A full day of thinking...

It's been a full day of thinking about my dissertation research project. So much of what I heard about today, or, not so much, but a good deal, had to do with research on literacy. It was hard not to think about my own work.

I keep coming back to this two-part structure of my work--the literacy narrative, the genre analysis--and I keep questioning the second piece. It's time to admit out loud that I really don't have enough to go on, when it comes to thinking through the genre analysis piece. I mean, Tony's essay is fine--but still speculative. This project wasn't an ethnography, where I was in the classroom, observing, taking it all in, and, most importantly, getting the teacher's perspective. It's not fair to talk about the assignments when i don't have that much to go on in terms of what the teacher wanted, why the teacher asked the students to compose the assignments, and what she/he made of the students' work. 

Saying this out loud...I'm not sure it prevents me from returning to this work to use it in a different way--to point out, for example, the extent to which school and work genres are different or to illustrate the struggle students have when faced with unfamiliar genres or how well they can do when writing is connected to activities. But I'm feeling as though, perhaps, especially after today, the descriptive nature of the work should, perhaps, be enough. Why has it never felt like enough? It's felt that way from the beginning. But perhaps that's what it is, descriptive work--and, in the end, the descriptive work--telling their stories, as Deborah Brandt put it today--is of value. And, in the dissertation, there were tentative conclusions or assertions that I was making as a result of this descriptive work. What were they? And perhaps I should focus more on presenting the multiple cases in a single article and then offering my tentative observations.

The problem is, the notion of the "reverse commute" is something that came up along the way, and yet, this is of interest to me. The reverse commute asks the question--what do adult students experience as writers as they transition from the workplace to the classroom, from writing-for-the-boss to writing-for-the-teacher? This is not a question that I had when I started this project. It is a question that emerged during the project. I was able to follow-up with Brad to talk a bit about this--but not with the others. For example, I never asked them what it was like to move from writing-for-the-boss to writing-for-the-teacher. I'm not sure I ever asked that question out-right. It's an interesting question. It would be interesting to hold up their workplace writing and academic writing and ask about how they make sense of the two worlds. But that is a different project than the one I did. 

Where does this leave me? Needing to focus on what I did do, and what I do have. And what I do have is a small list of implications that I do come to. And can I list them? I would have to look back at the final chapter of the dissertation. 

And what don't I have--context. Sources. The problem is the same problem I've had for some time now--how to situate the study, who can help me frame it, so that it's not just stories about these participants. For Sohn, she frames her stories with research on literacy practices and research on appalachian women and the appalachian region. So, for me, who or what do I surround my stories with? Research on adult students and literacy practices. That may be it--but that's going to require some work, particularly when it comes to the part about adult students. 

A place to begin next time...what were my findings? How did I answer those original questions?

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