Why Do I Do It?

Among other things, this blog is set up to track my research progress as I take on several human subjects research projects. I am working on analyzing data about service learning and political engagement that I collected as a Faculty Fellow for California Campus Compact and the Carnegie Foundation. I'm also continually working on fashioning research projects and collecting data on Writing Partners. Those two endeavors may be on the back burner in Spring 2010, though, because I have been asked to conduct a study of the impact of class caps being lowered to 20 students in all writing classes at San Jose State -- thanks to the wisdom of our Provost.

Why do I want to blog instead of keep a private journal? I am not sure. I have a few ideas: when I blog, I take time with my writing, revise it, try to make it good; when I journal, I just slap any old thoughts down there. So, for one, it may help me write sentences that are much closer to being ready to be included in an article or book. So that is the first reason: Efficiency.

The Efficiency reason is just a reality of my life: I have to find ways to work smarter not harder in order to fit in all that I want to do (parenthood, scholarship, teaching, service, citizenship, fun and friendship).

Another reason to do it is altruistic: my thoughts and musings and descriptions of my process might help someone else – a grad student or junior faculty member like me who is trying the make her way through qualitative research processes. This assumes that I will have an audience for this blog, which is unlikely. I could try to do things that would help me get an audience, like get more active in Kairosnews and link my blog there. OR I could just let it fly out there in the blogosphere and see what happens – that is sort of the Promise/Threat/Thrill of a potential but unknown audience.

A third reason to do it is far less altruistic and perhaps a bit linked to the first reason: so that I get credit for these ideas I am having. I used to swear that I’d never be “like that,” protecting my ideas so that only I can publish them. I still do not really believe in that model, but here is the problem. I am slow: I get ideas in my head long before I get them out there to publish, and I want some record that I have been thinking things for a while and not stealing them from someone who gets published sooner than me. It is less so that people do not steal from me and more so that I prove (to whom?) that I am not stealing.

Musings on Music

At my undergraduate alma mater Bethany College, I wrote my senior project on “The Poetry of Rock.” I have since shifted my attention to studying composition and rhetoric and writing studies. But every once in a while, I like to look back at song lyrics and have a go at them!

In David Bowie’s song “Young American” the word “American” is at the center of the song, yet “American” is othered in the song. Instead of an American being the unuttered norm, the American is named and in effect othered, pointed out as one among many. What I mean is that the song (a song) could also be about a Young Brit or a Young Chinese or a Young Iranian. Often “an American” is the assumed universal protagonist of the pop tune – at least in my perception due to my socialization as a (former : ) young American!

I tended to imagine an American person at the center of every love song I crooned to on the radio. I never imagined a person from Ghana or Germany as I played videos in my mind (before the age of actual videos – yes I am *that* far from being a *young* American). David Bowie points out the plurality of possible protagonists by naming an “American” in a way that Bruce Springsteen does not in his Born in the USA (even thought that cannot be read as a blindly patriotic song); Bowie can only sing about a young American is as outsider, whereas Springsteen can sing about the USA as an American himself. As such, they position “the American” differently (all of this brings to mind now-dim memories of Henry James’s _The American_ . . . ).

In my undergraduate days (my Young American days) this would be a great first draft for a paper explicating song lyrics, but now my scholarship has a different focus so I can use my blog as a sort of “essay germ” depository. This is fun!