I actually had never heard the above phrase before last night referring to the weather in this area. Friday I was running around West Philly with my shoes totally soaked from the rain/slush/snow and by Saturday afternoon, it was totally melted and the sun was shining. Granted, my shoes are still not totally dry, but fingers-crossed for only sunny days ahead!
It is hard to believe that we just have finished the first week of classes since Spring "break," but it was a loooong week. Master's Admitted Students Preview Day is on Friday, March 27th, and I will be there at 7:30am setting up with the admissions team. (There's breakfast and lunch soo...I shouldn't complain!) I hope to see some potential IEDPers and GSEers in general on Friday!
Highlights:
Curriculum Mapping: We looked at the overlaps of a teacher education curriculum for a school in Pakistan that our professor worked on.
I have not talked a lot about my "easy, fun class" (as I call it): "Self, Culture and Cognitive Development" is the real title. I randomly shopped the class and I fell in love because the instructor is a PhD candidate and super relaxed and the class always has really interesting readings. For the class, we have to write a proposal for research or an intervention related to the topic. I chose to look at the
cross-cultural differences of life-long meditators from Eastern and
Western contexts and contrast them to non-meditators from the same contexts on the view of the self. I will admit it: I totally dorked out while researching. It is not a long final product (10-pages double-spaced minimum) and I saved 28 articles because I found so many interesting ones so I wanted to save them to read "when I have time" aka after grad school. One quotation that really got me thinking was: "It feels a certain way to be a self in one cultural system or another; and in itself, understanding these differences is an extremely important part of understanding culture" (Cohen & Hoshino-Browne, 2007, p. 3).
After a 5 hour working-meeting for the curriculum project, I headed to the library and worked gleefully for 4 hours straight on the midterm paper (5 pages). My favorite classes are always ones where I can chose my topic and really enjoy the whole process of researching and writing and it doesn't feel like "work." That's how ALL of education should be, but instead the gleefulness ends up getting stacked under all the stress to get it done (often because of ridiculous page number minimums).
We had an IEDP alumni panel this week to hear about life after Penn. Some found it reassuring. I was rather the opposite. There were a lot of questions about jobs, interviewing, etc. and I left the class feeling soo anxious. It doesn't help that my internship is not settled yet, but I guess it was also a reality check that although we are all running around like chickens with our heads cut off, we are almost finished! It is scary and exciting, but there were also some great readings about identity for the class, one of which was from our professor, Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher (2014). A key quotation for me was: "Since my voice is one of the few (at this time) that speak to the experiences of a subset of Muslim immigrant youth, rather than shying away from my research because of the skepticism on one hand and pressure to represent on the other, I have to “speak louder”" (Ghaffar-Kucher, 2014, p. 14).
We also read Carr (2011) and these sentences resonated the most with me and ones I hope to remember in the future while going forward in this field of development: "We cannot unsettle development without unsettling ourselves, as development requires us to think about the ideas of change and progress, and our role in both...If you are unsettled, it means you are paying attention to this tension and trying to address it. If you are uncomfortable, you are probably doing it right" (Carr, 2011, p. 2798)
Trivial lowlights: the grad center was closed yesterday due to some planned power outage so I had to heat up my food in GSE and eat a REALLY early dinner (at 3:30pm), my shoes are still not dry from Friday's snow, and a housemate ate TWO of my amazing Trader Joe's veggie burgers...
References (My professors read this blog! I have to make sure it's in APA formatting at least! This is what grad school does to you...)
Carr, E. R. (2011). If you are uncomfortable, you are probably doing it right". In (D. Simon (Ed.) Geographers and/in Development: A Symposium. Environment and Planning.
It is hard to believe that we just have finished the first week of classes since Spring "break," but it was a loooong week. Master's Admitted Students Preview Day is on Friday, March 27th, and I will be there at 7:30am setting up with the admissions team. (There's breakfast and lunch soo...I shouldn't complain!) I hope to see some potential IEDPers and GSEers in general on Friday!
Highlights:
Curriculum Mapping: We looked at the overlaps of a teacher education curriculum for a school in Pakistan that our professor worked on. I have not talked a lot about my "easy, fun class" (as I call it): "Self, Culture and Cognitive Development" is the real title. I randomly shopped the class and I fell in love because the instructor is a PhD candidate and super relaxed and the class always has really interesting readings. For the class, we have to write a proposal for research or an intervention related to the topic. I chose to look at the
cross-cultural differences of life-long meditators from Eastern and
Western contexts and contrast them to non-meditators from the same contexts on the view of the self. I will admit it: I totally dorked out while researching. It is not a long final product (10-pages double-spaced minimum) and I saved 28 articles because I found so many interesting ones so I wanted to save them to read "when I have time" aka after grad school. One quotation that really got me thinking was: "It feels a certain way to be a self in one cultural system or another; and in itself, understanding these differences is an extremely important part of understanding culture" (Cohen & Hoshino-Browne, 2007, p. 3). After a 5 hour working-meeting for the curriculum project, I headed to the library and worked gleefully for 4 hours straight on the midterm paper (5 pages). My favorite classes are always ones where I can chose my topic and really enjoy the whole process of researching and writing and it doesn't feel like "work." That's how ALL of education should be, but instead the gleefulness ends up getting stacked under all the stress to get it done (often because of ridiculous page number minimums).
We had an IEDP alumni panel this week to hear about life after Penn. Some found it reassuring. I was rather the opposite. There were a lot of questions about jobs, interviewing, etc. and I left the class feeling soo anxious. It doesn't help that my internship is not settled yet, but I guess it was also a reality check that although we are all running around like chickens with our heads cut off, we are almost finished! It is scary and exciting, but there were also some great readings about identity for the class, one of which was from our professor, Dr. Ghaffar-Kucher (2014). A key quotation for me was: "Since my voice is one of the few (at this time) that speak to the experiences of a subset of Muslim immigrant youth, rather than shying away from my research because of the skepticism on one hand and pressure to represent on the other, I have to “speak louder”" (Ghaffar-Kucher, 2014, p. 14).
We also read Carr (2011) and these sentences resonated the most with me and ones I hope to remember in the future while going forward in this field of development: "We cannot unsettle development without unsettling ourselves, as development requires us to think about the ideas of change and progress, and our role in both...If you are unsettled, it means you are paying attention to this tension and trying to address it. If you are uncomfortable, you are probably doing it right" (Carr, 2011, p. 2798)
Trivial lowlights: the grad center was closed yesterday due to some planned power outage so I had to heat up my food in GSE and eat a REALLY early dinner (at 3:30pm), my shoes are still not dry from Friday's snow, and a housemate ate TWO of my amazing Trader Joe's veggie burgers...
References (My professors read this blog! I have to make sure it's in APA formatting at least! This is what grad school does to you...)
Carr, E. R. (2011). If you are uncomfortable, you are probably doing it right". In (D. Simon (Ed.) Geographers and/in Development: A Symposium. Environment and Planning.
Cohen, D., & Hoshino‐Browne,
E. (2007). Culture and the structure of personal experience: Insider and
outsider phenomenologies of the self and social world. Advances in
experimental social psychology, 39,
1-67.
Ghaffar-Kucher, A.
(2014). Writing culture; inscribing lives: a reflective treatise on the
burden of representation in native research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, (ahead-of-print), 1-17.
(Not sure why there are white-highlights and I can't get rid of them for some reason, grrr!)
(Not sure why there are white-highlights and I can't get rid of them for some reason, grrr!)
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