactly what he said, but it's close). This got me thinking. One of my biggest struggles as an early PhD student has been defining my research interests. In short, I have too many. Almost no interesting question is unappealing to me, in a range of areas.
There are, however, some ideas that have started to rise to the top of my focus. In particular, I'm becoming very interested in the possibilities of two branches of what gets called "computational social science." The first is natural language processing (NLP), and the second is agent-based modeling (ABM). I won't go into detail about what those entail here, as a cursory web search will give at least a decent idea. Rather, I want to talk a little about how I've started to use these techniques, and to observe something about them that I think is salient to defining what my unifying thread is and will be.
Both NLP and ABM are ways of reconceptualizing what counts as data and how to analyze it. NLP takes text - a form of data which we usually look at according to some theory of reading (like hermeneutics) - and redefines it as a "big data" set. That is, instead of looking at specific meaning in specific places in a text, NLP can help uncover aggregate trends in the use of language. For example, a recent paper I wrote for a doctoral proseminar included an analysis of how Salman Khan uses language in his first four lessons about fractions. Watching those videos certainly tells you a lot, but even something as simple as word counts uncovers surprising information, like Khan's almost non-existent use of interrogative words like "what" or "why." That alone says nothing about his quality as a teacher, but it does say something about how he teaches, and what the technology he uses affords him from a linguistic standpoint. Needless to say, this is a project I'm hoping to expand upon.
ABM, on the other hand, is less about analyzing data and more about performing complex though-experiments that you would not otherwise be able to undertake. ABM is known in the social sciences and hard sciences for overthrowing misconceived paradigms of both human and animal activity. The classic example is bird flocking behavior. For a long time, it was believed that birds followed a "leader" bird while flocking, and that they traded off being the leader. Essentially, the hypothesis was that each individual bird just did as he was told by the leader via some arcane communication system. Enter ABM. A new hypothesis suggested that, instead of a leader, each bird followed a very small set of simple rules (namely, get closer to other birds, but not too close; move away from another bird if too close; turn to try to face the same direction as nearby other birds). Creating hundreds of randomized agents in a computer program and giving them these rules to follow produces, in a short amount of time, an almost perfect analogue to the flocking behavior we see in nature.
There has been little work using ABM in education, but another student and I are adopting and adapting some of the work of Paulo Blikstein as a part of our research assistantship. We've been working on a model that represents the process of sharing a technological artifact in a classroom task. One of Paulo's papers using ABM alongside empirical data suggests that collaborative classroom tasks often lead to the assigning of roles based upon ability, which means that more advanced students end up doing most of the cognition unless specific role sharing is assigned and enforced. Similarly, our model viewed alongside video data suggests that it is vitally important that students share representations of data while doing scientific inquiry, lest the student holding the representation do all of the cognitive work.
These two projects - running Khan's teaching through some NLP paces and analyzing inquiry data through ABM - on the surface have little in common. Except that both are ways of reconceptualizing data, as I said above, and both are computational. This, then, forms an important part of the thread that I see running through both the work that I'm doing now and the work that I've done in the past. It's not data, per se, that I'm oriented towards, but rather re-imagining the bounds of what we can do with a given idea.
The thread that unifies my thinking is this: I hope to find and use new ways of thinking about and representing ideas and questions such that seemingly oppositional knowledge structures can be synthesized so that they can become more meaningful. Essentially, I'm describing a dialectical process. However, I don't believe that its an entirely phenomenological one. That is, I don't follow Hegel the whole way: there's more than interpretation here, there's also creativity.
Necessarily, the synthesis of oppositional knowledge structures requires pulling away from the depths of either. Hyper-specialization in the pejorative sense of knowing more and more about less and less has always been counterproductive, but here is is particularly problematic. Too often, increasingly detailed knowledge about a given area does not move the area forward, except by a very narrow definition of "forward" that applies only within the field. Rather, the most important innovations in the history of almost any science come from moving backward so far that previously separate knowledge structures collide, get blown apart, and reintegrate facing a new and altogether more productive direction.
That's all oversimplified, on the one hand, and hopelessly unclear on the other. Nevertheless, I think it's a good starting point for defining an academic identity for myself that incorporates both my wide range of passions and the need to have a clear self-definition.
On a somewhat different note, I also hope that I won't be away from the blog for two full months this time. I've been struggling with where this blog fits in my academic life, whether to continue it at all, whether to start a new one, or what. For now, anyway, I've decided that this one can stay. In fact, "Nicht Diese Tone," while not the most marketable slogan, ultimately does capture very well the core of my intellectual project.
Showing posts with label phd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label phd. Show all posts
Monday, April 16, 2012
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
An Alternative Pedagogy for the PhD Core
Introduction
Because my last post was a little bit negative, and perhaps somewhat dramatic,* I want to offer a constructive follow-up. Let me make explicit, first, the criticism that is really at the heart of yesterday's post. Then, I'll offer an alternative.
* I never, ever write overly-dramatic posts, do I?
The problem with my two required courses is that they are not, at least so far, good courses. One is a Doctoral Proseminar that every first year PhD student has to take. Its stated objectives are, in part, taking a broad look at the field of education research and, in part, getting to know the rest of the cohort. The other required course - the spark for yesterday's existential angst - is the first leg of a three course series of introductory research methods courses required within the first two years by all Education PhD students.
The How
How are these courses bad? Well, they are both co-taught, but there is not even a semblance of collaboration between the Professors co-teaching the courses. In both sections, one Professor gets up and lectures while the other sits around looking bored, only occasionally interjecting. At some point the Professors might switch places when the topic changes, but that's really it. There's no dynamic interaction, there's no prior planning, there's no engagement.
The lack of interaction is perhaps not damning, but the lack of student participation is. Now, a student in one of these courses might very well object that, yes, we do participate some. This is true. The lecture style in both classes is not pure, incessant blather. There is some opportunity for back-and-forth. But there is no room for dialogue, even so. The path of the "conversation" is, if not predetermined by the Professor, managed in its entirety by him.* Students don't have the opportunity to speak to each other without Professorial interpolation. That's not dialogue, that's Q&A.
* I say 'him' because three of the four Professors in question are male, and the three men are the chief pontificates.
A word on the classroom that both of these courses take place in. It's not exactly conducive to dialogue. It's basically a small-to-medium sized meeting hall, perfect for a breakfast get-together. There are a number of round tables that fit four people each, with a longer desk at the front of the room, in front of a SmartBoard (that, incidentally, none of the Professors knows how to use). At the back of the room is a blackboard. Notably, one wall contains creative artifacts made by STEP (Stanford Teacher Education Program) students, who use this same room more dynamically.
For a typical class, students will read a few articles and do a kind of preparation activity. In the Proseminar these are basically note-taking activities designed to reinforce good reading skills. In the methods course, these are writing activities, some of which have proven interesting and valuable, and others, well, yeah. My last post addresses that. Regardless, with the rare exception of some small-group work at the tables, whether a student has done the reading or not has no particular bearing on the course because the Professor simply stands around expounding about said reading for far too long, asking theoretically probing questions that the same five students answer.
In short, it's a typical University class. But what is striking is how different it is from my experience at this very University as a Master's student. It is said that the difference between the Master's level and the PhD level is that the latter is more focused on research. It seems that, in addition, because research is the important thing, pedagogy goes totally out the window as well.
A final note on the how and why of the problems with these required courses. In addition to troubling pedagogical practices, the curricula of both courses are far from compelling. There is no clear "this is what you're getting out of this class." That means that, while the assessments are fairly good, there's not a strong sense of how said assessments measure whatever it is that we as students are supposed to be learning. For example, the book review required in Proseminar may develop good habits of mind, but it does not connect in any meaningful way with the readings or the lectures, at least so far. In the methods course, we're supposed to design a study around our research interests and questions, but in the first three weeks (30% of the quarter), we've not even spoken about research questions, research design, or what makes for a good study, let alone actually done anything.*
* It's becoming a source of personal amusement that, in a certain sense, my tennis course is pedagogically superior to my other courses. Each session we show up, we warm up by working on whatever part of our skill set we want to, then the instructor shows us a new skill or a wrinkle on an old one and we go practice it for a half-hour as he wanders around giving pointers. And you know what? My ability to play tennis is improving much faster than my ability to research. I know it's not a totally fair analogy, but that doesn't mean it's not worth thinking about.
The Why
Why are these courses the way they are? Perhaps the Professors teaching these courses are doing it because they're trying to curry favor with the administration, and thus they don't want to invest in designing a strong curriculum or practicing good pedagogy. Perhaps the course curriculum, because it is designed by committee and not by the teacher, is innately unfocused. Perhaps no one has recognized the problems with the room the courses are housed in, and therefore hasn't tried to come up with a more engaging way of using the space.
Whatever the reason, at its heart is this: Stanford University, like most institutions of higher education, is primarily interested in research.* While many Professors like to teach, they frequently have little to no actual teaching training, and their jobs are in no way dependent on the quality of their teaching. Students, similarly, are generally less invested in classes** because they're wrapped up in research agendas and assistantships and meeting other requirements and trying to survive in the Bay Area on the roughly $20,000 a year they make as PhD students.
* Well, research and football, anyway.
** A quotation from a Doctoral student well-along on her path: "Your classes don't matter." In that case, I wonder, why do we have them at all?
In summary, Professors are not accountable to their employers for their teaching. They are accountable to their students, but their students don't particularly care whether they teach well or not. As a result, there's no particular motivation to improve a course, no particular need to assess whether it is "working" or not,* and no particular place for a student who does care about the quality of his courses (and the pedagogy therein) to voice concerns. It's a self-perpetuating, broken system. Except it's not broken at all: it's exactly what almost everyone involved wants it to be, which indicates that maybe the real problem is much, much deeper. But we'll have to leave that for another time.
* At Stanford in particular such an assessment would be confounded by the fact that most students here are extremely good at doing well in and taking as much as they can from poorly taught classes. Otherwise they wouldn't have made it to Stanford in the first place.
An Alternative Pedagogy
Vogon Guard: "Alright, so what's the alternative?"
Ford Prefect: "Well, stop doing it, of course! Tell them you're not going to do it anymore. Stand up to them!"
Vogon Guard: "Doesn't sound that great to me."
- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The alternative to lecturing is, simply enough, not lecturing. The alternative to none - or few - students participating is getting them all to participate. Perhaps this is my St. John's education speaking, but I still think there's a lot to be gained from students talking to each other, and there's no reason that can't happen in these required courses.
How does that work? First of all, no more powerpoint slides. No more prepared lectures or conversational agendas. No more "this is what this article means" declarations. Questions - even pointed ones - to shape a conservation are fine, but presupposed answers are death to inquiry. If the goal is for new doctoral students to learn to interpret research, to discuss or analyze a text, and to be able to construct and argument as to what that text means, then it's imperative that they get practice at actually doing it. That does not mean "write a summary," that means dialogue, conversation, and argumentation.
So instead of two Professors trading off droning - with occasional interruption - at 30 students, let's put all of the manpower and brainpower in the classroom to work. Split the class into two groups of fifteen,* and send one Professor off with each group.** Sit in one great big circle, let the Professor ask a question about the text, and let the students work together to try to answer that question. Have, in other words, a dialogue.
* And rotate the groups around each week, so there's always a different mix in each group.
** Alternatively, split into even smaller groups - say five groups of six - and let the Professors float around, or put them into different groups each session.
Does that sound like St. John's? Of course it does. And why do I suggest it? Because it works. Stanford PhD students are smart people. If you put fifteen of them in a room with a text and ask them to figure out what it means and why it's important, odds are they're going to succeed. So why not give it a chance? They'll be developing interpretive skills, learning to talk to each other about research (which, vitally, may not even be in their area), and getting to know each other much better than they can when they're sitting four-to-a-table and being lectured at for two hours.
It is true that Professors are generally experts in these fields while students are not, but their wealth of experience does not mean that they are innately better readers than their students, or that they can say something more insightful about a text. What's more, even if they are better at those things, students will not learn simply by watching them talk. I cannot learn tennis without swinging for myself (and sometimes hitting it into the net), so how can I be expected to learn to speak to my future colleagues about research without being given a chance to do so, even if sometimes our interpretations are wrong, or we cut each other off, or we oversimplify? By doing will we learn, not by watching.
The Professor's role in this picture is to be the net. When I hit a tennis ball too short, I can tell. When I say something stupid, the Professor can chime in. But here's the really cool part: even that can be given over to students. If you let us talk to each other, we'll learn how to point out each other's mistakes, as much as highlight each other's strengths. In short, we'll form and learn to be a part of an intellectual community much like the one we're supposedly entering as future PhD-holding scholars.
Perhaps the objection could be raised that dialogue doesn't happen among Professors, either, and that therefore such a pedagogical system would not prepare students for the Academy. If that's so, then this alternative to lecturing becomes doubly important: we need academics who do more than merely pontificate, but who can actually communicate. The only way we'll get them is by training them to do so from the beginning. And anyway, it's a lot easier to transfer the ability to dialogue into giving a good lecture than the other way around.
A St. John's-ian dialogue, of course, is not the only valid alternative to a lecture class. Not all good classes are discussion classes. I do, however, pose it as a radical opposite pole. Somewhere in between is an equally good place where co-teachers actually work together, where the affordances of the room are taken into consideration when shaping the curriculum, and where the students are allowed to practice and be engaged with the material (and each other) for the whole two to three hours. Such pedagogical strategies exist. I wish that some enterprising Professor teaching a required, core course would use them.
Because my last post was a little bit negative, and perhaps somewhat dramatic,* I want to offer a constructive follow-up. Let me make explicit, first, the criticism that is really at the heart of yesterday's post. Then, I'll offer an alternative.
* I never, ever write overly-dramatic posts, do I?
The problem with my two required courses is that they are not, at least so far, good courses. One is a Doctoral Proseminar that every first year PhD student has to take. Its stated objectives are, in part, taking a broad look at the field of education research and, in part, getting to know the rest of the cohort. The other required course - the spark for yesterday's existential angst - is the first leg of a three course series of introductory research methods courses required within the first two years by all Education PhD students.
The How
How are these courses bad? Well, they are both co-taught, but there is not even a semblance of collaboration between the Professors co-teaching the courses. In both sections, one Professor gets up and lectures while the other sits around looking bored, only occasionally interjecting. At some point the Professors might switch places when the topic changes, but that's really it. There's no dynamic interaction, there's no prior planning, there's no engagement.
The lack of interaction is perhaps not damning, but the lack of student participation is. Now, a student in one of these courses might very well object that, yes, we do participate some. This is true. The lecture style in both classes is not pure, incessant blather. There is some opportunity for back-and-forth. But there is no room for dialogue, even so. The path of the "conversation" is, if not predetermined by the Professor, managed in its entirety by him.* Students don't have the opportunity to speak to each other without Professorial interpolation. That's not dialogue, that's Q&A.
* I say 'him' because three of the four Professors in question are male, and the three men are the chief pontificates.
A word on the classroom that both of these courses take place in. It's not exactly conducive to dialogue. It's basically a small-to-medium sized meeting hall, perfect for a breakfast get-together. There are a number of round tables that fit four people each, with a longer desk at the front of the room, in front of a SmartBoard (that, incidentally, none of the Professors knows how to use). At the back of the room is a blackboard. Notably, one wall contains creative artifacts made by STEP (Stanford Teacher Education Program) students, who use this same room more dynamically.
For a typical class, students will read a few articles and do a kind of preparation activity. In the Proseminar these are basically note-taking activities designed to reinforce good reading skills. In the methods course, these are writing activities, some of which have proven interesting and valuable, and others, well, yeah. My last post addresses that. Regardless, with the rare exception of some small-group work at the tables, whether a student has done the reading or not has no particular bearing on the course because the Professor simply stands around expounding about said reading for far too long, asking theoretically probing questions that the same five students answer.
In short, it's a typical University class. But what is striking is how different it is from my experience at this very University as a Master's student. It is said that the difference between the Master's level and the PhD level is that the latter is more focused on research. It seems that, in addition, because research is the important thing, pedagogy goes totally out the window as well.
A final note on the how and why of the problems with these required courses. In addition to troubling pedagogical practices, the curricula of both courses are far from compelling. There is no clear "this is what you're getting out of this class." That means that, while the assessments are fairly good, there's not a strong sense of how said assessments measure whatever it is that we as students are supposed to be learning. For example, the book review required in Proseminar may develop good habits of mind, but it does not connect in any meaningful way with the readings or the lectures, at least so far. In the methods course, we're supposed to design a study around our research interests and questions, but in the first three weeks (30% of the quarter), we've not even spoken about research questions, research design, or what makes for a good study, let alone actually done anything.*
* It's becoming a source of personal amusement that, in a certain sense, my tennis course is pedagogically superior to my other courses. Each session we show up, we warm up by working on whatever part of our skill set we want to, then the instructor shows us a new skill or a wrinkle on an old one and we go practice it for a half-hour as he wanders around giving pointers. And you know what? My ability to play tennis is improving much faster than my ability to research. I know it's not a totally fair analogy, but that doesn't mean it's not worth thinking about.
The Why
Why are these courses the way they are? Perhaps the Professors teaching these courses are doing it because they're trying to curry favor with the administration, and thus they don't want to invest in designing a strong curriculum or practicing good pedagogy. Perhaps the course curriculum, because it is designed by committee and not by the teacher, is innately unfocused. Perhaps no one has recognized the problems with the room the courses are housed in, and therefore hasn't tried to come up with a more engaging way of using the space.
Whatever the reason, at its heart is this: Stanford University, like most institutions of higher education, is primarily interested in research.* While many Professors like to teach, they frequently have little to no actual teaching training, and their jobs are in no way dependent on the quality of their teaching. Students, similarly, are generally less invested in classes** because they're wrapped up in research agendas and assistantships and meeting other requirements and trying to survive in the Bay Area on the roughly $20,000 a year they make as PhD students.
* Well, research and football, anyway.
** A quotation from a Doctoral student well-along on her path: "Your classes don't matter." In that case, I wonder, why do we have them at all?
In summary, Professors are not accountable to their employers for their teaching. They are accountable to their students, but their students don't particularly care whether they teach well or not. As a result, there's no particular motivation to improve a course, no particular need to assess whether it is "working" or not,* and no particular place for a student who does care about the quality of his courses (and the pedagogy therein) to voice concerns. It's a self-perpetuating, broken system. Except it's not broken at all: it's exactly what almost everyone involved wants it to be, which indicates that maybe the real problem is much, much deeper. But we'll have to leave that for another time.
* At Stanford in particular such an assessment would be confounded by the fact that most students here are extremely good at doing well in and taking as much as they can from poorly taught classes. Otherwise they wouldn't have made it to Stanford in the first place.
An Alternative Pedagogy
Vogon Guard: "Alright, so what's the alternative?"
Ford Prefect: "Well, stop doing it, of course! Tell them you're not going to do it anymore. Stand up to them!"
Vogon Guard: "Doesn't sound that great to me."
- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The alternative to lecturing is, simply enough, not lecturing. The alternative to none - or few - students participating is getting them all to participate. Perhaps this is my St. John's education speaking, but I still think there's a lot to be gained from students talking to each other, and there's no reason that can't happen in these required courses.
How does that work? First of all, no more powerpoint slides. No more prepared lectures or conversational agendas. No more "this is what this article means" declarations. Questions - even pointed ones - to shape a conservation are fine, but presupposed answers are death to inquiry. If the goal is for new doctoral students to learn to interpret research, to discuss or analyze a text, and to be able to construct and argument as to what that text means, then it's imperative that they get practice at actually doing it. That does not mean "write a summary," that means dialogue, conversation, and argumentation.
So instead of two Professors trading off droning - with occasional interruption - at 30 students, let's put all of the manpower and brainpower in the classroom to work. Split the class into two groups of fifteen,* and send one Professor off with each group.** Sit in one great big circle, let the Professor ask a question about the text, and let the students work together to try to answer that question. Have, in other words, a dialogue.
* And rotate the groups around each week, so there's always a different mix in each group.
** Alternatively, split into even smaller groups - say five groups of six - and let the Professors float around, or put them into different groups each session.
Does that sound like St. John's? Of course it does. And why do I suggest it? Because it works. Stanford PhD students are smart people. If you put fifteen of them in a room with a text and ask them to figure out what it means and why it's important, odds are they're going to succeed. So why not give it a chance? They'll be developing interpretive skills, learning to talk to each other about research (which, vitally, may not even be in their area), and getting to know each other much better than they can when they're sitting four-to-a-table and being lectured at for two hours.
It is true that Professors are generally experts in these fields while students are not, but their wealth of experience does not mean that they are innately better readers than their students, or that they can say something more insightful about a text. What's more, even if they are better at those things, students will not learn simply by watching them talk. I cannot learn tennis without swinging for myself (and sometimes hitting it into the net), so how can I be expected to learn to speak to my future colleagues about research without being given a chance to do so, even if sometimes our interpretations are wrong, or we cut each other off, or we oversimplify? By doing will we learn, not by watching.
The Professor's role in this picture is to be the net. When I hit a tennis ball too short, I can tell. When I say something stupid, the Professor can chime in. But here's the really cool part: even that can be given over to students. If you let us talk to each other, we'll learn how to point out each other's mistakes, as much as highlight each other's strengths. In short, we'll form and learn to be a part of an intellectual community much like the one we're supposedly entering as future PhD-holding scholars.
Perhaps the objection could be raised that dialogue doesn't happen among Professors, either, and that therefore such a pedagogical system would not prepare students for the Academy. If that's so, then this alternative to lecturing becomes doubly important: we need academics who do more than merely pontificate, but who can actually communicate. The only way we'll get them is by training them to do so from the beginning. And anyway, it's a lot easier to transfer the ability to dialogue into giving a good lecture than the other way around.
A St. John's-ian dialogue, of course, is not the only valid alternative to a lecture class. Not all good classes are discussion classes. I do, however, pose it as a radical opposite pole. Somewhere in between is an equally good place where co-teachers actually work together, where the affordances of the room are taken into consideration when shaping the curriculum, and where the students are allowed to practice and be engaged with the material (and each other) for the whole two to three hours. Such pedagogical strategies exist. I wish that some enterprising Professor teaching a required, core course would use them.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
The Future of the Blog
As I am about to begin working on my PhD in Education at Stanford University, I have been reflecting on this blog and the role it will play in my studies. While I was an MA student I wrote here frequently, and I expect I'll continue to write frequently as a PhD student. I feel, however, that I put an undue amount of pressure on myself to produce content for this blog at a fairly regular rate. Undue because, ultimately, I have a very small readership (though I very much appreciate those of you who do read the blog regularly), and thus mostly am writing for myself.
The upshot of all of this reflection is that, while I'm not planning on discontinuing the blog by any stretch, I'm planning on scaling it back significantly. Instead of my target of two posts a week, I'm hoping to get to a post every now and again... Maybe one every couple of weeks. I'm still going to work on my Beethoven project, of course, as time and willpower permit, and likewise with my still nascent novel (which has been more difficult than I anticipated), and I fully anticipate occasional game ravings, political rants, and educational reflections to make their way to this space. But the pace at which I've tried to write here over the past couple of years will be lessened because, well, there's just too much else to do.
In particular, there's too much else to read. Not only will I be taking on a heavy PhD reading load, but I've found that the Internet is bustling with great writing, and the decision to be an active producer of writing sometimes gets in the way of my desire to read more. With that in mind, I want to encourage my readers to take a look at Dirk Hayhurst, at Eric Nusbaum, at Joe Posnanski. These are writers who I follow (or have recently begun to follow) and who are teaching me - whether they intend to or not - to write better.
Perhaps what I'm trying to say is this. As an undergraduate I read a lot and wrote a little. Since then, I've written a lot and read not as much. Now I think it's time for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction, and a few years from now I'll pick up the pen (or the keyboard) and become a writer again. Of course, that's not really a dichotomy - one may write and read a lot at the same time - but I nevertheless feel that one's focus naturally tends towards one or the other at any given time. For now, it's back to being a reader and a student.
The upshot of all of this reflection is that, while I'm not planning on discontinuing the blog by any stretch, I'm planning on scaling it back significantly. Instead of my target of two posts a week, I'm hoping to get to a post every now and again... Maybe one every couple of weeks. I'm still going to work on my Beethoven project, of course, as time and willpower permit, and likewise with my still nascent novel (which has been more difficult than I anticipated), and I fully anticipate occasional game ravings, political rants, and educational reflections to make their way to this space. But the pace at which I've tried to write here over the past couple of years will be lessened because, well, there's just too much else to do.
In particular, there's too much else to read. Not only will I be taking on a heavy PhD reading load, but I've found that the Internet is bustling with great writing, and the decision to be an active producer of writing sometimes gets in the way of my desire to read more. With that in mind, I want to encourage my readers to take a look at Dirk Hayhurst, at Eric Nusbaum, at Joe Posnanski. These are writers who I follow (or have recently begun to follow) and who are teaching me - whether they intend to or not - to write better.
Perhaps what I'm trying to say is this. As an undergraduate I read a lot and wrote a little. Since then, I've written a lot and read not as much. Now I think it's time for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction, and a few years from now I'll pick up the pen (or the keyboard) and become a writer again. Of course, that's not really a dichotomy - one may write and read a lot at the same time - but I nevertheless feel that one's focus naturally tends towards one or the other at any given time. For now, it's back to being a reader and a student.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Why I Chose Stanford
It's official, I've accepted Stanford's offer to attend their Learning Sciences and Technology Design PhD program starting next fall. Initially I'll be studying under Roy Pea and Hilda Borko, both - since we're talking about, you know, Stanford - renowned researchers and well-respected in their field. I know Roy from my time as a Master's student, during which my friend and co-conspirator Coram and I consulted Professor Pea as often as we felt we could get away with while working on our project. As a result, I'm certain I'll be able to work with him and learn from him.
Ultimately, this decision was not an easy one, even though Stanford is an "obvious choice." To the common layperson, the name Stanford alone is worth so much that, when I have posed my conundrum to certain people the response has been a resounding, "you mean there's actually a question?" My answer is, yes, there is (or was) a question. You see, PhD work is less about prestige and more about fit. My decision, then, was not about trying to find the "best" program, but to find the program that most matched my own learning style, research interests, pedagogical biases, and general outlook on the world in general.
The Communications department at the University of California, San Diego matches me very well in almost all of those areas. Their pedagogical model is highly discussion driven, the amount of reading and writing that students do their lines up well with the amount of reading and writing I do of my own volition, their conversations are lofty and philosophical, and the people are quirky, critical, and equal parts cynical and optimistic. In short, a lot like me. Indeed, had I chosen to attend UCSD I'm sure I'd be having a number of conversations with a variety of people right now in which I would be pointing out exactly that: I definitely fit at UCSD, and that's the most important thing.
So why not UCSD? Well, I also fit at Stanford. In fact, I think I fit better at Stanford.
While the people at UCSD are a perfect match for me, and while I would have the freedom to pursue my research interests, I'm actually not convinced that the general outlook of the department matches my own and that, even more importantly, the pedagogical bent of the program would suit me. I don't mean to say I think there's anything wrong with the outlook or pedagogy at UCSD, I just think they wouldn't work for me.
As a graduate of St. John's College, I come from a strange academic tradition. I'm a student of the so-called "Western Canon" at a time when a lot of the academic world - and places like UCSD in particular - seriously doubt whether there really ought to be such a thing as a canon. The questions at the heart of this objection are valid, and look like this: How can you determine which books are Great, or even if there is such a thing as Greatness? Isn't that a hegemonic, colonial tool to marginalize the values and cultures of all of those people who are not white male Europeans?
By themselves, these are important questions that, frankly, St. John's probably doesn't do a good enough job answering.* The problem, to me, is the double-reversal jiu-jitsu that comes next. Because those are good questions, the answers are assumed to be, basically, that there is no such thing as Greatness, that the Great Books are a total sham, and that any curriculum that reads them and takes them seriously on their own merits (instead of through alternative cultural and contextual lenses) is itself an instrument of intellectual and cultural tyranny. The result, of course, is the laissez-faire, anything goes attitude towards ideas that pervades the post-modern world. That attitude says, "your ideas and my ideas are equally valid, because they each come from our own perspectives. Right and wrong are relative, and meaning is personally constructed, and if we all just agree to disagree and get along the world will be all right." To me, that's a shameful intellectual surrender. Maybe this is a hegemonic idea, but I like to think that there's more value in consensus - and, even more so, the effort to get there - than there is in tolerance.**
* Of course, any graduate of the college who continues in academia will inevitably have to confront these questions anyway, and will be - I think St. John's would argue - equipped to do so because of the critical thinking skills they've gained as Johnnies. I suspect a great many St. John's graduates end up being heavily critical of the curricular content of the Great Books program precisely because it is so Anglo-European centric. So it's hard to criticize the college for picking a narrower curricular goal that it can achieve in four years, instead of trying to bite off more than it can chew when it knows students will get there after-the-fact anyway. That's just good curriculum design.
** That the position of tolerance for differing ideas is also held be many self-proclaimed radicals - many of whom are only actually tolerant up to a point - only serves to remind me of this Eva Brann (St. John's Dean, not wife of Hitler) quotation: "To the radicals we might say: you don't begin to know what radical is; we are the ones who go to the roots."
Now that's not to say that I know anything like enough about UCSD to say where the institution as a whole stands relative to this issue. In reality, I'm sure there are a range of opinions. I did, however, get the sense from the brief time I spent there and the one class I visited that I would likely end up very frustrated by the "make connections" instead of "find meaning" model that goes with their post-modernist academic culture. That each week's reading on the syllabi I saw included multiple and intentionally disparate authors in order to build background and force cross-cutting interpretations rubs against my Johnnie sensibilities, in which those things are not exactly bad, but nevertheless can undercut the effort to actually understand a given text's content, instead of just its context or impact.
Again, I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with the way UCSD is doing things, I just don't think it's right for me.
Now you might be thinking that Stanford is vastly different. It isn't. If anything, it's less discussion and dialogue oriented than UCSD, and it is just as much concerned with post-modernist questions and processes. The difference, then, is that Stanford is not just talking and reading and dancing around the theories and philosophies of these issues, but is, in fact, actually out in the world doing. My experience as an LDT student was one of project-based classes and practice-oriented learning, which lines up well with modern learning theory. While not every professor I had was a brilliant teacher using the more cutting edge pedagogy and technology, many - including Roy, incidentally* - were just that. For all of its stuffy, privileged, businessy, ivory tower reputation, Stanford really does strive to practice what it preaches.
*Or not incidentally at all.
Being political (in the root, Greek sense of dealing with society) has its drawbacks. It can be frustrating to try to make a difference. But as much as I'm sure I'll have days and nights when I feel like I'm just a small, insignificant part of a broken system, and I can't do much to improve the situation, I think that Stanford will encourage and support (and, really, actively enlist) me in fighting the good fight. The potential for myopia at UCSD, on the other hand - the ability to remove myself from the world and just do whatever I want - frightens me much more than the frustrations I'm sure I'll feel at Stanford sometimes do. I am, despite myself, equal parts idealism and practicality, and I feel like Stanford understands that dichotomy (and supports both sides of it) better than UCSD does, at least in my case.
There are, I suspect, a great many other things I could say about what draws me to Stanford (including my previous experience there compared to the relative unknown of UCSD), but they would be variations on the theme from above. The truth of the matter is, both programs were the "right decision," but in different ways, and I was fortunate to have an opportunity to pick between the two, even if it meant the decision was a difficult one.
Ultimately, this decision was not an easy one, even though Stanford is an "obvious choice." To the common layperson, the name Stanford alone is worth so much that, when I have posed my conundrum to certain people the response has been a resounding, "you mean there's actually a question?" My answer is, yes, there is (or was) a question. You see, PhD work is less about prestige and more about fit. My decision, then, was not about trying to find the "best" program, but to find the program that most matched my own learning style, research interests, pedagogical biases, and general outlook on the world in general.
The Communications department at the University of California, San Diego matches me very well in almost all of those areas. Their pedagogical model is highly discussion driven, the amount of reading and writing that students do their lines up well with the amount of reading and writing I do of my own volition, their conversations are lofty and philosophical, and the people are quirky, critical, and equal parts cynical and optimistic. In short, a lot like me. Indeed, had I chosen to attend UCSD I'm sure I'd be having a number of conversations with a variety of people right now in which I would be pointing out exactly that: I definitely fit at UCSD, and that's the most important thing.
So why not UCSD? Well, I also fit at Stanford. In fact, I think I fit better at Stanford.
While the people at UCSD are a perfect match for me, and while I would have the freedom to pursue my research interests, I'm actually not convinced that the general outlook of the department matches my own and that, even more importantly, the pedagogical bent of the program would suit me. I don't mean to say I think there's anything wrong with the outlook or pedagogy at UCSD, I just think they wouldn't work for me.
As a graduate of St. John's College, I come from a strange academic tradition. I'm a student of the so-called "Western Canon" at a time when a lot of the academic world - and places like UCSD in particular - seriously doubt whether there really ought to be such a thing as a canon. The questions at the heart of this objection are valid, and look like this: How can you determine which books are Great, or even if there is such a thing as Greatness? Isn't that a hegemonic, colonial tool to marginalize the values and cultures of all of those people who are not white male Europeans?
By themselves, these are important questions that, frankly, St. John's probably doesn't do a good enough job answering.* The problem, to me, is the double-reversal jiu-jitsu that comes next. Because those are good questions, the answers are assumed to be, basically, that there is no such thing as Greatness, that the Great Books are a total sham, and that any curriculum that reads them and takes them seriously on their own merits (instead of through alternative cultural and contextual lenses) is itself an instrument of intellectual and cultural tyranny. The result, of course, is the laissez-faire, anything goes attitude towards ideas that pervades the post-modern world. That attitude says, "your ideas and my ideas are equally valid, because they each come from our own perspectives. Right and wrong are relative, and meaning is personally constructed, and if we all just agree to disagree and get along the world will be all right." To me, that's a shameful intellectual surrender. Maybe this is a hegemonic idea, but I like to think that there's more value in consensus - and, even more so, the effort to get there - than there is in tolerance.**
* Of course, any graduate of the college who continues in academia will inevitably have to confront these questions anyway, and will be - I think St. John's would argue - equipped to do so because of the critical thinking skills they've gained as Johnnies. I suspect a great many St. John's graduates end up being heavily critical of the curricular content of the Great Books program precisely because it is so Anglo-European centric. So it's hard to criticize the college for picking a narrower curricular goal that it can achieve in four years, instead of trying to bite off more than it can chew when it knows students will get there after-the-fact anyway. That's just good curriculum design.
** That the position of tolerance for differing ideas is also held be many self-proclaimed radicals - many of whom are only actually tolerant up to a point - only serves to remind me of this Eva Brann (St. John's Dean, not wife of Hitler) quotation: "To the radicals we might say: you don't begin to know what radical is; we are the ones who go to the roots."
Now that's not to say that I know anything like enough about UCSD to say where the institution as a whole stands relative to this issue. In reality, I'm sure there are a range of opinions. I did, however, get the sense from the brief time I spent there and the one class I visited that I would likely end up very frustrated by the "make connections" instead of "find meaning" model that goes with their post-modernist academic culture. That each week's reading on the syllabi I saw included multiple and intentionally disparate authors in order to build background and force cross-cutting interpretations rubs against my Johnnie sensibilities, in which those things are not exactly bad, but nevertheless can undercut the effort to actually understand a given text's content, instead of just its context or impact.
Again, I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with the way UCSD is doing things, I just don't think it's right for me.
Now you might be thinking that Stanford is vastly different. It isn't. If anything, it's less discussion and dialogue oriented than UCSD, and it is just as much concerned with post-modernist questions and processes. The difference, then, is that Stanford is not just talking and reading and dancing around the theories and philosophies of these issues, but is, in fact, actually out in the world doing. My experience as an LDT student was one of project-based classes and practice-oriented learning, which lines up well with modern learning theory. While not every professor I had was a brilliant teacher using the more cutting edge pedagogy and technology, many - including Roy, incidentally* - were just that. For all of its stuffy, privileged, businessy, ivory tower reputation, Stanford really does strive to practice what it preaches.
*Or not incidentally at all.
Being political (in the root, Greek sense of dealing with society) has its drawbacks. It can be frustrating to try to make a difference. But as much as I'm sure I'll have days and nights when I feel like I'm just a small, insignificant part of a broken system, and I can't do much to improve the situation, I think that Stanford will encourage and support (and, really, actively enlist) me in fighting the good fight. The potential for myopia at UCSD, on the other hand - the ability to remove myself from the world and just do whatever I want - frightens me much more than the frustrations I'm sure I'll feel at Stanford sometimes do. I am, despite myself, equal parts idealism and practicality, and I feel like Stanford understands that dichotomy (and supports both sides of it) better than UCSD does, at least in my case.
There are, I suspect, a great many other things I could say about what draws me to Stanford (including my previous experience there compared to the relative unknown of UCSD), but they would be variations on the theme from above. The truth of the matter is, both programs were the "right decision," but in different ways, and I was fortunate to have an opportunity to pick between the two, even if it meant the decision was a difficult one.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
The List
For the past few weeks - since my resignation at NALU - I've been mired in a search for an appropriate PhD program. If you know anything about academia, you know that my timing is particularly awkward, because most programs put their deadlines smack dab in the middle of December, which is, you know, very soon. So I've been exploring research angles, having conversations, browsing websites, sending emails, and doing all the legwork I need to do as quickly as possible.
The result is that, as of today, I've made my decision as to where I'm applying, and for what. I don't think it's a perfect list, but it's a list, it's actionable, and I know - or at least strongly suspect - I would be happy in any of the programs I've narrowed my search down to. So, without further ado, here are the five programs.
Stanford University, Learning Sciences and Technology Design
I'll be applying to LSTD for the third time, and from a third completely different angle. When I was accepted to LDT I applied at both the Master's and PhD levels, but my application was broad and vague to a degree that made me an undesirable PhD candidate. Last year, I wrote a more specific statement of purpose, but unfortunately my specific interests didn't align with anyone at the University. This time, and now that I know the Professors better (and they know me better), I feel I can write an even better statement of purpose, and potentially latch on with a suitable advisor.
In short, the question I'm pushing will be this: what is the most effective design in terms of providing students access to secondary, tertiary, and contextual sources? There are more than a few angles here, including whether it's better to simply let students surf the Internet for contextual information about the books they're reading or the history they're learning, or whether there are ways to specifically limit that vast set of information. Likewise, one might focus on the difference between learning from primary source materials alone versus learning from primary source material supplemented by secondary sources, interpretations, and contextual information. Regardless, it is vital to consider pedagogy here, as well, and what kind of teaching goes best with what kind of information.
So yeah, that's jargony, I know. But it's also the kind of focused question that not only might help me get into a school that I do love, but also would set me up to be a successful doctoral student there, with a sufficiently nuanced, but also sufficiently broad research question.
University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought
Now I haven't really chosen a specific research focus here yet, but the program is fascinating to me. Perhaps the most appealing part of this program is its breadth, and its inherent similarity to the St. John's education I received as an undergraduate. Indeed, the program shares common roots with St. John's and the "Great Books" curriculum - as well as the dialogic pedagogy - they use.
The Committee on Social Thought website states that students are encouraged to come without a specific dissertation topic already in mind, but rather a broader area. The purpose of the first two years, then, is to study a variety of works in that area, to select a dozen-ish of them, and then to begin laying the groundwork for doing a dissertation on the confluence of themes and ideas in those dozen books. So, really, it's like a Johnny's dream.
The broader area, however, is something I still need to think about. The application asks me to check a box: philosophy, literature, history, classics, or art history. I'm inclined towards literature and/or art history, and perhaps even the combination of the two. Peter Quince at the Clavier is, of course, an example of that intersection, and something I felt compelled to write about for fun. I'm leaning, however, towards an explicit study of art history in the form of music. That would be in line with my undergraduate thesis, on the one hand, but would allow me to reach far beyond the narrow scope that I began to explore in my paper about Beethoven's 3rd and 9th Symphonies.
Needless to say, this won't be as specific and jargony an application as my Stanford one will be, but I dare say it's not supposed to be. Rather, this program would signal a return to my educational roots, but at a much higher level of sophistication. And, armed with some knowledge of education and technology design, who knows what fun ways I'll come up with to synthesize my learning.
University of California Santa Clara, History of Consciousness
Besides having an awesome name, this program fulfills the requirement of being sufficiently cross-disciplinary and creative for my liking. The website notes that the program is "in transition," and that the next cohort will be a smaller-than-usual one, which doesn't necessarily bode well. But, on the other hand, that means that if I am not a good fit, it's extremely unlikely I'd get in.
I'm applying, however, because my intuition says that I am a good fit. Unlike Chicago, UCSC asks for applicants to have a fairly specific project in mind, and of the faculty research interests they list perhaps the most interesting to me is "global capitalism and cultural process." Now, I have almost no economics background, but culture and I spend a fair amount of time with each other, and the relationship between the two is the kind of question that I could easily get lost in for a few years.
That said I'm also intrigued by the possibility of formulating some of my own questions about culture and learning. More than any non-education program, it strikes me that I might be able to formulate the intersection of my questions about culture, learning, and technology into a single actionable research path. The question, of course, is if anyone at UCSC is interested in that kind of thing. If not, well, that's why I'm applying to five schools. If so, then maybe this is the place.
University of California San Diego, Communications
Yes, that is half of a green telephone at the top of their website.
The program here was described by someone I trust very much as "the only good communications program in the country." So I figure it's worth an application. Back before I enrolled in the LDT program, I looked long and hard at communications as a field that I might want to do graduate work in. I think that education ended up being the right choice in the short term, but now that I have at least some education background, branching out into a cross-disciplinary communications program makes sense.
One of UCSD's Communications listed sub-genres is, in fact, "mediational theories of mind and of learning." UCSD might be, for that reason, the perfect place to pursue something along the lines of a study of how people learn music, and in what role "communication" plays in that learning. That would be an outgrowth, in some ways, of my undergraduate studies combined with my graduate work at Stanford. In short, it would be wonderfully synthetic of what I have already done, meaning I can write a compelling application, and I would enjoy the hell out of studying it because I could go so much deeper into the issues at hand than I had an opportunity to as an undergraduate (or Master's student).
University of Hawaii, Educational Foundations
Perhaps the least "ambitious" of my applications, I nevertheless feel as though there are significant benefits to potentially staying in Hawaii and receiving a PhD from the School of Education at UH. For one thing, if Jericha and I want to live and work in Hawaii in the long term, I could do worse than getting a degree from UH. It's hard to explain, but I honestly believe that a PhD at UH will get you further in Hawaii than a degree from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, or any other school. That's just the way it is here.
Beyond the practical, however, I'm happy to note that UH has a very interesting School of Education. Like all of UH's programs, the Educational Foundations program is cross-cultural. And, moreover, it strikes me as fairly interdisciplinary as well. That is, the goal is to understand what is at the heart of education, and how to build meaningful thought and learning processes that serve as a foundation for further learning. The question "How do we learn?" may be too broad for PhD work, but it's a good entry point, especially coupled with the cultural question: "In what ways do different people's learning differ, and what do various cultures and peoples have in common?"
In summary, I am legitimately excited about the possibilities in all five of these programs. What's more, the geography is agreeable as well. The three California schools are, of course, in the good parts of the state (two in the Bay Area, one in San Diego), the Hawaii school is, well, yeah. And the University of Chicago may be in Chicago, which would test my anti-Cubs patience, but is also the location of the Baha'i National Assembly for the United States, which would make Jericha very happy. Plus, a lot of people do swear by Chicago, and it does have a good reputation as big cities go.
Unfortunately, deadlines loom, and so I'll be holed up working for the next couple of weeks. Then, once I'm done, I'll be waiting for a few months. Ah, academia.
The result is that, as of today, I've made my decision as to where I'm applying, and for what. I don't think it's a perfect list, but it's a list, it's actionable, and I know - or at least strongly suspect - I would be happy in any of the programs I've narrowed my search down to. So, without further ado, here are the five programs.
Stanford University, Learning Sciences and Technology Design
I'll be applying to LSTD for the third time, and from a third completely different angle. When I was accepted to LDT I applied at both the Master's and PhD levels, but my application was broad and vague to a degree that made me an undesirable PhD candidate. Last year, I wrote a more specific statement of purpose, but unfortunately my specific interests didn't align with anyone at the University. This time, and now that I know the Professors better (and they know me better), I feel I can write an even better statement of purpose, and potentially latch on with a suitable advisor.
In short, the question I'm pushing will be this: what is the most effective design in terms of providing students access to secondary, tertiary, and contextual sources? There are more than a few angles here, including whether it's better to simply let students surf the Internet for contextual information about the books they're reading or the history they're learning, or whether there are ways to specifically limit that vast set of information. Likewise, one might focus on the difference between learning from primary source materials alone versus learning from primary source material supplemented by secondary sources, interpretations, and contextual information. Regardless, it is vital to consider pedagogy here, as well, and what kind of teaching goes best with what kind of information.
So yeah, that's jargony, I know. But it's also the kind of focused question that not only might help me get into a school that I do love, but also would set me up to be a successful doctoral student there, with a sufficiently nuanced, but also sufficiently broad research question.
University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought
Now I haven't really chosen a specific research focus here yet, but the program is fascinating to me. Perhaps the most appealing part of this program is its breadth, and its inherent similarity to the St. John's education I received as an undergraduate. Indeed, the program shares common roots with St. John's and the "Great Books" curriculum - as well as the dialogic pedagogy - they use.
The Committee on Social Thought website states that students are encouraged to come without a specific dissertation topic already in mind, but rather a broader area. The purpose of the first two years, then, is to study a variety of works in that area, to select a dozen-ish of them, and then to begin laying the groundwork for doing a dissertation on the confluence of themes and ideas in those dozen books. So, really, it's like a Johnny's dream.
The broader area, however, is something I still need to think about. The application asks me to check a box: philosophy, literature, history, classics, or art history. I'm inclined towards literature and/or art history, and perhaps even the combination of the two. Peter Quince at the Clavier is, of course, an example of that intersection, and something I felt compelled to write about for fun. I'm leaning, however, towards an explicit study of art history in the form of music. That would be in line with my undergraduate thesis, on the one hand, but would allow me to reach far beyond the narrow scope that I began to explore in my paper about Beethoven's 3rd and 9th Symphonies.
Needless to say, this won't be as specific and jargony an application as my Stanford one will be, but I dare say it's not supposed to be. Rather, this program would signal a return to my educational roots, but at a much higher level of sophistication. And, armed with some knowledge of education and technology design, who knows what fun ways I'll come up with to synthesize my learning.
University of California Santa Clara, History of Consciousness
Besides having an awesome name, this program fulfills the requirement of being sufficiently cross-disciplinary and creative for my liking. The website notes that the program is "in transition," and that the next cohort will be a smaller-than-usual one, which doesn't necessarily bode well. But, on the other hand, that means that if I am not a good fit, it's extremely unlikely I'd get in.
I'm applying, however, because my intuition says that I am a good fit. Unlike Chicago, UCSC asks for applicants to have a fairly specific project in mind, and of the faculty research interests they list perhaps the most interesting to me is "global capitalism and cultural process." Now, I have almost no economics background, but culture and I spend a fair amount of time with each other, and the relationship between the two is the kind of question that I could easily get lost in for a few years.
That said I'm also intrigued by the possibility of formulating some of my own questions about culture and learning. More than any non-education program, it strikes me that I might be able to formulate the intersection of my questions about culture, learning, and technology into a single actionable research path. The question, of course, is if anyone at UCSC is interested in that kind of thing. If not, well, that's why I'm applying to five schools. If so, then maybe this is the place.
University of California San Diego, Communications
Yes, that is half of a green telephone at the top of their website.
The program here was described by someone I trust very much as "the only good communications program in the country." So I figure it's worth an application. Back before I enrolled in the LDT program, I looked long and hard at communications as a field that I might want to do graduate work in. I think that education ended up being the right choice in the short term, but now that I have at least some education background, branching out into a cross-disciplinary communications program makes sense.
One of UCSD's Communications listed sub-genres is, in fact, "mediational theories of mind and of learning." UCSD might be, for that reason, the perfect place to pursue something along the lines of a study of how people learn music, and in what role "communication" plays in that learning. That would be an outgrowth, in some ways, of my undergraduate studies combined with my graduate work at Stanford. In short, it would be wonderfully synthetic of what I have already done, meaning I can write a compelling application, and I would enjoy the hell out of studying it because I could go so much deeper into the issues at hand than I had an opportunity to as an undergraduate (or Master's student).
University of Hawaii, Educational Foundations
Perhaps the least "ambitious" of my applications, I nevertheless feel as though there are significant benefits to potentially staying in Hawaii and receiving a PhD from the School of Education at UH. For one thing, if Jericha and I want to live and work in Hawaii in the long term, I could do worse than getting a degree from UH. It's hard to explain, but I honestly believe that a PhD at UH will get you further in Hawaii than a degree from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, or any other school. That's just the way it is here.
Beyond the practical, however, I'm happy to note that UH has a very interesting School of Education. Like all of UH's programs, the Educational Foundations program is cross-cultural. And, moreover, it strikes me as fairly interdisciplinary as well. That is, the goal is to understand what is at the heart of education, and how to build meaningful thought and learning processes that serve as a foundation for further learning. The question "How do we learn?" may be too broad for PhD work, but it's a good entry point, especially coupled with the cultural question: "In what ways do different people's learning differ, and what do various cultures and peoples have in common?"
In summary, I am legitimately excited about the possibilities in all five of these programs. What's more, the geography is agreeable as well. The three California schools are, of course, in the good parts of the state (two in the Bay Area, one in San Diego), the Hawaii school is, well, yeah. And the University of Chicago may be in Chicago, which would test my anti-Cubs patience, but is also the location of the Baha'i National Assembly for the United States, which would make Jericha very happy. Plus, a lot of people do swear by Chicago, and it does have a good reputation as big cities go.
Unfortunately, deadlines loom, and so I'll be holed up working for the next couple of weeks. Then, once I'm done, I'll be waiting for a few months. Ah, academia.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Exploring Research Questions
Having effectively joined the ranks of the unemployed following my resignation as Director of NALU Studies, I have begun not only looking at other jobs - which is lots of fun in the current market - but also looking at PhD programs. In the case of the former, my range is fairly narrow. I'm looking, basically, for work with schools that want to do technology integration in their curricula because, after all, that's what I got my Master's in. In the latter case, the angle is much more obtuse.
Pursuing a PhD is something that makes sense to me, as an avid writer, reader, and thinker. While the politics of the University world are somewhat abhorrent, the intellectual community is appealing nonetheless, and a doctoral degree hardly means that I'd have to stay in academia if I found it too distasteful. On the other hand, the real challenge here is not navigating politics or soft money, but rather defining an area of interest sufficiently narrow to ensure finding a fitting advisor and, ultimately, a fruitful dissertation.
For a generalist, however, that is a difficulty that cannot and should not be overlooked. Part of the appeal, indeed, of the specialized job of instructional technology and curriculum support is that it is, in reality, a generalists job. I would be the expert on what tools are available for classroom use, and good implementation practices, but I would (at least in theory) have the opportunity to work with teachers of English, history, science, math, music, foreign language, and anything else a given school offers. In short, I'd be a specialist who nevertheless gets to work across fields, who gets to talk to people who know, between them, know a lot about almost any subject you'd want to know about. Contrast that with most Universities, where the world is more insular, where conversations don't frequently happen across departments, and you'll see the appeal to a generalist and a learner of being able to span multiple disciplines.
So the challenge, given the fast approaching deadlines of many PhD programs, is defining not only a question, but even an area of study. Hence this post, which is more for me than my readers, as I try to explore the implications of a few ideas and, hopefully, get some ideas back in return.
Music
One of my first thoughts in my current exploration of graduate programs was, "Why not return to music?" I do love music, as the title of the blog suggests. The biggest challenge is that, though I am a marginally competent pianist, I am no expert, certainly not at the level that PhD programs expect. In the last two years, especially, my practice has been limited, and while I have more or less maintained my skills, I am no better at the piano now than I was as an undergraduate.
Nevertheless, my Senior Thesis at St. John's was a musicology paper, I was an assistant in music courses for three years, and I conducted a chamber orchestra. I don't think selling a program on my background would be easy, but it would be far from impossible. Which leaves the bigger issue of what part of music I'd like to study.
Regardless of the field of study I pursue, integrating some of my Stanford LDT knowledge is a no-brainer. And, ultimately, I'm still passionate about education. So the angle from which studying music is most appealing is the musical-cognition angle. That is, how do people learn to understand music? Perhaps there's a cultural and anthropological bent to that question: how does culture and language effect the learning of music? How, for example, does classical music differ from jazz harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically, and how would a classical musician describe those differences relative to a jazz musician? Beneath all of that, how does learning the music from one or the other perspective (and we could throw in many others, from pop music to modern rock to Hindu chants) influence the comprehension of the others?
It seems to me that there are two chief ways to explore those questions. The first involves neuroscience, studying cognition using brain waves and such. But that science is still in its infancy, and the more interesting angle (though probably the less fund-able one) is the anthropological one. The ethnography necessary to do research into any of those questions would be fascinating and enjoyable.
Another angle, here, is strict musicology, but that seems a little bland and self-serving. At least the above has implications for education, assuming schools ever teach music again, anyway. On the other hand, musicology could also be a curricular focus. Is there a way to teach music to students that combines theory, history, and appreciation. As it is, those are all usually separate classes (as the college level, of course). Why not make a single class that incorporates all of those? The question, I guess, is does that effort even belong in a PhD program, or is it more of a professional deal?
Fellow Johnnies will point out that St. John's does indeed combine those three points, which leads to a possible research project: how do students of St. John's music program compare to students who take music classes at other colleges? But that's a can of worms that leads to a different area of study, as well.
Education
Working towards a PhD in education makes some sense given my Master's in education, and I certainly feel I can ask a more sophisticated and specialized research question in this area than in any other. Of course, the question I'm most fascinated by brings with it certain challenges: St. John's and research are not always friends.
What I mean is, I'd love to study the differences between a St. John's education, a different liberal arts education, and normal University education, and a parochial education. I of course know that the curricula and pedagogy are wildly different, and I more or less know in what way and why. But the question is deeper than that: how do students in those various settings differ? What is the culture of St. John's compared to Williams College, compared to the University of Michigan, compared to a Community College? How much of that owes to geography, how much to pedagogy, how much to some other factor? Of course, the outcome piece is important, too: which graduates are more "successful," and in what ways?
I'm not convinced, however, that St. John's buys the kinds of processes that go into that kind of research project. I'm not sure I do, either. Try as they might, even the most objective education researchers usually have an axe to grind, and have biases built mostly (or even exclusively) on their own educational experiences. "Best practice," in that cynical world view, is "what worked for me." And, without a doubt, that's the challenge I would face. St. John's is, to me, one of the best colleges in the country, if not the best. Could I really overcome that bias and look at it objectively? Would St. John's even want me to? Do they care if they are "effective" in any modern, researchable sense?
Which leads me to narrower questions that might be more researchable, and still fit under education. For example, do students do better working from original source material alone, or do they do better working with secondary sources and interpretations? This question comes from a conversation I had at Stanford with a Professor there, and it still is fascinating to me. It captures a piece of St. John's, without a doubt (since Johnnies are discouraged from using secondary sources and interpretations, so much so that we're often asked not even to consider context). But it also captures high school English, where Hamlet is usually read without any accompanying documents.
The linchpin here is "better." What exactly constitutes "better?" Do secondary sources improve comprehension, interpretation, analysis? Do they improve creativity? Do they improve the level of conversation in the classroom? What's more, is there even a good way, pedagogically, to introduce them without being boring?
There are other rich angles here, as well, such as the differences between high school and college level students (which benefits more from secondary source material). Moreover, we might ask about the cultures of the schools and classrooms involved. Perhaps a lecture class is much better with secondary sources, but a discussion one is not. Or maybe it's the other way around? Who knows?
Needless to say, I could probably generate a good dozen questions that fit under the heading of education, but the underlying theme to all of them is the same: I want to know about the components of a St. John's education, and what makes it work (assuming it does). Discussion versus lecture is the key here, and that's a cultural question, which leads to a whole other kind of thought.
Anthropology
I have never taken a single anthropology class in my life, though the Alienation and Deprivation in Fiction and Education course at Stanford was close. I don't know the language, I don't know the research, and I don't know the questions. Nevertheless, the concepts keep hitting me again and again. Cultural anthropology is the kind of research I keep coming up with, even if it's in music, or education, or literature, or anything else.
Now there's no question that I am a math person, and I don't know what place math has in anthropological research. I'm wary of numbers, because too often we let them stand in for real meanings and real people. That said, mere anecdote does not knowledge make, and so the best bet is to combine the two. I'm sure that anthropology does this, but I simply don't know enough about it.
So what questions do I even have? Well, I don't have archaeological questions. That's not totally true, but I don't want to get a PhD in them. My questions are more about modern cultures, and especially the Internet. Ironically, though I do not use Facebook or Twitter, I'm fascinated by the cultural implications of both. A study of how social networking is effecting people's understanding of self and culture would be extremely interesting to me. And I'm sure it's already happening.
Anyway, that's just one of many questions in the anthropology world that appeals to me. Some of the questions from my music and education sections could probably fall under this heading as well. And that's the rub. How and where can I bring subjects together? What school is cross-disciplinary enough, what advisor enough of a generalist to help lead me through not only doing research, but narrowing my focus enough to be effective without gimping my generalist tendencies overmuch?
The truth is, I'm leaving off disciplines, even here. I've explored Stanford's Modern Thought and Literature program, which runs out of their English department. I've considered Linguistics. I won't rule out Neuroscience, even if I'd have a lot of catching up to do. I'd even consider Statistics!
The trick, to me, is not finding the right field, it's finding the right school and the right advisor, and then breaking the rules. My academic success has always been built upon stretching the limits of what is acceptable, whether that means turning in a poem instead of an essay (but a poem that is still an essay), or taking courses that don't fit into a degree but using them to inform projects, or purposefully trying to break rubrics.
Which is all well and good once I'm in a structured, academic environment, but I'm smart enough to realize that I need that structured environment, too. The rebel has to rebel against something. The innovator is only innovative relative to his surroundings. Finding a good environment, then, is the real key, and the truth of the matter is, I don't know what I'm looking for. Or, rather, I know exactly what I'm looking for, but I don't have the slightest clue how to find it.
But maybe that, more than anything else, suggests to me that I'm ready to work towards a doctorate.
Pursuing a PhD is something that makes sense to me, as an avid writer, reader, and thinker. While the politics of the University world are somewhat abhorrent, the intellectual community is appealing nonetheless, and a doctoral degree hardly means that I'd have to stay in academia if I found it too distasteful. On the other hand, the real challenge here is not navigating politics or soft money, but rather defining an area of interest sufficiently narrow to ensure finding a fitting advisor and, ultimately, a fruitful dissertation.
For a generalist, however, that is a difficulty that cannot and should not be overlooked. Part of the appeal, indeed, of the specialized job of instructional technology and curriculum support is that it is, in reality, a generalists job. I would be the expert on what tools are available for classroom use, and good implementation practices, but I would (at least in theory) have the opportunity to work with teachers of English, history, science, math, music, foreign language, and anything else a given school offers. In short, I'd be a specialist who nevertheless gets to work across fields, who gets to talk to people who know, between them, know a lot about almost any subject you'd want to know about. Contrast that with most Universities, where the world is more insular, where conversations don't frequently happen across departments, and you'll see the appeal to a generalist and a learner of being able to span multiple disciplines.
So the challenge, given the fast approaching deadlines of many PhD programs, is defining not only a question, but even an area of study. Hence this post, which is more for me than my readers, as I try to explore the implications of a few ideas and, hopefully, get some ideas back in return.
Music
One of my first thoughts in my current exploration of graduate programs was, "Why not return to music?" I do love music, as the title of the blog suggests. The biggest challenge is that, though I am a marginally competent pianist, I am no expert, certainly not at the level that PhD programs expect. In the last two years, especially, my practice has been limited, and while I have more or less maintained my skills, I am no better at the piano now than I was as an undergraduate.
Nevertheless, my Senior Thesis at St. John's was a musicology paper, I was an assistant in music courses for three years, and I conducted a chamber orchestra. I don't think selling a program on my background would be easy, but it would be far from impossible. Which leaves the bigger issue of what part of music I'd like to study.
Regardless of the field of study I pursue, integrating some of my Stanford LDT knowledge is a no-brainer. And, ultimately, I'm still passionate about education. So the angle from which studying music is most appealing is the musical-cognition angle. That is, how do people learn to understand music? Perhaps there's a cultural and anthropological bent to that question: how does culture and language effect the learning of music? How, for example, does classical music differ from jazz harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically, and how would a classical musician describe those differences relative to a jazz musician? Beneath all of that, how does learning the music from one or the other perspective (and we could throw in many others, from pop music to modern rock to Hindu chants) influence the comprehension of the others?
It seems to me that there are two chief ways to explore those questions. The first involves neuroscience, studying cognition using brain waves and such. But that science is still in its infancy, and the more interesting angle (though probably the less fund-able one) is the anthropological one. The ethnography necessary to do research into any of those questions would be fascinating and enjoyable.
Another angle, here, is strict musicology, but that seems a little bland and self-serving. At least the above has implications for education, assuming schools ever teach music again, anyway. On the other hand, musicology could also be a curricular focus. Is there a way to teach music to students that combines theory, history, and appreciation. As it is, those are all usually separate classes (as the college level, of course). Why not make a single class that incorporates all of those? The question, I guess, is does that effort even belong in a PhD program, or is it more of a professional deal?
Fellow Johnnies will point out that St. John's does indeed combine those three points, which leads to a possible research project: how do students of St. John's music program compare to students who take music classes at other colleges? But that's a can of worms that leads to a different area of study, as well.
Education
Working towards a PhD in education makes some sense given my Master's in education, and I certainly feel I can ask a more sophisticated and specialized research question in this area than in any other. Of course, the question I'm most fascinated by brings with it certain challenges: St. John's and research are not always friends.
What I mean is, I'd love to study the differences between a St. John's education, a different liberal arts education, and normal University education, and a parochial education. I of course know that the curricula and pedagogy are wildly different, and I more or less know in what way and why. But the question is deeper than that: how do students in those various settings differ? What is the culture of St. John's compared to Williams College, compared to the University of Michigan, compared to a Community College? How much of that owes to geography, how much to pedagogy, how much to some other factor? Of course, the outcome piece is important, too: which graduates are more "successful," and in what ways?
I'm not convinced, however, that St. John's buys the kinds of processes that go into that kind of research project. I'm not sure I do, either. Try as they might, even the most objective education researchers usually have an axe to grind, and have biases built mostly (or even exclusively) on their own educational experiences. "Best practice," in that cynical world view, is "what worked for me." And, without a doubt, that's the challenge I would face. St. John's is, to me, one of the best colleges in the country, if not the best. Could I really overcome that bias and look at it objectively? Would St. John's even want me to? Do they care if they are "effective" in any modern, researchable sense?
Which leads me to narrower questions that might be more researchable, and still fit under education. For example, do students do better working from original source material alone, or do they do better working with secondary sources and interpretations? This question comes from a conversation I had at Stanford with a Professor there, and it still is fascinating to me. It captures a piece of St. John's, without a doubt (since Johnnies are discouraged from using secondary sources and interpretations, so much so that we're often asked not even to consider context). But it also captures high school English, where Hamlet is usually read without any accompanying documents.
The linchpin here is "better." What exactly constitutes "better?" Do secondary sources improve comprehension, interpretation, analysis? Do they improve creativity? Do they improve the level of conversation in the classroom? What's more, is there even a good way, pedagogically, to introduce them without being boring?
There are other rich angles here, as well, such as the differences between high school and college level students (which benefits more from secondary source material). Moreover, we might ask about the cultures of the schools and classrooms involved. Perhaps a lecture class is much better with secondary sources, but a discussion one is not. Or maybe it's the other way around? Who knows?
Needless to say, I could probably generate a good dozen questions that fit under the heading of education, but the underlying theme to all of them is the same: I want to know about the components of a St. John's education, and what makes it work (assuming it does). Discussion versus lecture is the key here, and that's a cultural question, which leads to a whole other kind of thought.
Anthropology
I have never taken a single anthropology class in my life, though the Alienation and Deprivation in Fiction and Education course at Stanford was close. I don't know the language, I don't know the research, and I don't know the questions. Nevertheless, the concepts keep hitting me again and again. Cultural anthropology is the kind of research I keep coming up with, even if it's in music, or education, or literature, or anything else.
Now there's no question that I am a math person, and I don't know what place math has in anthropological research. I'm wary of numbers, because too often we let them stand in for real meanings and real people. That said, mere anecdote does not knowledge make, and so the best bet is to combine the two. I'm sure that anthropology does this, but I simply don't know enough about it.
So what questions do I even have? Well, I don't have archaeological questions. That's not totally true, but I don't want to get a PhD in them. My questions are more about modern cultures, and especially the Internet. Ironically, though I do not use Facebook or Twitter, I'm fascinated by the cultural implications of both. A study of how social networking is effecting people's understanding of self and culture would be extremely interesting to me. And I'm sure it's already happening.
Anyway, that's just one of many questions in the anthropology world that appeals to me. Some of the questions from my music and education sections could probably fall under this heading as well. And that's the rub. How and where can I bring subjects together? What school is cross-disciplinary enough, what advisor enough of a generalist to help lead me through not only doing research, but narrowing my focus enough to be effective without gimping my generalist tendencies overmuch?
The truth is, I'm leaving off disciplines, even here. I've explored Stanford's Modern Thought and Literature program, which runs out of their English department. I've considered Linguistics. I won't rule out Neuroscience, even if I'd have a lot of catching up to do. I'd even consider Statistics!
The trick, to me, is not finding the right field, it's finding the right school and the right advisor, and then breaking the rules. My academic success has always been built upon stretching the limits of what is acceptable, whether that means turning in a poem instead of an essay (but a poem that is still an essay), or taking courses that don't fit into a degree but using them to inform projects, or purposefully trying to break rubrics.
Which is all well and good once I'm in a structured, academic environment, but I'm smart enough to realize that I need that structured environment, too. The rebel has to rebel against something. The innovator is only innovative relative to his surroundings. Finding a good environment, then, is the real key, and the truth of the matter is, I don't know what I'm looking for. Or, rather, I know exactly what I'm looking for, but I don't have the slightest clue how to find it.
But maybe that, more than anything else, suggests to me that I'm ready to work towards a doctorate.
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