My Thesis

During my undergraduate work in Arizona, I became aware of (and opposed to) Proposition 300 that – amongst other things – forced public universities and community colleges to charge undocumented students out-of-state tuition. My experiences teaching, tutoring and generally interacting socially with undocumented students encouraged me to utilize my privileged status as an aspiring academic (a position of authority) to share the stories of these students and demonstrate that Proposition 300 was poorly crafted public policy which shattered the dreams of many bright young people and their families. Since that time, I have kept in touch with many of these students and know the actions they (and the university administration) are taking to resist or circumvent the law.

An exhaustive literature review on the academic success rates of undocumented students and college access for undocumented students has unearthed very little. Unfortunately, because of their immigration status and the obvious jeopardy they place themselves (and their families) in when revealing said status, there is a dearth of scholarship or even a mention of their existence. I have located a handful of recent dissertations (completed within the last 3 years) and a few articles.

Given the context of this project, an ethnographic study would be most appropriate but considering the short time span and daunting IRB clearance necessary to properly conduct such data collection methods, I believe a conceptual paper is in order. With that said, I would like to deconstruct Proposition 300 through a critical theoretical lens, demonstrating the illogical premises this policy is based on and the juxtaposition of the state keeping undocumented students at arms-length for the purposes of reduced tuition but welcoming such young people with open arms when encouraging them to join the military. This is but one component of an argument in which I hope will properly unpack Proposition 300 (micro) and help tease out more national/international (macro) issues dealing with youth, the postmodern western state and globalization.

Thesis Projects

Alright Gentlemen,

I'm sure the two of you are working on your thesis projects, so I thought I would share with you the outline of my own. I am currently in the process of writing my thesis proposal, which in my program counts as my comprehensive exam (comps).

As part of SPF 301 Culture and Schooling, I require my students to keep a journal over the course of the semester. The prompt for each week is simply, "How does what we are discussing in class connect to what you are seeing in your placement sites?" The journals have approximately 14 entries each and there are approximately 30 students who completed journals and agreed to let me use them.

I want to analyze the journals using critical discourse analysis as a method to uncover the hidden and underlying meanings within the text. I wish to focus specifically on race. I will share with you that already several themes are emerging from the journals including race as something to be overcome and race as an excuse. I then want to place these finding side by side with my own pedagogy and practice in the class. These journals are representative of a particular place and time and I am the intended audience, meaning I am an inextricable part of these texts. Using the method of practitioner inquiry, I wish to explore my own aims and goals as the intructor for this course, as well as the stated aims of the course from the syllabus to determine whether or not the students, while engaged in the practice of critically interrogating their own pedagogy, also critically examined their own held notions of race.

That's what I'm working on day and night these days. What are the two of you working on?