More later,
Sandra Enos
Saturday, March 27, 2010
First entries
For many years now, I have thought about creating a blog, a haven for all the ideas and observations I have that have no other home. I have no plan about when I will post to this site but you can expect a combination of musings about teaching, photography, my research projects, and my general impressions about life in the 21st century. More accurately, life where we exist at fleeting moments of time that are informed by the present moment and greatly influenced by all baggage and treasures from the past.
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This week, I enrolled in a memoir writing class that I am taking on line. I am looking for support and structure for my writing. I have too many ideas in my head not to develop some for circulation. It would be like having a library and lending out any books.
ReplyDeleteAs a college professor, one trades in ideas and abstractions. Some of us have practical applications to our work but many of us don't. My work is a blend between real world application and the steady development of ideas that I mainly traffic in with students in and out of class. I have a research agenda that runs somewhere under (and away from) standard academic outlets. At present, I an juggling several research projects and beginning others.
I live in Rhode Island and am nearly a life-long resident. Newcomers, even those who come to occupy us, deride this state and its population. There is a strong anti-working class bias in the newcomers. And the long-time residents resent the newcomers but in many respect, it is the newcomers who hold the real positions of power and privilege. The presidents of the corporations, the presidents of the universities, the kings of the mountain. The real power sitting on the real throne, sometimes unbeknownst to the little people. And because of this, the little people often are on the attack of the public officials who in some cases, are just window dressing in the whole scheme. Even they don't know how the damned thing works.
My research agenda reflects some of what I care deeply about, some of what I know and want to share, some of what I need to learn more deeply. Current projects include:
+ Mapping the landscape of our history using GIS mapping and podcasting to create modules that begin to collect history and culture in interesting ways. This would evolve into tours and virtual museums.
+ I am a collector of oral histories and a taker of them as well. I am returning to a project that interviewed former residents of the state orphanage. I am focused on reviewing these interviews to see what light they can shed on the existential dilemma of being a child of the state.
+ I am examining the landscape of the nonprofit community in the state, looking at organizational founding. I am keenly interested in the great variety of NPs and how they develop their ideas about addressing the problem they have selected to attack. I am also interested in getting a handle on how many organizations in our community are working on, let's say, educational reform and how many of these have a model of social change that is effective. I am a great believer in civic participation but I am also increasingly interested in impact and results.
+ I am revising an article that I submitted to RI HIstory on the history of how our state has addressed the problem of child cruelty. I hope to have that published later in the year.
+ I am interested in taking a critical look at how students evaluate their learning in an introductory sociology course, as well as a capstone course. Both courses ask students to trace their intellectual and for want of a better work, spiritual journeys, in a semester long course and over the course of their educations as undergrads. I am arguing in this research project that students may learn more than we teach them or learn these lessons in ways that would surprise their professors.
+ I am also doing research on tourism in the DR in a project with students.
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