Seven pieces of advice for students
entering graduate (or undergraduate) study in education—and a lot of other
disciplines too.
Last week I had the honor of addressing
the students entering several of UCLA’s graduate programs in education. I
offered them seven thinking and writing tips that I believe will be helpful as
they pursue their studies. These tips are also relevant to a number of other
areas of study, and could prove useful to undergraduate students as well. With
that, let’s enter the speech right after I made my introductory remarks.
***
You can call these tips habits of mind,
or intellectual strategies, or principles of inquiry, or simply tricks of the
trade that I’ve picked up over the years and am passing along to you to use in
your thinking and your writing as you pursue your studies.
1) Pay attention to your writing. Many
of us in education come out of the psychological or social sciences and never
had the opportunity to focus on our writing and to get detailed feedback on it.
But writing is an exceptionally potent tool for you regardless of the program
you’re in. It will be invaluable in your classwork, and also professionally as
you see things that trouble you and you want to give voice to or—something we
don’t do enough—when you see things that need to be celebrated. Writing will be
part of your intellectual and professional toolbox for the rest of your
careers.
Take advantage of resources. There are
undergraduate and graduate-level writing courses on campus. There’s a Writing
Center. And when you form study groups—and I hope you do—make them writing and study groups.
Trust me on this. Regardless of the type
of work you do and your future goals, the more effectively you can consider
your audience, craft your argument, turn a phrase, the more likely you’ll
achieve those goals.
2) Make your criticisms as even-handed
as you can. You will be called upon while you’re here—and in many cases after
you graduate—to critique a reading, or a policy, or an educational practice.
Don't just be a flamethrower. Before launching into your critique do your best
to present that reading, policy, or practice as fairly as you can, even if it
irritates you to do so. Then develop your critique. Your critique will be all
the more effective if your reader sees you being even-handed. Which doesn’t
mean you’re being wishy washy or can’t take a strong point of view. You can. In
fact, I think the strongest critiques are ones that fairly present elements of
the argument, policy, or practice that you’re questioning—and then
systematically, point-by-point deconstruct them or demonstrate their
inadequacy.
3) Related to #2. Investigate the things
that trouble you. Most of you as part of your program will visit schools or
classrooms or tutoring or counseling sessions or some kind of community meeting
or event. Sometimes you’ll be really impressed by what you see. And sometimes
you’ll have questions. And sometimes what you see and hear seems wrongheaded,
even harmful. Try your best to find out the rationale behind what you saw. Talk
to people. Don't assume, explore. I’m embarrassed to tell you how often in my
life I’ve made a quick judgment about something a teacher or principal or
social worker did only to be humbled later when I learned the full background
for their actions. But, let’s say that what you find out confirms your negative
judgment. That will also happen. Well, then you will have a better
understanding of what you saw, a deeper grasp of the dynamics and background
factors of what troubled you—which puts you in a better position to critique
what you saw in a substantial and principled way.
4) Types of evidence. In a lot of my
work I rely on stories, vignettes, interviews, scenes from
classrooms—qualitative data. But I also draw on numbers, statistical data on
frequencies, percentages, ratios. And there are quotations from authoritative
sources, from scholarly studies, policy reports, historical accounts, and the
like. Unfortunately, some people think that numbers come out of the devil’s
workshop or that stories are enjoyable but unsubstantial. Nothing could be
further from the truth. As a general rule, the more kinds of evidence you have
to support a claim or an argument, the stronger your claim or argument is. A
story or a clip of an interview can be powerful and moving, but it becomes more
convincing, I think, at least in some contexts, if it is paired with a
statistic that demonstrates the story or interview is representative of a
trend, is not an isolated occurrence. Likewise, statistics can be forceful, but
they can gain additional strength to move people to action when they’re
combined with a story that touches the heart. This combination of kinds of
evidence, of statistic and story is often what we see in the successful passage
of public policy.
5) Always remember, human behavior is
complex, and certainly education is complex. There is rarely, if ever, a single
explanation for anything. Think about your own behaviors. Can you explain why
you’re here? Why you care for the people you care for? Your relationship with
your parents? Even your sleeping and eating patterns? Can you explain any of it
with one motive or cause? Probably not.
Because of this rich complexity, be
cautious about attributing a single cause to any educational phenomenon or
explaining it with a single perspective. This is the power, I think, of what
feminist scholars and critical theorists refer to as “intersectionality.” That
is, that social characteristics—race, class, gender, sexual
orientation—intersect and interact. To best understand one, you need to look at
all in context and interaction.
Now, of course, there are times when you
do want to focus on a single phenomenon, a single possible cause because it has
been under-acknowledged or ignored. We might want to shine a light on race or
sexual orientation or, more specifically, we might want to focus on a single
variable in, let’s say, academic achievement, or college-going orientation, or
in the acquisition of language. Fine and good. There’s analytical reasons for
doing this. But remember that the highlighted phenomenon or variable still
plays out in everyday reality in concert with all the other bits and pieces of
our complex lives.
6) Whatever it is you’re interested in
or become interested in as you study here, learn its history.
You may be interested in teaching math
in the primary grades or in diversifying and enriching the literature read in
high school.
Or college affordability might be your
thing.
Or maybe feminist standpoint theory.
Or you’re taken with a particular
approach to student advising.
Or how about advanced statistical
methods like Structural Equation Modeling or Item Response Theory. Maybe these
are what you curl up with at night over a soothing cup of tea… or something
stronger.
All of these have an origin. People have
been working on them for a while, in some cases, a long while. Learning how
something came into being and how it developed can be so useful in the present,
affecting your understanding of it, its mistakes and blind alleys as well as
the missed opportunities that remain to be seized—things you can work on.
Knowing the past makes you a better practitioner in the present.
7) I just asked you to go deep in the
past. Now I’m going to ask you to try to gain a wide, broad view of the present.
It is the nature of graduate study that we specialize, we are trying to get
very good at something that is pretty specific: in your case, in college
advising, or in an area of teaching, or in a research topic. This is what we
do. Every once in a while, though, look up from your specialization and survey
the broad landscape of education and note where your specialization fits in. In
the vast system that extends from pre-school to graduate school and includes
adult school and occupational training, and much more, where does my
contribution belong? How does what
occurs in the rest of the system affect my sphere of work? How does my work
affect the rest of the system? Every so often, you want to ask yourself those
questions.
So those are my seven tips. I hope you
find them useful.
In wrapping up I’d like to offer this
suggestion. A little while ago, I recommended that you always keep in mind the
rich complexity of human life and educational practice and to not limit your
vision to a single way of seeing. Well, speaking of different ways of seeing,
you have here in your entering class a remarkable range of life experience, and
educational and professional experience, and knowledge of disciplines and
educational practices. What a reservoir of resources! Graduate school is immensely stimulating but
also taxing, growth-fostering but difficult. You’ll need good people around you
to help you process it all. Get to know each other, form meaningful
relationships, making sure that some of your new acquaintances have different
backgrounds and interests from yours. You will benefit greatly from this
diversity of background, interest, and knowledge.
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