What I do

It is very common in academia to hear, "So what do you study?" More common in public circles is, "So what do you do?"  More often than not, in public, I just say that I'm a doctoral student, maybe adding that I'm in education.  It's confusing for some people, who think I'm becoming a teacher or a principal.  The idea of educational research, which is primarily what I'm being prepared for, is evidently quite foreign to a lot of people.  I usually tell them I'm becoming a professor, to teach future secondary schoolteachers.  But in truth, there's a lot more to it than that.

Officially, I'm in a Language, Literature, and Culture specialization.  This is motivated by my background as a secondary English teacher and a desire to prepare such teachers for today's schools.  I never went through a formal teacher education program, but like many folks who did and still others who did master's licensing programs, I didn't find the classes I did  have to take all that helpful.  Even when they were especially practical, like classes on curriculum and instruction, what I learned was so abstracted from the realities of the classroom that I could transfer very little beyond the theoretical frameworks presented for teaching and learning.

Which takes me to where I am now.  My primary interests are in teacher education, especially preservice teacher education programs -- those that target undergraduate students, not yet teaching, who are preparing to be teachers, ideally in public schools.  I am especially interested in preservice teachers who want to teach in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms and/or in urban settings, though I think I have something to offer those who believe they will teach in very homogenous school settings as well.  Much of what I am interested in is what's called "social foundations" of education -- the systemic and institutional factors that impact classroom teaching.  In particular, I am interested those factors that relate to certain kinds of diversity -- race, ethnicity, language, gender, geography, religion, sexual orientation, and dis/ability.  I want to better prepare teachers to go into classrooms with a wide range of diversity their student population.  I want them to learn to look at students' diversity as a resource rather than a deficit and learn how to use it to support learning.  I want to help all teachers learn how to enact multicultural curriculum in their classrooms, the kinds that prepare people to live in the pluralistic democracy we inhabit and, ostensibly, wish to sustain.  This is the work that I do.

What I study right now is small interventions that can be put in place to help preservice teachers prepare for the contextual, situational, personal work that is part of good teaching and disproportionately beneficial to students from traditionally underserved populations.  I'm studying a lot in medical education, trying to look at how they prepare future clinicians to be (what they term) culturally proficient in meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse patient population.  I want to learn what, if anything, can be re-appropriated into teacher education, and perhaps also be of service to those in medical education seeking to take a qualitative look at their work.  I will likely do much of my work in secondary English classrooms and teacher education programs because that's where I'm most knowledgeable, but I really want to find things in my work that transcend subject matter and are useful to teachers at different grade levels and in different disciplines.  I imagine that much of my work for my dissertation will focus on allowing teachers to practice the difficult conversations around diversity that come with teaching -- providing a safe, supportive environment for what Erickson calls "deliberate practice."  I am a qualitative researcher, someone who says, "Yes, I am a part of the study.  Let me tell you why that matters."  I don't pretend to be objective, and I don't think quantitative research (at least in education) is objective either.  Qualitative researchers just happen to acknowledge it.  I'm interested in moving towards a standard for more rigorous qualitative research such that it's taken more seriously in the field of education, something that's deemed relevant to policy makers who so consistently prefer the numbers (though they ignore most of those, too, to be honest).  I especially want to do that for research on preparing culturally and linguistically responsive teachers, a corpus of research often overlooked in the educational world.

So if you ever wondered what I do, or more specifically what I study, this is it.  I think it's interesting.  I think it's important.  I think it's wildly challenging.  But I'm also proud of what I've committed my career to.  And I sincerely hope that I can make a meaningful contribution, of whatever size, in the course of it.