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The article by Patsy Duff, our instructor no less, covers pretty much everything that needs to said on the topic of academic socialization. I’m not just trying to be polite – she is planning to view this blog, isn’t she – but looking down the list of works cited, I cannot think of anyone else who has written in this area. And to be on that list, to have one’s name positioned inside brackets of a highly esteemed colleague seems to be the goal of many academics entering their post doctorate studies. There are plenty of bumps along the way, wouldn’t seem worthwhile to be in these studies if just anyone could be a scholar. The various case studies reported in Language Socialization into Academic Communities demonstrate that there will be some amount of exclusionary practices, but they could be seen more in the light of gate-keeping policies rather than ways of turning people away (or off) from higher education. The one example that sticks out the most, in my mind, involves Séror (2008) study of undergraduate Japanese students in Canada, mostly because my wife went through a very similar and frustrating experience taking an English course last term. I was even having a hard time to decipher her instructors handwriting. When at last we could figure out what changes could be made, it was barely worth the trouble trying to figure it out in the first place as the advice contradicted instructions delivered orally in class. Fortunately, my wife has moved on to a more literate instructor, and loves participating in her short story course this term.
Thanks to those of you who logged into Goodreads to catch up with my anticlimactic comments on Learning the Literacy Practices of Graduate School. I agree with many of the reflections posted on-line from other classmates, and agree that these experiences will be similar yet separate for each of us. The same sense that I got from looking over the list of Crucial Elements (Richardson, 2008, p. 261-3), reinforced by the readings this week: we all already do many of the things listed, and written about in the first section, yet are still in the process of proving it to others. Sometimes, according to John S. Hedgcock the process of proof-in-the-writing will take an entire career to establish.
Learning the Literacy Practices of Graduate School: Insiders’ Reflections on Academic Enculturation by Christine Pearson Casanave
Set design for Blackbird Theatre’s
Uncle Vanya
Today’s class began with introductions and outline reviewing, as well as a two-part discussion on the ways in which graduate schools could or must change. To better understand what each of us are getting ourselves into, we read as much of the one of these two articles: Nicolas (2008)’s optimistic Researcher for Tomorrow and the seemingly more pessimistic Taylor (2009) End of University as We Know It. Both express ways in which graduate schooling has to keep up with present-day demands for research and job opportunities. The key phrase comes from the mechanical engineer Nicolas, who advises in a workmanlike way, to have graduates who know where to dig, rather than digging the same holes as their mentors. Sounds very much like Tapscott and Williams (2007) were investigating in the book Wikinomics‘ chapter on Goldcorp.
Having been introduced to the methods and readings that in weeks to come, I took the thoughtful lessons about becoming a professional language and literacy educator and went to see a show with my dad, Blackbird Theatre’s production of Uncle Vanya. In an eerie way that has started with my master program, everything I come into contact with outside of the classroom has some relation to what I am studying. Here it becomes obvious with Anton Chekhov’s caricature of a professor past his prime: Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov. Ageing and aching from gout, he returns to his wife’s country estate to wreck havoc on the remaining inhabitants (his wife, Vanya’s sister, having passes away and the professor remarried to a much younger woman) who he partly ruined by leeching off them during his studies and long process towards retirement. Of the many people he has upset along the way, Serebtyakov’s worst habit is his disregard for the lowly farmhand, Ilya Ilych Telegin, the only character who took an active interest in what the retired professor has to say. I have seen that look, the confused “who is this person?” brush-off that seems to be a bad habit of surrounding oneself with ideas rather than other people.