Defining A Research Focus

Defining A Research Focus

When I started grad school, I was after a job.  When I got the degree and job, I was after money to pay back debts.  While I paid off my student loans through semesters and semesters paychecks, I too improved my pedagogy with years of experience.  Now, with degree, job, no debt, some money, and refined semesters of teaching, what’s next?

This is a question I’ve begun to answer this fall 2016 semester.  

It’s hard to leave the classroom, to graduate, and continue productivity.  Deadlines, reading lists, assignments, these are the motivators of ideas as a student, but what motivates independent thinking?

None of us (mostly) know what we want to do when starting college.  My background is in linguistics, but as a linguistics student, the more semesters that passed, the more I realized this wasn’t exactly the field for me.  Sure, my degree led to employment, crucial employment mind you, but money isn’t the ends, which is a contradiction of terms, I know.  Some people view ‘gettin’ ends’ as their ultimate life goal.  Yikes!

I don’t understand how a teacher could teach the same thing for years on end.  The same lessons, content, lectures that pair with typical course content, this approach is, well, boring and fails to impact students and the community, a tall order indeed.

In a (sort of) second stage in my career, I’m interested in making a difference, in impacting the community and students, to connect students with their community, to get out of the classroom for real world learning experiences.  I now work less (from four jobs to two) and volunteer more.  I tutor a 5 year old at Jacox elementary and will teach in Norfolk City Jail in the spring.  Less money, more impact.

I’m redesigning my courses to include social justice, open access, and service learning perspectives.  My students too will experience, learn about, and serve community causes.

In these choices, I hope that I’m too defining a life-long research focus.  As a student of linguistics, laboring over phonetics and syntax, language acquisition theory and research methods, I never thought beyond that first job, that first paycheck.  Now I’m thinking about who I am and what I want to accomplish as an educator, as a public servant.

I feel very lucky to be employed by Old Dominion University, a place where I can define the course of my work.