Letter to an Advisor that somewhat sums up the past two weeks....

Honestly?  Getting this (fellowship grant) would put me back on track at least mentally.  I'm not sure I'm behind on the timeline at all.  I got my second rejection on a job that I had been encouraged to apply for (and through a newsletter for the college, not even a 'thanks for your interest' letter), and now the Thailand trip may be postponed for a year.  I'm just having trouble transcribing my most recent interview (motivation-wise solely, as the technical pieces are working just fine) because I'm feeling discouraged to push for any sort of 'deadline' for the final product.  With no job possibilities on the horizon, it's hard to feel the urgency to finish. 


On a more positive note, I'm making progress with the newspaper articles and CDA portions.  I think I can finally "prove" some of those claims I tried to make last spring in the paper for our immigrants course.  My plan is to re-work that paper some before the end of the semester.  


Also, after re-reading some of the Narrative Inquiry materials, I think fewer subjects and more interviews/conversations is more authentic to the approach.  We can talk more about that later, but I do know that I now need to read Dewey's "Education and Experience"--who knew that he countered his earlier positions (in TCH ED 2211, we talk about Dewey's approach in "Democracy in Education" and the importance of preparing them to think and interact, focusing on respecting each other and looking at social problems, but that he didn't seem to focus on ways in which student's lives at home and experiences outside of the class matter in the class itself), saying that experience and understanding others' experiences IS the essence of education, and that the good educational research projects need to focus on experience. 


Therefore, their experiences and our interactions/experiences together need more attention and less categorization, I think.  While I definitely see a number of similarities that we can talk about in the discussion and even between the chapters, it's the individual stories that need some attention.  Each, at this point, are women from different countries and have different experiences--but ALL FOUR OF THEM have been involved in teaching at some point or another (and that's not how I met them or all of my sources met them), and that in itself seems very interesting when we get into the discussion and how this experience, identity, and education "puzzle" fits together :D

Anyway, that's where I'm at in a nutshell.  How are classes going for you this semester?  I'm looking forward to the December party/meeting and catching up with others again.

 --Emily