Stephen Plans His Research

For my second blog, I'll be talking a little about my doc program, educational history, research interests, and professional goals. Dr. Hogue - for your ease, I have bolded my one-sentence research topic in the first paragraph below. 

I'm currently nearing completion of coursework in the Curriculum Studies program in Purdue University's College of Education. Curriculum Studies focuses on the concept of curriculum broadly and generally - though not always - take a qualitative, critical approach to asking questions like "What knowledge is worth knowing, and who gets to decide?" I transferred into the Curriculum Studies program from Purdue's Higher Education program, due to a) a conflict with my previous advisors and b) a better fit for my research interests and work-life balance. My original interest in the program was in a subfield called public pedagogy - this field looks at 'curricula' outside of traditional learning spaces: ie, what is the curriculum, or what is taught, through culture, art, protests, or any number of spaces, places, and texts outside of the classroom. Initially, my interest was in the intersection of public pedagogy, video games, and social justice; I'm still deeply interested in this topic, but my dissertation work has taken a different direction, which I'll discuss a bit later. In general, my hope for this program is to provide me with a breadth of knowledge about curriculum structure and analysis, as well as the research and writing skills to expand that base of knowledge. Currently, however, I'm aiming for my dissertation to align as much with my career as possible, for two reasons: a) my career goals are primarily administrative or otherwise non-faculty positions and b) work-life balance; it's much simpler to find interesting phenomena to analyze amongst the things I spend my workday thinking about than it is to shift to an entirely new topic after a long work day - and I do care deeply about my work. To that end, I'm currently interested in and expect that my dissertation will investigate the role of student organizations/student leadership as a humanizing or liberatory practice in STEM education, as well as how these students navigate and wield institutional power; my day job is supporting the many student organizations in Purdue's College of Engineering, so this aligns well with that. 

My thinking on my area of interest has been influenced and shaped in many ways - in fact, it feels hard to say that everything I've experienced isn't an influence in some way, but that's not much of a useful answer. I would say conversations with advisors and mentors and my career have had the most influential impact on my thinking about students and humanizing/liberatory practices. In my career, I started as an academic advisor for first-year engineering (FYE) students at Purdue. While I don't believe the FYE program was designed to be a "weed out" program - I think the faculty who built the program do genuinely care deeply about the success of all their students - it does sometimes have that effect for students. In my first role as an academic advsior, I watched students struggle with an educational system that felt entirely indifferent to them, and that often failed to acknowledge their humanity. As I grew in my role and started doing more administrative work, I saw this play out in both ways - students who were able to find themselves and a sense of community were able to flourish and accomplish great things; other students who experienced the inhumanity of some of these systems struggled, stalled, or even dropped out. In one instance, I remember a student who had a genuine medical emergency, but because of the way a particular excused absence policy was interpreted (her emergency was dental in nature, and the policy demanded a note from an emergency room, not a dentist), she was met with hostility, accusations of dishonesty, and complete inflexibility in making any accommodations for her situation. She ended up having to repeat a course she had already performed very well in, setting her graduation back by a year, and costing her family another year of out-of-state tuition. She and I both felt powerless against a few sentences of policy written on an obscure webpage. This is an exemplar of many similar experiences I've had with many students, and I believe we simply have to be capable of more humanity in our approach to education. Through conversations with advisors and mentors, I've been able to name and understand some of these phenomena, and better understand how education ought to be. These advisors and mentors have pointed me to important works like Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress, which have been majorly influential on my thinking and will also serve as the theoretical underpinning for my dissertation work. 

So, my research interests in the potential humanizing/liberatory function of student organizations stems directly from these experiences. In my currently role, I've had the joy of working with several of student leaders in engineering who have demonstrated a deep concern for the wellbeing and humanity of other students - even students they don't know. Likewise, students in these groups often report feeling like the organization is their family away from home, providing a sense of belonging and community that they don't get from being in the classroom; these same students are willing to expend tremendous effort in support of their organizations' goals and fellow members. To me, this is worth investigating. What exactly is the phenomenon at play here? Is it simply the group membership? Working toward a common goal? Is it the institutional power that some of these groups wield (like the Student Council)? What can we learn about these experiences to better improve the STEM curriculum for all students?

As far as what I already know, my coursework has been very thorough in introducing me to both theoretical lenses (i.e., humanizing curricula) as well as the more niche understanding of the role of student organizations. I feel I have a strong grasp on the theoretical components - Freire, Giroux, and hooks provide accessible and powerful tools for analyzing these kinds of curricula, and my coursework thus far has given me ample opportunity to practice this kind of analysis. Likewise, I've already completed a fairly comprehensive - but not quite exhaustive - literature review on the role/effects of student organizations broadly. I would say there are still some areas I need more information, which are student leadership, broadly as a concept to tackle in my literature review, and narrative inquiry, as I plan to take a narrative-ethnographic approach to my dissertation. 

My professional goals aren't set in stone, but, as I noted in a previous post, I'm most likely not looking for a tenure-track faculty position. I would consider a position as a full-time lecturer, but I have concerns about the job security and availability of those sorts of positions. My primary goal from this program is to advance my administrative career; there's a bit of a ceiling in administration that, with rare exception, typically requires a PhD to break through; thus, I'm hoping my PhD will demonstrate the breadth and depth of research experience to gain access to these higher level administrative roles.