And now for some poetic inspiration from the Writer's Almanac

I strongly recommend subscribing to the Writer's Almanac newsletter. You know, that 2 minutes they have on at like 6:47am with Garrison Keeler reading you a poem? Comes in email form, unfortunately without Garrison Keeler.

Anyway, today they have a poem from William Henry Davies, called "Leisure" about enjoying life. Read it and enjoy some life today.

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Inspired by women who find a way to balance their careers and their lives

The other day I went to the gym and saw a friend who had given birth to a beautiful little girl three weeks prior. She was just getting back into exercise, and maybe even taking a little time for herself. On those days when I feel "too tired" to go to the gym, I think of her and it inspires me.

I sometimes read the Mama, PhD blog and while sometimes I think they can sound a little complain-y, it does make real the challenges of combining family life with an academic career. The blog led me to this book, and a great essay by Barbara Jacobowitz which says, "My love for my work enhances what I bring to my children as a parent, and.. the love that I bear for my children brings something extra to my work." She never says it is easy, but is anything worth living for easy?

And no, I am not pregnant. What is it with people? I had a glass of seltzer at the party and everybody freaked out and said I must be. I sure hope not, because I also had a glass of wine. Something about turning 30 and people suddenly think you've turned into mom.

In the beginning, there was this: "My parents were Greek."

When I began to interview Dr. James Estafanos Alatis about his life and career, he told me, “One might want to start from the beginning. And how I got involved in languages at all.”

I said, “Yes.”

“My parents were Greek,” he said.

For Dr. Alatis, his life’s work in foreign language education, the teaching of English as a second language and advocacy for less commonly taught languages begins with Greek. From a Greek community of steel workers and small business owners in Weirton, West Virginia, Dr. Alatis pursued a vigorous academic career that encompasses work in education policy, educational leadership, and teaching. The stories of his origins and his sense of self as a Greek American highlight the transcultural nature of his experience. This exploration of Dr. Alatis’s life examines his fluid movement between cultural narratives of Greece and America, his interaction with the borderland language of Americanized Greek, and his dual experience of belonging to and alienation from the Greek community.

plugging away

I'm still plugging away at work, it's just been a whirlwind of activity in my life. You can tell from my desk, which is a mess.

Currently linking together the Greek-American immigrant experience, transcultural narratives of old and new traditions, and Dr. Alatis's life. I think it makes sense. I'm about to take a look at it in a few to see.

getting ready for comprehensive exams

I'm like, didn't I do this already? In undergrad? Yeah. That was a miserable time of life. This doesn't seem that bad.

I have to write 2 papers (we're calling them "scholarly articles"). Here are the comp questions:

1. Using Alistair Thompson's article "Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History" (Oral History Review 2007 34(1):49-70) as a starting point, what are the methods of creating oral history for the fourth paradigm transformation, the digital era? What are the ethical implications of using these new technologies to create oral history?

2. Dr. James E. Alatis attributes his interest in languages and linguistics to his upbringing in a Greek immigrant community in West Virginia. How does the literature on the transcultural experience of heritage language speakers illuminate this experience?

Thoughts? You wanna write them for me?

Ok more things I have to learn about.

By the way, this has been a huge week. We're under contract for a house in NE DC. Woo-hoo! I mean, keep your fingers crossed that it all works out, but if it does, we'll be the lovely owners of a 68 year old house with a hideous red-and-white awning, which will clearly come down.

National Council on the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (funded/supported by CAL? and Charles Ferguson)
Survey by Dr. Allen and Fritz Eeyani on the teaching of English in the US (done by the Office of Education sometime in the 1950s)

A brief list of things I need to learn about...

Origins of the TOEFL Test
Kenneth Mildenberger
Charles Ferguson
History of the Center for Applied Linguistics
...

To be continued....

Wikipedia has ethics, rules, peer review???

I'm discovering the elaborate system that is Wikipedia. Why? One of my initial goals for starting my oral history project is to create a Wikipedia page about Dr. Alatis. Wikipedia does have strict standards for articles which are biographies of living persons; however, I feel that I will be able to abide by their standards as well as those governing the prohibition of original research. As long as I reference Dr. Alatis's publications and other publicly available material (including research I conducted at the Georgetown archives), I think this will be easy provided I apply the Wikipedia standards of neutral point of view, etc.

It is a really sophisticated system. I have often referenced it as a quick way to learn about a topic, but I had no idea how elaborate a community it was. It's actually really cool.

Anyway, you can check out my user page and see what I'm currently working on over there.

lost and found

So I managed to make a pretty good stab at it after my post earlier today. I'm now back into the nitty-gritty (currently reading Wikipedia's policies on creating biographies of living persons.) My eyes are starting to zone out, but here is some of the stuff I have so far:

by way of introduction:
Dr. Alatis's life is important to me because of his profound influence on the field of foreign language education. He discovered a love of language at Greek school in West Virginia as a child, and throughout his life has worked with teachers, scholars, administrators, and students to foster a love of language and find ways to make language education successful. He gave out grant monies from the National Defense Education Act, and he was instrumental in professionalizing of the field of teaching English as a second language by serving as Executive Director of TESOL for over twenty years. Most of these facts, however, can be learned through a quick Google search. Oral history allows me to delve deeper, to ask questions, to hear the story from the individual and those surrounding him, and ultimately to create a new archive of knowledge from an accomplished man. My belief is that Dr. Alatis's story will not only serve to remind the foreign language community of the battles fought over the past 50 years, but as a model for oral historians of how we can use digital tools to breathe new life into an ancient method of collecting history. In this article, I discuss practical, how-to aspects of technologies I have used in this project and their implications for what Michael Frisch calls a return of aurality to oral history as well as ethical considerations of digital tools.

by way of talking about technology:

I also turned to the popular site Wikipedia. Despite the attention that Middlebury College received when their history department limited the use of Wikipedia as a primary source1. Brock Read, “Middlebury College History Department Limits Use of Wikipedia,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 53 Issue 24, February 16, 2007. , other scholars find Wikipedia to be a good first source that can often lead researchers in new directions2. Cathy Davidson, "We Can't Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies," The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 53, Issue 29, March 23, 2007; . The collaborative capability of Wikipedia allowed Ann Kirschner to create an article on Ala Gertner and use the research she had done for her book, Sala's Gift, culled from a trove of letters her mother had kept from her time in Nazi work camps3. Kirschner, Ann, "Adventures in the Land of Wikipedia," The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 53, Issue 13, November 11, 2006. . Wikipedia is often a way for those with similar interests to collaborate in the creation of knowledge, and the creation of knowledge by the crowd has been the subject of debate. I discuss the real-time and collaborative creation of knowledge through technology later in the article.

Voila.

Writer's block = bunch of crap

Well, at least that's what I'm telling myself.

I just sat down to start composing this "article" that I have had swimming in my head for at least a month now, and I don't know what it is - fear, nervousness, anxiety, the sense that I have never, ever read enough, whatever - but I just can't seem to write the thoughts down. Writing seems to be the hardest part of all the research that I'm doing, because every time I'm faced with the blank word processor screen, I freeze up. I even wrote down some partial thoughts at one point to get "warmed up," and it didn't seem to work.

But I can write here, maybe because I can see that some people are listening. So I'm going to warm up here and writer's block be damned.

When I began my work with Dr. Alatis, I entered another world. James E. Alatis was born in 1926 in Weirton, West Virginia. He is the son of Greek immigrants, his mother coming from Chios and his father from Cypress. At 82 years old, he is Dean Emeritis of the Georgetown School of Languages and Linguistics and Professor of Linguistics and Modern Greek. He teaches four days a week at Georgetown, and although at our first meeting he told me that he met with a colleague to discuss his retirement, he shows no signs of slowing down despite a debilitating eye condition.

Why is Dr. Alatis's world so different from my own? I am the daughter of two IT professionals, first generation college student, and avid technophile. During my time as a graduate student, I have conducted many interviews while learning the craft of both oral history and ethnography. I use a variety of technologies to help me transcribe interviews, record my observations, and write my conclusions. Without realizing it at first, I have been taking part in what Alistair Thompson calls the fourth paradigm transformation of oral history, the digital revolution in oral history (1). Ignoring all else that has occurred during the past half century, the digital revolution has created a divide for me to cross when interviewing Dr. Alatis. I have learned that the key is to enter his world completely, and then bring his stories back into my own, where I can use my abilities as a 21st century oral historian to bring new meaning to them, meaning that may have not been possible 10 or 20 years ago.

Ugh. I still feel like there's no "there" there - I'm working through it. Basically I want this to be an introduction to my work - giving the reader some key, interesting details about Dr. Alatis (like why do I want to know about this guy?), highlighting my methodology and especially why I am in a unique position to bring his story to life (I'm adept with technology, can bring his story to a wider audience), and finally, some meat to what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. Also, the goal is that this would be a publishable article - something that would give other oral historians some insight into new ways to bring oral history to life. I guess I can bring up the fact that I'll be using Wikipedia, why Wikipedia, etc, my blog, what that means. Even my Twitter - whenever I post here, it goes on Twitter, which then goes on facebook, which then draws in readers to read about my work and therefore about Dr. Alatis. And all of these things are simple to do. I guess the differences are that I (and others from my generation) tend to create in real-time... we don't research, write, edit, re-edit, edit, then edit some more. We write and hit "publish post," and then it becomes part of the public domain. What implications does that have for our narrators and for our craft?

OK. I'm definitely on to something here. Thank you, Google, Blogger, readers, whomever... I think blogging definitely cures writers' block.



(1) Alistair Thompson, "Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History." Oral History Review 34 (1) (2007): 49.