I Used To Be An Academic

I used to be an academic and I have a few extra initials, publications, and presentations under my belt to prove it. I soundly rejected academia after I graduated because I found that I don't have the temperment for it. I'm a bit too big picture focused to hunker down and circle around one main idea until I get tenure and turn into a vulture circling around the endless grantmanship corpse.

What I do have is a real love of the research and the play of ideas. I'm never as happy as when I'm applying my framework to a situation and thinking about how the small details fit into the larger sceme of the system. I'm never as unhappy as when I'm forced to write it up. See, I'm not an academic and I'm not a writer. I'm a talker and a "thinker out loud"er and often joked with the researchers that I worked with that I should just get a tape recorder and transcribe what I had just said.

I just had a paper accepted at a conference. Well, actually, I just had an abstract accepted at a conference, the paper needs to come next and that's its own mess.

What the acceptance inspired in me was what I wanted to research next. I have an opportunity to do some research on a new program where kids take some very specialized science classes that lead to internship the following year. One interesting aspect is that the research scientists teach the kids and then the kids work in their labs. This is actually a pretty new idea at this grade level but not one that particularily interests me.

The interesting aspect of this research project is the way the students process their experiences. Recent research demonstrated that it is important to give kids and opportunity to share their experiences with their peers, compare notes in a way, and to discuss what their learning and adjusting in a professional scientific research lab. What we have set up is a duel system for that: an in person moderated discussion group and an online version. Why is this interesting to me?

Well, I'll have to take you back a step. The most interesting piece of research that I did was about how kids participate in the classroom. There is an idea called "gatekeeping" in which someone or something controls the flow of participation, favoring or blocking participation based on their own sense of how participation should happen. A classic example of this is how teachers will only call the kid with her hand raised and scold the kid who just shouts out. The teacher is priviledging on form of participation over another. In terms of classroom management this is a totally legit thing to do but research has shown that this is also about the teacher's notions of student's abilities and a whole slew of other thing.

I took this idea and applied it to how students gatekeep one another. Classic example, a girl is called on by the teacher, gives her answer and is then mocked or shot down by another classmate. If the teacher then shuts down the other student she is the gatekeeper, if not, the student is the gatekeeper. In the world of middle school, that dominant and aggressive student is sending all sorts of signals that shape participation regardless of the teachers response. There is a wide variety of ways to apply this framework.

For this current project I would like to apply this framework by comparing gatekeeping in the in person class and the online environment. Once you change the participation methods, raising ones hand vs an asyncronous reply online, you may change the way that students gatekeep. Give that we can observe this type of stuff in both settings it strikes me as a good opportunity.

The first thing I have to do is publish the initial paper and the second is to do some research into online participation. After months of essential brain death, it is nice to finally get the juices flowing again.