Connecting

On my commutes to and from campus, I often meet other academics who make the 1.5 to 2 hour bus ride each way much more pleasant. Yesterday, for example, I sat with a Trent professor whose reaction upon finding out that I was a fourth-year doctoral student was, “Oh, I’m so sorry” 🙂 She teaches a cognition and instruction course very similar to CTL7011 to undergrads hoping to become teachers. Although she covers more theoretical material, it was really helpful to hear about her teaching practices to make students more self-aware of their learning while covering similar material. She also gave me a journal reference that would be useful. Most of all, it was inspiring to hear about her graduate student experiences, especially because she was a mother of two who had commuted to an university even further away than mine for five years and then a post doc for two years.

This was a face-to-face connection, but I’ve also gotten resources from online connections. Admittedly, signing up for alerts from various journals and organizations doesn’t have the same kind of emotional connection, but these electronic resources do help in their own sort of way. For instance, I got an email from Sense Publishers to preview a PDF copy of Wolff-Michael Roth’s Doing Qualitative Research: Praxis of Method. So far, I think it’s a good read for graduate students interested in research design, especially design experiments and ethnographic studies.