A few weeks ago, after skimming through the formatting of my dissertation one last time, I said a little prayer. The last call was, “God, I leave it in your hands now.”
Before I said those words, I had done everything possible to ensure my success. I selected committee members who would push me to think deeply about my work without the dismissal of my personhood. I wrote, rewrote, and accepted/rejected changes from my advisor. I talked to multiple data analysts. I did 27 interviews, including four in a day and another six over a week. I collected over 100 survey responses from across the city. I got through the Institutional Review Board process, luckily without many hiccups. I defended my dissertation proposal, different than the actual dissertation defense. I wrote that proposal over six weeks. I completed my coursework in two and a half years. I accepted the challenge of taking on sociology and education.
I left teaching to become a full-time student again. And kept all the other titles, too.
At the heart of the study were the lived experiences and embodied histories of New York City public school teachers. On a few occasions, I’ve hinted at the core of my study (and have even before I started this doctoral work), but let me be clear: many of the ways people think about “professionalism” are inadequate and elitist. Attending to the fidelity and integrity of one’s work often gets conflated with subjective, narrow forms of how teachers work. This seems especially true for teachers in schools that are underresourced and over-scrutinized since the No Child Left Behind Act.
But to get that understanding, you would have had to deeply and intentionally listen to teachers. More power to you if you’ve taught in the same era alongside them.
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