Author: Dr. Nicole Blalock

Cited: The First Citation

Academics, Cited

I was just informed by my wonderful fellow UCD graduate colleague (and friend) Dr. Kristina Casper-Denman, professor at American River College, that she has cited my work in her dissertation. To my knowledge this is the first citation of my published work.

Her dissertation, “California Indian Education Association (CIEA): Working Towards Educational Sovereignty” explores the history of indigenous educational movements in California and suggests that the future of of academic sovereignty lies in continued reclaiming by the indigenous nations across the state and improved methods for increasing cultural competency of school instructors at all grade levels.

Congrats to Dr. Casper-Denman who earned her Ph.D. in Native American Studies in 2013!

After the Ph.D.

Academics

It is with great excitement that I announce the first part of my post-Ph.D. journey: this Friday I begin my postdoctoral work at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College of Arizona State University! I have just moved to Arizona (and yes, in July and August it is HOT) but am looking forward to what awaits me under the supervision of Dr. Audrey Beardsley. Arizona is a really unique place with small, rural indigenous communities; small and large reservations that cross state and nation boundaries; and large, urban centers. With a number of well-respected scholars in my field, I know ASU will be a really great place to learn and grow over the next two years.

Institute on Statistical Analysis for Education Policy: Causal Inference

Academics

Despite being so close to dissertation submission (yes, I wrote at night, in between sessions, and on my flights), I flew off to D.C. for a fun three day institute given by the American Educational Research Association on causal inference analyses for education policy research. The institute focused on design of randomized experiments and challenges to implementation in educational settings. We considered methodological approaches such as propensity scores, regression discontinuity, instrumental variables, path analysis, and structural equation modeling as methods of establishing causal relationships. I met graduate students and faculty from around the U.S., and hope that we will have connections that we can develop into future collaborations.

 
I encourage anyone in education policy that wants to spend a few days with great faculty teachers dialoguing about causal inference with research, apply to attend. Watch for the opportunity here: http://www.aera.net/ProfessionalOpportunitiesFunding/FundingOpportunities/StatisticalAnalysisCausalInference/tabid/14751/Default.aspx.

Your Tablet as a Productivity Tool: Organizing Your Apps

Academics, Productivity

I will say it now: I hate messy desktop screens.

As my work became more integrated with technology tools, I found that I needed an efficient way to organize my apps on my tablet. I didn’t want to flip through endless screens to find what I use most, nor did I want to remember if I filed something on the “personal” screen or the “academic” screen. I needed a way to organize myself so that no matter what I was doing, I would quickly find the right app, helping me integrate my tablet into the natural course of my activities.

What finally worked best for me, after trying many different schemes, was organizing apps by what I do with them. This goes beyond the category types you’ll find them organized under in the Play Store or iTunes and instead describes the actual function. Taking a break and want to catch up on news feeds? Check out my “read” folder. Time to update the blog? Look in “write”. Skype date with a colleague who moved across the country? I’ll find that in “talk”.

Screenshot_2013-05-06-20-09-30

As you can see, I have my folders on an upper row. Now, my apps that I’m going to use frequently that I don’t want to tap through to find, are situated on a second row and include the obvious – my web browser, calendar, notebook, and email. Everything else that I use on a weekly basis, and yes, that includes Organ Trail, the zobmie-awesome Oregon Trail spin-off, is located in a top row folder. The other four screens of my tablet don’t even include anything at this point and everything else on the device can be accessed in the full menu if needed.

If you’ve been struggling to integrate your devices into your work-flow, then think about trying this action-based organization system. How do you organize your apps? Have you found a system that helps you work and play?

A lot happening at AERA 2013

Academics, Presentations

As usual, a lot happened at the 2013 meeting of the American Educational Research Association. This conference is so big, I don’t think I’ll ever get close to exploring all of it. This year’s highlights for me included our first fireside chat mentoring session in the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas SIG, presenting preliminary analysis from my dissertation, and being voted in as program co-chair for the 2014 meeting.

This year, Program Chair Dr. Eve Tuck introduced the idea of creating a mentoring space in our SIG program. While we worked with her during the planning process, my colleague Crystal Jensen and I developed some ideas about using the time to have small group discussions on particular career-oriented topics. We had 8 junior-senior scholar pairs scheduled to participate and around 40 scholars attended the session. Crystal and I spent the session considering directions for 2014 with Dr. Tuck and Dr. Linda T. Smith who also attended. I think it was a huge success!

During the SIG business meeting, Crystal and I, who helped develop the 2013 program with Eve were nominated in and voted in (although it still has to go out for a full SIG vote) to chair the 2014 program. We will get a behind the scenes look at planning with the SIG leadership and I think we are both really looking forward to the opportunity. See you in 2014!

Finally, I did present preliminary results of my dissertation analysis with the Curriculum and Instruction SIG. There was good conversation and all the papers of the session fit together well to create some dialogue. I always enjoy the exchange that happens, and come home excited (and really tired!) of the possibilities of future directions.

Presentation at American Indian Studies Association

Academics, Presentations

I just enjoyed a fun two days at the American Indian Studies Association in Tempe, AZ. A small conference, with lots to offer, AISA is the longest-standing meeting of scholars on indigenous studies in the United States. A diverse set of topics were discussed over the course of the conference and drew scholars from all over the country. I presented a paper from a recent seminar class on visual sovereignty, where I analyzed an indigenous gaze in the photographing of cultural objects (particularly those held by museums and in private collections). Although not part of my main research, as an artist, I do hope in the future to continue finding ways to intersect my art and educational research interests, and found much encouragement at this meeting.

Thoughts on Sole-Author Publishing as a Graduate Student

Academics, Publications


I was really excited when, for the first time, in late 2012 I got to see my name in the author byline of a journal article. Coming into my fifth year of graduate school, I was feeling behind. Colleagues were earning prestigious, national fellowships and I was still struggling to get my feet under me analyzing dissertation data. I needed a boost. Since then, I have finished two more manuscripts that are currently being revised under “revise and resubmit” requests of the respective journals and completing a fourth, smaller essay. In sharing these accomplishments with a professor, I was urged to contribute my thoughts on the process with a wider audience. That is you, my dear readers.

Being in the humanities and social science fields, there do not exist the same sort of frequent, collaborative authoring opportunities as seem to be available to life and physical science graduates who are constantly part of a professor’s lab (of course, not being in a life or physical science anymore, this may all be perception rather than reality). There are research groups if you work for a professor with a large enough grant and certainly three years worth of graduate student research positions taught me a lot about collaborative grant reports and conference presentations, but none of these have yet led to publications due to the long-term nature of the research.

I realized that if I wanted to begin publishing that I would have to go it alone.

I have been very lucky to take a variety of seminar classes across my two main fields of study that allowed me the opportunity develop pieces of research that could be metamorphosed into publications. Obviously, not everyone takes advantage of such an opening, but if you are searching for that next seminar paper, think for a minute about choosing a topic that will really excite you and be new to the literature conversation (or at least extend and enhance the conversation in some way) in some way.

So, when the professor mentoring me through my research on the Piper v. Big Pine School District of Inyo County (1924), urged me to publish the resulting paper, I decided to just try and see what happened since I’d been wanting to learn the process anyway.

I narrowed down some journal choices and talked about them with a couple different professors before deciding where to submit. After receiving my first round of clarification questions and editing suggestions, I saw that there was a whole new process that I had to learn in translating the work into a good journal article. But I took the time and found the experience rewarding.

Sharing our hard work with the outside world is, I believe, a psychological process. I remember seeing a tweet awhile back linking to the LSE impact blog and an article by Helen Sword who urged, “when you are 80% happy, kick it out the door”. This resonated with the experiences I had – I felt my research was strong and I felt the paper was good, though not perfect, and opening the work to criticism by submitting it did produce anxiety. My positive and supportive experience with the journal editor of my first publication took some of the fright out of the process, however.

I am not a brilliant writer. I still make grammatical and spelling errors. Usually I am too close to the work to realize when I’m being too dense (don’t worry, reviewers will point this out to you and allow you to fix it!). But, I want to share the things I am learning because that is so much of what the research process is about for me – finding out something I didn’t know before.

In the end, getting started down the path of successful publishing of research comes down to letting go of that fear enough send your writing to a journal. Literatures are built because many people find the same thing exciting enough to research – and all of them began with a just a few people in the conversation. Have the courage to know that someone else will find your work as interesting as you do.