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When I started my doctorate, in 2001, I thought that I had all the answers. That attitude lasted until the first night of the first class. I realized that having been out of school since 1975 was not to my advantage in terms of study habits, organization and doing homework. That was the first shock. The second shock was the all my accumulated knowledge and experience from working in education and with the State Department, 20+ years of living out of the U.S. and my facility in learning and using languages were fragmented bits and pieces that did not automatically entitle me to the title of Doctor. I had a lot to learn. So my journey started with a lesson in humility. It is a lesson that has stayed with me. Another lesson from the first years of my program which has become more and more obvious is that the more I learn, the more I realize what I don't know. And, the more I find that I don't know, the more I want to learn. That attitude of wanting to explore and learn a bit about every aspect of education that I encounter has derailed me a few times because I have found myself wanting to keep branching out to study more and more aspects of education. I have been like a kid in a candy store wanting to sample everything. Only in the last year has my quest to buy every new book on education settled down to buying just every new book on dual language, reading for English language learners and second language acquisition. I am starting to focus. By the end of the third semester of the doctoral program (including the summer), I had taken most of the required general courses and the Education Leadership courses. I appreciated the design of the program and the courses because in each of the courses, I used leadership to give me the framework for my research and/or projects and used Multicultural/Bilingual education as the content for the projects. By the time I finished the leadership courses, I had an extensive collection of research on bilingual education and second language acquisition. (Coursework completed up to first portfolio review: course descriptions and links to products and reflections) |
| After the first portfolio
review I kept up a frantic pace of three courses each semester. In
spring of 2003, I had my first of four courses in my minor concentration,
Multicultural/Bilingual Education. That is what I was waiting for.
I have always been interested in immigration issues (hence my
stint with the State Department) and how the children of immigrants
learn in our public school system. The first course, Seminar in Multicultural
Education, broadened my interest and my knowledge base because since I
had come back to the US in 2000, I had focused on my own school's population
= Spanish speakers. This course took in issues of other ethnic and
language groups. (Coursework
Spring 2003)
In addition to this course, I also took Emerging Issues in Administration and Supervision with Dr. Earley. In this course, I used the structure of the course and investigated multicultural issues and bilingual education issues for the content. Dr. Earley urged me to branch out and look at other issues and so I did but everything related to multicultural issues in some way. (EDLE 895) This semester I also took
EDRS 811. Methods in Quantitative Research. Ugh. Luckily we took
the course in a computer lab and were able to do a lot of hands-on practice
using EXCEL and finally in the last few weeks, SPSS. This course
was hard on my book budget. I bought a number of idiot and dummy books
including Statistics for Dummies, and the Idiot's Guide to Statistics.
My advice to any non-mathematically-inclined student is to take this course
by itself in order to have time to really understand the math behind the
equations. I found that by taking it with two other heavy courses,
that I was studying every free minute, trying to research on-line statistics
help. I have a great library for the next math-phobe to come along.
Reflecting on what I learned, I think that because I was learning in a
high-anxiety situation, I did not retain much from that class. Qualitative
research seems so much more logical and valuable when looking at what I
would like to study.
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| The summer of 2003 brought
a surprise and an honor. I was chosen to go to Uruguay for eight weeks
with the Fulbright Administrators Exchange. I was asked to be in
the first group of American educators to visit Uruguay. Two groups
of Uruguayan school directors had visited the US already. Of course,
I accepted and spent an extremely valuable summer traveling around Uruguay,
visiting newly established schools. I spent one week at each of six
schools. Each school had, or were trying to establish, a dual language
program in either Spanish/English or Spanish/Portuguese. The experience
of visiting schools, talking to Uruguayan educators and lecturing at teacher
training colleges added an international dimension to my studies.
I used the eight weeks in Uruguay as my internship. My contact with
some of the schools continues as I am helping develop an English computer
program at one school and am fostering school-to-school penpal projects
with another.
(Fulbright experience in Uruguay) Since I was going to be learning as well as teaching during this eight week period, I requested that my time as a Fulbrighter be used as my internship. It was approved and so the link to the Fulbright experience above, will also take you to the proposal for the internship and the reflection on the internship at the end. |
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