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What’s in a summer?

I went home over the weekend, I met with several members of my speech community.

There was lots to talk about… And I realized, my IRB protocol might be a moot point.

After all, my Culturally Responsive Curriculum Development work (scheduled to take place at 1-4 pod sessions along the Klamath River basin this summer), must be responsive to the desires, hopes, dreams and BOUNDARIES of the speech community which has gifted me with a reason to come to grad school in the first place… My Karuk language.

What can I accomplish during a summer?

There are many tasks that can be accomplished during this summer for my Mellon Scholarship. As the quarter swiftly moves to an end, the task of organizing a collaborative research agenda can be daunting and overwhelming, especially when we also have other responsibilities on campus, such as teaching, research, etc. For my project, I have decided to adopt a Project Framework that will allow arranging visually deadlines and objectives.

I’d love to say that there is SO much I can do over a summer (and truly, there is a lot we can get accomplished), but the reality is, there are hurdles and delays that complicate our time commitments.

This week we have been asked to question what can we do over a summer–the question, I think, not only being what we can conceivably accomplish with regards to a particular project, but what kind of change we can effect for the community and public with whom we are working.

This week I have been thinking about the challenges of undertaking a public humanities project for a summer and what I can realistically accomplish. While we’re all here because we believe in the importance of public scholarship, public scholarship and particularly public humanities projects can suffer from being broad, ambitious, and, at times, nebulous in scope. For this reason, I think that these kinds of projects benefit from specificity more so than other academic projects, like writing an academic article.

This is a tough question to answer, especially since I think the central question for me is: what can we do over a summer? Our readings have emphasized the idea of collaboration and exchange in community-engaged work, so while I can set goals for myself, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that this project will involve a host of other people–and communicating with them will be a big part of the project.

Making feasible plans is central to public scholarship. As I work to plan my project, I am very concerned about planning a feasible project that will still provide meaningful benefits to Yolo County Food Bank. I think project management is a crucial skill to develop for public scholars. Although project management and planning are important to any research project, I believe they are even more important in public scholarship due to the involvement of multiple parties and the more pressing timelines in the public sphere.

Week 1)

Native American “educational goals [are] profound—to produce competent, caring adults—and consequences for failure [are] equally profound.  The ultimate test of each human educational system is a people’s survival (Lomawaima, K. & McCarty, T.; To Remain An Indian, 2006).”

What is “Public Scholarship” in relation to educational paradigms in existence, and I do mean paradigmS.  During Discussion, I find myself feeling vulnerable.  I don’t mean to be a bull in a china shop, but I also can’t help feeling like a tea cup on a horse track…

I am assuming the ‘here’ in the question refers to the public scholars seminar. So, my answer, although directed at explaining why I am interested in being a public scholar, begins by pointing out a coincidence, which is the fact that I have often asked that question in my educational journey. Particularly, in the last four years of graduate work at UC Irvine, the question has been recurring consistently. On the one hand, as I am the first in my extended family to venture into a Ph.D. program, I have had to resort to that question to make sense of the experience I am going through.