The Spencer Research Training Grant Program

Colloquium Series 1998-1999 on 

The Practice of Educational Research

A Panel Discussion on

“DOING A DISSERTATION PROPOSAL THAT WORKS:
THOUGHTS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF A DISSERTATION IDEA
FROM PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN THERE AND LIVED TO TALK ABOUT IT”

Panelists:

Don Duggan-Haas
Heather Mikkelson Pleasants
Shari Levine Rose
Loukia Sarroub
Andrew Topper

Thursday, November 12, 1998
12:00 to 1:30
Room 252 Erickson Hall

David Labaree:  I wanted to welcome you to the second colloquium in a series that’s focused on the practice of educational research.  It’s a series that’s sponsored by the Spencer Research Training Grant in the college.  The idea is not to talk about the products of research, but the process.  The way we do it.  With particular attention toward dealing with issues that are of concern to people – students – who are in the process of becoming researchers and approaching a lot of these issues for the first time.  You’ll recall in the last colloquium we focused on “Doing a Dissertation that Matters” – which was a panel discussion about three strong dissertations that came out of the college in the last few years in an effort to find out what makes a strong story worth telling in a dissertation.  That was an all faculty function if you recall.  This time we have an all student panel.  The idea is to take a look at an issue that may be the scariest one facing most graduate students as they consider their future as dissertation writer.  And that’s the idea of coming up with a dissertation idea, writing a proposal, getting it approved, and finally getting over that hurdle.  These five are all people who are over that hurdle.  Four of them are working on their dissertations, and one is already finished.  The topic as it’s defined here is “Doing a Dissertation Proposal that Works: Thoughts on the Development of a Dissertation Idea from People Who Have Been There and Lived to Tell about It.”   Chairing this session is going to be Dr. Andrew Topper, who graduated last summer, so he’s a little farther past this stage than some of the others.  He’ll let you know some of the basics about how we’re going to work today, and he’ll introduce the panel for you.  Keep in mind to tell people who cannot make it here today that, as was the case with the first colloquium, we will be producing a transcript and the transcript will be loaded onto the website for the Spencer Research Training Grant.  You can get the transcript for the first colloquium there now, and this one will also be available in a couple of weeks.  I hope you find this enlightening.  

Andrew Topper: Thanks David.  What I’m going to do is just take a few minutes to describe the structure of what we’re going to try to accomplish this afternoon.  Let me first start by introducing the people who are up here with me.  Down at the end we have Heather Mikkelson Pleasants.  Next to her we have Shari Levine-Rose.  Then we have Loukia Sarroub, Don Duggan-Haas and I’m Andy Topper.  As David said we’re all going to talk about this issue of how do you come up with a dissertation proposal.  And all of us, as he said, have been through this process and are at various stages in our growth and development as academics.  As David mentioned, I graduated in May.  My area of study was Cognition and Technology in  Educational Psychology.  And I’m now working for Yong Zhao as a Post-Doc on a research project.  What I’d like to do is take a minute and talk about my work and my dissertation proposal.  And we’re just going to go down the line and everybody’s going to take a turn.  We’re going to try to cover a couple issues.  First issue is where did the idea for this work come from, because we think that’s really important.  And related to that, how did that idea turn into a dissertation, because you can get ideas any day of the week.  But how do you then make that into a workable dissertation that you can do in a feasible amount of time.  So we’re going to be focusing principally on that, but we’re also going to be talking about how the development of these ideas and the work of the dissertation connects to who we are and who we’re becoming personally and professionally.  So those will be themes that’ll come out in this first round when we talk about developing the idea of a dissertation.  And then we’re going to have a conversation based on the things we talked about last week.  Hopefully it’ll be interesting.  I can’t guarantee it.  So what was my dissertation?  My dissertation was actually working with a small group of elementary school teachers in a local school with technology. The way that I got started was one of the teachers was my son’s first grade teacher.  And I had been teaching a workshop on the Internet and she came up to me at the workshop and she said, “This is good stuff, this technology.  But I don’t know how I’m going to do it.  I don’t have time.  I’m afraid.  Etc, etc.”  So it really was a case of serendipity where I got started working with her in her classroom after school.  And the idea for the dissertation actually came out of that work.  Because I realized that a lot of the studies you read about technology and teaching talk about teachers who are really excited about it.  You don’t often hear about teachers who are ambivalent or afraid or  whatever.  Which I think, quite honestly, represents the larger population, if you think about it.  But, like I said, we don’t often hear about that.  So I was intrigued with trying to understand the experiences of a small group of teachers who were not technology savvy, but who were being pushed to use technology by their district, by their school, and by their parents.  So my work actually grew out of that relationship with that one teacher.  I will tell you also that I started a first dissertation before I started this one.  And I actually wrote a proposal and got it approved, but nothing happened.  I mean nothing interesting happened.  So, it’s possible that you can go through this process without completing a dissertation. I’m not trying to scare anybody, but I wouldn’t wish this on anybody either.  But through the process, maybe a year into it, you may realize you really don’t have anything interesting to show for it.  So what I ended up doing is I ended up, as I said, I fell into this other possible dissertation that connected with the interest that I was having in how teachers’ personal and professional lives are shaped by technology.  So I was actually lucky to have that first dissertation that turned into nothing and then use the summer to write the proposal that actually became my real dissertation.  And my proposal was about a dozen pages if you’re interested in length.  So I’m going to turn it over to Don and he’s going to talk about his experience.  

Don Duggan-Haas:  Well the idea for my dissertation arose from my work with the Salish project, which is a study of nine universities and their recent grads in the secondary science education.  And, as MSU is one of the nine universities involved and I was a graduate assistant at MSU for the project and amongst my duties, were doing some interviews and coding those interviews for MSU, and, on one of the interview protocols, developing the methodology for coding across all nine sights.  In these interviews, the new science teachers were asked to reflect on their teacher preparation program, and specifically ask questions about their science courses and their teacher education courses.  This was a set of nine parallel questions about each course.  In coding these New Teacher Interviews for MSU initially, and then compiling them for all nine universities, I saw in the typical response for a question about teacher education, if you try to imagine the opposite of what that response was, that’s what they said about their college science classes.  This is not terribly surprising, but it sure is interesting to see that in virtually every category when they were asked to describe a characteristic of their teacher education course, you could imagine what the opposite was, that’s typically what they said about their college science courses.  That recognition first led to a very short paper for one of David Labaree’s classes, and then in the following semester when I was taking another David Labaree class, that became a much longer paper and that longer paper really evolved into my dissertation proposal.  It kind of took a turn along the way and I tried to add some more stuff into it, that I ended up pruning out as it turns out and reflecting back on it I think I would have speeded up the process by just kind of giving the first paper and not trying to do revisions in between.  That’s the way, in a nutshell, it worked out for me.  

Loukia Sarroub:  You’ll have to excuse me.  It seems that every time I have to speak in front of a group of people -- it doesn’t happen very often -- my throat decides to act up.  For me, I think things happened very differently, very sporadically. I came to Michigan State with all kinds of interests and I had no idea what my eventual topic of interest was going to be and what I was going to spend my time on. I’m in a program in TE called Educational Policy and Social Analysis. It's a great program, but I also have other interests in literacy, so if you ever get an e-mail from me I’ll put educational policy and social analysis and literacy education in my signature at the bottom of my messages.  I named this new program, which doesn’t exist, to suit my purposes.  So within that, when I arrived here, I didn't have a whole lot of knowledge about the field of education.  All I knew is that this would be a place for me to do interdisciplinary work.  I had to discover ways of  bringing different disciplines to work for something I’m interested in developing.  And what I realized along the way as I read books in coursework and on my own (books such as Annette Lareau’s Home Advantage, or in David Labaree’ course we read a book called God’s Choice by Alan Peshkin; in David Pearson's I learned more about James Gee’s work) was that there’s a lot of research out there on social constructs such as ethnicity, language, and gender.  But these show up in various studies singly and it’s very rare that you’ll get a research study on all these constructs in one setting in one book or in one article. I was lucky enough to have an opportunity to study all of these constructs together.

Shari Levine Rose:  My dissertation is about children’s historical thinking which is not something I came here thinking I would do my dissertation on.  Like Loukia I started out in the policy program.  But I was also teaching 402 social studies and I didn’t feel particularly great about my own social studies teaching when I was an elementary school teacher.  So as a teacher educator I felt I needed to go back in schools and teach.  Fortunately,  Professional Development Schools were funded a little more when I started out here, so I was able to teach at Otto and then at Averill Elementary School.  In the beginning I was paying much more attention to my own teaching but, part of my teaching focused on finding out about children’s ideas.  As I paid close attention to their ideas, I noticed that they had much more sophisticated ideas than the literature spoke about. I was constantly fascinated about the things my kids said.  There is not much literature about children’s ideas on historical topics at the elementary level.  That led me to want to go back and research more systematically children’s historical thinking.  

Heather Mikkelson Pleasants:  Okay, well, these notebooks comprise everything it took to get me to my dissertation proposal.  It took me six years but I finally came up with an idea!  I brought these not to intimidate anybody, but to remind myself that it just didn’t happen overnight--it took me a long time and each of these notebooks represents a kernel of an idea that prepared me for what I wanted to do for my dissertation proposal.  And it’s very interesting, in the very top notebook, in between my Christmas list and a note to myself to get an emergency loan, there's this little flyer.  It’s from a bookstore called Revealers of the Hidden Truth bookstore and cultural center.  One of the things mentioned on the flyer is that every Saturday there is a black children’s reading hour at 10 am.  This is what I did when I first got to Michigan State, because I wanted to find a way to be involved with African-American kids.  I wanted to find a way to have my involvement include literacy and maybe also cultivate of a love for literature and reading and writing within the African American kids I worked with.  And that’s what I started out thinking I was going to do for my dissertation project.  What happened is that through my connection with the owner of the bookstore (who was on the school board of a charter school in Lansing, at which I’m currently doing my dissertation research) I found out about a new charter school that was going to be developed. Additionally, a student that I was teaching said, “Oh you should come in and check out this new school.”  I was like, okay, yeah, whatever, I blew them off, basically.  And a couple months later I saw the same guy just by chance and he said, “You know I heard you’re volunteering at the bookstore, you should really come by and check out the school.”  So I said, okay, yeah, whatever, and I blew him off again.  It was like fate giving me these hints saying you should really check out this school.  So finally I went in and I checked out the school and lo and behold, I found out that the school was really interesting. And I started volunteering at the school and relating my experiences there to some of the literature I’d read on charter schools. One thing that jumped out at me is the fact that much of the literature on charter schools uses rhetoric promoting the idea that parents are more involved in charter schools, and that parents have more opportunities to be involved.  Proponents of charter schools promote the idea that these schools are going to attract parents and they’re going to be involved and volunteer and parents will just be an integral part of the school community.  But at the monthly parent - teacher meetings at the charter school where I volunteered, only 30 parents were coming, even though the principal had told me that all parents at the school were supposed to be there. With this information, I knew that there was something going on at this school that didn't quite fit what charter school advocates had been saying. And that formed the basis of my dissertation. I’m studying (1) how and why African-American parents choose charter schools, and (2) how do they become involved in these schools once their children are enrolled.

Topper:	I think you’ve heard all of us talk a little bit about how our idea became a dissertation.  I’ve heard a couple things, one: it seems that it’s really important that you are passionate about what you’re doing.  If it’s going to take 3 or 4 or 5 years to do it and you’re not excited about it, it’s not going to be any fun.  Another thing is, sometimes things might happen that you might not recognize initially as opportunities, but through luck or serendipity or whatever, you may come to see that there’s an opportunity to study something where you have access to a research sight that you hadn’t thought about, or that you hadn’t thought about in that way.  And I think that’s true in a couple people’s cases.  Another thing you’ve heard about is coursework and to a certain extent, we haven’t talked about it, comps can help you in terms of feeding your ideas towards the completion of something that’s a dissertation product.  I think all of us at various points in our coursework ended up writing something that was either part of or, in some cases, all of what was going to be a dissertation.  So try to use whatever course material, course work, or if you’re going to do a literature review for a course, or to a certain extent comps, and feed that into a proposal for a dissertation.  A couple things we haven’t talked about.  One is a committee, and I think we should spend some time talking about how we came up with our dissertation committees because I know a lot of people get really anxious about this.  Myself, I actually started with a committee on a different dissertation topic and had to add another person to my committee because my direction changed so dramatically.  But a couple things I would say about choosing dissertation committee members, and especially choosing directors.  For me working with your director is something that’s going to be like a marriage.  You have to really be connected with this person.  Because this person has your best interests at heart and you’re going to end up having to work very, very closely with this person.  So it should be somebody that you feel really connected to, I think.  Now, we’re each going to talk about different scenarios about how our committees might work.  In my case I took a very active role in setting the agenda for my committee, in picking the people who were involved and deciding what I was going to share with them, and my director actually worked in combination with me but I kind of did a lot of the work myself.  I did a lot of agenda setting and that sort of thing.  And that’s something that I prefer to do and my dissertation director and I worked well with that arrangement.  The other people I selected, I thought first of all that they had something to contribute to the work that I was doing, whether it be analysis of discourse, or teacher beliefs and knowledge or the role of technology in my case.  But also, what I found was that I could go to those people and they could help me solve particular problems I’d run into as the work progressed.  Because, you know, you can’t anticipate everything that’s going to happen.  So you have to have people on your committee who are flexible and willing to work with you to help resolve problems when they come up and maybe change  where you’re going to go.  And so I think it’s really important to select people you feel comfortable with.  We had a conversation last week about whether they should all be people you’ve had classes with before, but that’s something other people can talk about.  But in my case I selected people I felt very confident I could work with over a long period of time.  

Duggan-Haas:  In assembling my committee, one thing that I wanted to keep in mind was balance, I guess.  I’m interested in both science education and policy, and having at least some what of an ethnographic approach in my dissertation, so I wanted all of those pieces represented, so on my committee I have five folks, one more than meets the minimum.  Two are science educators, one of those two has dual appointment between the college of education and the college of natural science.  A third is a scientist in the college of natural science, so do keep in mind you can go outside of the college and I’ve taken a class in the college of natural science.   Reflecting on my experience if I had it to do over again I might take more than one. I’ve got an ethnographer (points to Doug Campbell). I’ve got a policy person who introduced us.  And I think it’s very important that even if I was more concentrated in my focus, if I just focused just purely on science education, I still would want to have a variety of perspectives in my committee.  But also those perspectives are not in conflict.  I actually think that if you have four people on your committee who are all science educators, there might be more conflict than if you have variety.  Because you know from working with faculty that even if they’re in the same area, they don’t necessarily see things the same way.  And knowing your committee members I think is very important.  I think I know everybody on my committee fairly well from either classes or research projects I’ve been involved in.  And I think that’s all I’m going to say.

Sarroub:  My first committee came together at the end of my first year.  At the time I thought it would be important for me to work with people who had me in courses and were familiar with my intellectual abilities, my personal and professional goals, and my research potential.  So, that was the basis around which my committee developed.  When I chose the members of my committee, I already knew that whatever I was going to do was going to be fairly interdisciplinary.  For instance,  I have an educational anthropologist on my committee; I have a sociologist, I have a educational psychologist who focuses on the life span  and professional development, and I have another sociologist who focuses on gender and comparative education.  My main advisor focuses on literacy and assessment policy and has joint appointments in educational psychology  and teacher education. I knew that having a very diverse committee would help me in different ways.  I started out with a kernel of an idea --  the first time I ever wrote about it, it was two pages long. As this idea developed over time I would talk to different committee members about different aspects of the idea.  I’d actually go in and chat with them.  I’d make an appointment and say, 'well, this is what I’m thinking about."  I would do this within the context of coursework and at other times, I would just approach them when it was convenient.  Eventually I had a draft, and of course the first draft was read by my main advisor.  He took a look at it and we started to send drafts back and forth through the revisions mode on Word. He read several drafts and suggested revisions in different screen colors until I had something that I could show the rest of the committee. I was just telling Shari that I had 7.5 drafts of the proposal in my computer.  There are actually 7 distinct files that say dissertation proposal, all with different dates.  As I sent the proposal out to different members of the committee, they would actually focus on different areas of the proposal.  One member said I really don’t like pages 1-15 (my proposal was 35 pages) but I really like 15-35.  Every time I wrote a different draft I would focus on different parts.  The overall effect in the end  was that each disciplinary perspective I had within the text was strengthened because each committee member played a role in the writing of different sections of the proposal.  That really worked out well for me.  This is my fourth year and everyone on my committee gets along well.  The only thing I should say is that over four years I’ve worked more closely with some committee members than with others.  Some people have had different roles over time.  Right now I’m working with the literacy and sociology persons more closely, but I think that when I analyze my data, I’ll need to work a bit with the educational anthropologist on my committee.  No one person on my committee is completely responsible for overseeing my work, although I do work closely with my main advisor.  I’m actually the responsible one in terms of setting up meetings and updating them on my progress.  Everything has worked well. I think I’ve been very lucky so far.

Rose:	In selecting my committee, the thing that was most important to me was that the people in the committee supported the research I wanted to do. I  don’t think I  mentioned this earlier, but I conducted my research in the context of my own teaching at Averill.  I needed to have people who said that that was okay.  Some people don’t agree that research conducted in your own classroom constitutes “real” research.  So, I had to make sure everybody felt comfortable about that.  Like the other people who spoke, I also chose people  who had strengths related to my topic upon which I could draw. For example, Michael is a historian.  Suzanne and Helen both have backgrounds in history. Kathy Roth has an interest in social studies, but she also has experience writing about children’s ideas in science.  Both Kathy and Suzanne had experience with teacher-research. Loukia mentioned earlier about the model of our committee.  I think she mentioned that the people on her committee shared equal responsibility.  Others have a strong committee chair, and others play less of a role.  That’s how my committee is.  Although they all have important things to contribute, it’s just a different model.  There wasn’t any one consistent model among us.  

Pleasants:  I’m going to be honest.  Brutally honest. When I first came here I didn’t know what I was doing.  The first thing I had to do before constructing a committee was construct an understanding of myself.  I said, “Heather, okay.  Who are you?  Who is Heather?” And I had to answer truthfully. Number one, I’m a procrastinator.  Number two, I’m  a perfectionist.  As you can imagine, those two don’t work really well together.  That’s probably why I have all these notebooks.  So I had to begin slightly differently than some of the people here sitting with me.  I had to think about who would best help me to deal with aspects of my personality, and also who would help me to grow intellectually and make the progress I needed to make to get my doctorate.  I should add one thing.  I also like a challenge.  The first person I picked was my guidance committee chairperson.  She’s also my dissertation director.  She challenges me, to say the least. The next person I had to choose was someone who was going to be no nonsense and not mince words. Someone who would tell me  “You need to do this, and you need to have it to me by Friday.”  I picked Pat Edwards. I think that was a very critical and important choice.  Not to mention the fact that I also have interests in literacy issues and she’s a leader in that area.  I met Pat Edwards as a first year student, and in my state of naivete and not knowing who I was, I came into her office and she sat me down and said, “So, what are you going to teach when you get out of here?  What’s going to be your research focus?”  I just stuttered and felt myself on the verge of tears and thought, who is this woman?  Why is she doing this to me?  And a couple months later I realized that’s the type of person I needed on my committee. I went back to her office and said will you please serve on my committee, and she did.  The rest of the people on my committee, I think, have a lot of commonalties with the other faculty describe by the other panelists. They have helped me to develop my research questions and my interests through their knowledge and their ability to critique my direction and provide me with ways to hone in on what I think is most important.  However, I think the people that were first most important to me were those who helped me deal with those aspects of my work habits and personality that were going to be personal challenges.  

Rose:	I just want to make one comment about that.  Andy said that your relationship with your dissertation committee chair is like a marriage.  Sometimes it’s more like the relationship between a therapist and the patient.  

Pleasants:  I would say they’re like parents.  

Topper:  So there are different ideas about a committee director.  

Duggan-Haas: I want to pick up on something Heather said about being a procrastinator.  For getting to the proposal defense, I put it off.  Finally I just set a date.  And I set a date that all your committee can go to.  I had to have something ready by then.  And I, I really need a Pat Edwards every now and then.  Procrastination is a real issue for me.  And that was an important step for me to get past.

Sarroub:  I have so speak up for the non procrastinators.  I’m at the other extreme.  I really have to slow down sometimes.  I am adamant about getting things done on time.  I think I drive my committee crazy (well, not really) because I’m always e-mailing them things when it may not be convenient for them.  I think it’s because I always feel that it's what I’m supposed to do. Luckily they’re so laid back.  In a way I found a group people who fit my needs as a student perfectly.  They'll say such things as, 'Hold back a little.  Don’t rush too much.  You have something interesting going on here.'  This is wonderful for me.  

So, there is this other side (non procrastinators). I’ve also met people who are somewhere in the middle.  They don’t procrastinate and they’re not persistently getting things in on time.  We were talking amongst ourselves earlier, and we all agreed that knowing what your committee expects is important.  I always feel that  I have an obligation to let them know what I’m doing.  Sometimes I take that too far by telling them too often through e-mail.

Topper:  If you think about this process of writing proposals, it’s actually a negotiation process between you and these other people about what you’re going to do.  And we’ve all talked about aspects of it.  One thing for me is that when I’d go to people and share my ideas, people would push me in one direction, and it’d be the direction they were interested in.  And I’d end up getting pushed in five directions while this work really ought to be about what's interesting to me.  One of the goals for you is to say, “You know I’m going to do something that really overlaps a bit in all these areas.  I can’t satisfy everybody, but this is  my dissertation.  You have to have something that represents you,  something that you feel is important in terms of a message. It has to be yours.  Be careful about being pulled in so many directions.  Negotiation for me was getting my committee members  convinced that I could actually do the work .  

Pleasants:  I’d like to add something.  For me coursework was not the most effective method of outlining my dissertation idea, because I’m very externally driven.  It goes along with the procrastination and perfectionism.  I would tend to focus my ideas through the lens of the courses I took.  It wasn’t helping me develop my own idea independent of the requirements.  That’s why I started with these notebooks.  It was the place I didn’t have external influences.  It was my opportunity to say what do I think?  No one would read this.  No one would want to. But they do contain ideas.  Over time they became one big idea.  For me the process was not one informed by coursework as the main vehicle, because I had to divorce myself from that in order to be productive.  Along with the formation of my committee, I picked people somewhat purposefully that didn’t have interests in what I was doing at first. They had peripheral interest in pieces of it.  I thought that would be a good idea because then, really, I have no choice but to develop what I think and to be able to verbalize why I think my research idea is important.

Topper:  That way everybody can agree with you.

Pleasants:  And understand it and critique it.

Sarroub:  I took comps, the TE comps in October and I had my dissertation proposal defense in April.  There was this six month lag time where I needed to do some thinking, writing, and preliminary fieldwork.  During that time I had two major epiphanies that I wrote down so that I wouldn’t forget them.  This is in the process of talking to committee members and meeting teachers and meeting students in my study.  One of them is very obvious now that I look back:  A proposal is supposed to make a persuasive argument about something. The courses I had taken had taught me to do that.  A proposal is an exercise of what you already know how to do.  The minute I realized that I became less nervous.  The point was to employ what I learned and to know what my committee’s expectations were in terms of writing, structure, ideas and so on.  The second epiphany occurred when I was struggling to draw together different bodies of literature in 35 pages.  It was really, really hard. I was reading research written from different disciplinary perspectives and trying to figure out how they inform my questions. I found this quote which was really quite helpful in Clifford’s The Writing of Culture, and he quotes Roland Barthes who is an anthropologist.  This was the epiphany:  'Interdisciplinary work (and the reason I bring this up is because I know I’m going to be doing this kind of work) so much discussed these days is not about confronting already constituted disciplines to do something interdisciplinary; it’s not enough to choose a subject, a theme and gather around it two or three sciences.  Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.'  This was really important for me.  An object that belongs to no one.  This is my chance to say something interesting, maybe original, although I have been told there’s really nothing original under the sun anymore. The proposal gave me an opportunity to develop and create something of my own.  I had  worked on different aspects of the proposal in other contexts, but the act of writing the proposal was a major step for me.  During that process I had these two major epiphanies, and they helped push me forward.  

Topper:  One of the things we talked about as a group was looking back on the process,  Focusing on  things we would do differently on reflection.  Maybe we can each take a few minutes and talk about that and then I want to leave some time for any questions.  For me, looking back on the process, I think you get all worried about the details, and whether or not you’ve covered every literature there is and read every article there is and do you have a bullet-proof argument you can make.  And what happens is you get to a point where you’re convinced that this is a good piece of work, you can do it and it’s going to be something substantive and interesting.  And so we worry about all the details, did I read that one article that this person wrote that everybody’s talking about?  A lot of it for me was just making sure I felt comfortable doing the work.  That I was able to articulate that to a group of people who were knowledgeable in their own way about different aspects of the work, and be able to articulate it enough so that it was a basis for me to take the next step.  At some point in this process you have to start doing the work.  You have to stop writing the proposals and start doing the work.  You get the proposal down and the work doesn’t get done.  At some point you’ve got to start on the work.  I think that’s when you realize in your mind that it is interesting, that it needs to be done, and the committee members can help you make it successful.  That’s what it was for me.  

Duggan-Haas:	I think in the ideal world I would have been more prepared going into my proposal defense than I was.  And there were a number of things that came up immediately before that complicated that.  My wife totaled her car, my computer crashed at home and all kinds of other things that made it kind of difficult.  I think I should have started a little bit earlier than I did.  My dissertation proposal did end up being very similar to something I had written a year before.  And I think I could have really crunched that time up and that would have been helpful getting my proposal through in a timely fashion.  One thing that I wish I had done earlier is my UCRIHS form.   I wrote this summer while my advisor was in Africa.  When he returned, I was out of town, so I had him put it in campus mail.  It took eleven days to get from Erickson Hall to the UCRIHS office.  Walk your application to their office!

	So, uh, but I do think that I could have moved a little bit faster.  I could have moved faster and still been better.  In my defense, my proposal defense, the committee more or less agreed that I had three interesting proposals and that I should pick one.  And I could have gotten that information by talking to my committee beforehand.  That would have given me a better idea.  The defense was a little over two hours long which I didn’t anticipate going in.  It was very helpful for me in thinking about where to go with my proposal.  The defense is not just a place for you to showcase your idea, but to work on your idea.  At least if your committee is doing what I think a committee should do.

Sarroub:  What could I have done differently?  I have five people in my committee and I told you that I took comps in October and defended the proposal on April 29.  Not being a procrastinator, of course, I really tried to get a draft out to my advisor as soon as I could, at least a month before.  But, one thing I wish I could have been more thoughtful about was to plan better the writing of the proposal since in  occurred right before AERA. People are just really, really busy during that time.  I felt really pushy with my committee around this time.  'Here can you read this draft?  Or here can you read this?'  One way to avoid this is to finish a draft earlier.  But I’m not that good of a non procrastinator.  So, I thought three weeks or a month ahead would give them enough time.  Another thing I wish I had done differently was to know more specifically what happens at a proposal meeting. I was really, really nervous. I was so nervous that I think I just babbled  during the first half hour (or it seems that way to me). I listened to the tape the other day, and the first half hour is nonsense.  I thought to myself that this is what they listened to and it obviously did not reflect how I had written my proposal.  In the end the meeting was really very nice, a good two hours of intellectual talk and reflection.  But, I do wish I had been better prepared for the meeting at the beginning.  I wish I hadn’t been so nervous and had been able to structure a meeting where I could be more confident from the outset. 

Rose:	I’m not sure if this is what I would have done differently.  My major problem is never thinking I know enough about the topic.  I always want to know more about the topic.  So far various people they talked about how their coursework and their comps led up to their dissertation proposal. Maybe then you feel like you know more.  My dissertation topic wasn’t the main thrust of my coursework nor were my comps.  So for me I felt like I didn’t know enough about the topic to do the research.  And I really don’t think I did know enough.   I read my proposal and it sounds like I knew something, but at the time I don’t think I really knew as much as I would have liked.  Writing the proposal is a humbling experience.  As you’re writing it, even if you have more knowledge on the topic, I think it’s common to  start thinking about how much you don’t know.  You sort of have to say to yourself that it’s okay and move on to the research.  

Pleasants:  I had two defense meetings.  The first one I thought was my defense but after talking to my committee for about an hour and a half, they convinced me that this really wasn’t a defense, because I wasn’t prepared.  Basically, they told me to come back in a couple months. I wouldn't advocate this kind of approach to a dissertation proposal defense.  So, I think what I would do differently is utilize the resources of the people around me, who are important in my professional and personal life, and those are my peers.  Most recently we’ve started meeting, a group of three people, over dinner.  At each meeting we have dinner at different person's home. At the meeting one person presents their work and beforehand they give each of us a piece of writing that will form the basis of our discussion.  This experience has been engaging socially and intellectually.  I think I would have relied more on these kinds of resources to help me get ready and prepared for doing a defense and having a workable proposal that was more complete than what I had when I first when in there.  The other thing I think I would have changed is that I would actually believe the people who told me that a dissertation proposal is not something etched in stone which forever guides your dissertation research.  I didn’t believe that.  I spent too much time trying to make my proposal something beyond the scope of what it was, which was a proposal, a beginning point.  Because after I had actually defended, even though my committee said you’re ready to go, I found areas where I needed to do more work.  I needed more work on my method section.  I needed to know more about certain areas or bodies of literature.  It’s not as if my proposal was rounded off thing or fully formed when I defended it.  I worked a lot on it after it was defended.  I think the work after that is going to help me write a dissertation that’s going to be more complete.

Topper:  So you’ve heard all of us talk about this process.  I’m going to make a few final comments and then we’ll open it up for questions.  First, as you heard there are different models for the committee configuration, how you go about this.  And I think it’s interesting to hear the different perspectives because we’re all different people and we all do different kinds of work, but there are some common things here too as well.  Hopefully that’s helped you.  My own take on the dissertation defense and proposal was, first of all, I was thinking, I was in a haze; you’re floating because you realize you’re past a real hurdle. That glow lasts until you realize, "wait a minute, now I have to do this."  Then you come right back down.  But I think this question of "do you know enough?  Are you ready?" is important.  You’re not going to know everything or else you won’t need to do the research.  The research is about answering questions.  But, you have to know enough to ask the right questions and answer them in a way that makes sense.  The last thing I would say about the committee is I really enjoyed working with my committee members.  And I felt that it was an opportunity to talk to five really smart, insightful people about my work.  I think that opportunity is not one you’re going to get except through this process.  I’ll open it up for questions.

Ed Jones:  I just turned a proposal in on Monday.  I’ve been working on this thing probably since early Spring, and I guess I always got, from talking to other people, not necessarily in the department, but other places, that your dissertation proposal...could make a significant contribution to the first few chapters of your recitation.  So I’m spending an ordinate amount of time trying to get the framework and all that, and I spent a lot of time doing it and it amounted up to a few pages.  Now what I wanted to know from you guys, how much do you think your proposal contributed to your dissertation? 

Topper:  In my case, the proposal, the work that I used on the proposal, I tried to use as much as I could.  Because like you said, you’re going to do all this work, you might as well use it.  It was really the literature review, principally, the discussion of the methods, and why I chose the methods I chose.  That was about it.  There was some discussion of the theoretical framework, but one of the things about that is that’s not going to change significantly.  There probably are people where nothing changes.  Or what they say they’re going to do is exactly what they do.  And there isn’t really change there.  But in a lot of other cases, if the work changes you’re re-reading the information, you’re testing new instruments, you’re just...I probably used about 30 - 40 % of the proposal in my finished dissertation.  Does anybody else want to comment on that?

Mikkelson:  I think a lot depends on what your committee expects and what kind of dissertation you’re doing.  My dissertation was a qualitative dissertation.  I spent a lot of time working on synthesizing literature.  And I worked on methods like Andy said.  I just recently finished writing a draft of my method section.  And what I’ve written has a lot to do with what I found out when I was collecting my data.  It’s kind of an iterative process in my case, because the approach I was first taking to collect data in support of my research questions had to be revised to deal with some of the complexities of the context within which I was trying to figure out what was going on.  A lot depends on what your committee expects of you and what kind of dissertation you’re doing.  And what conventions surround the atmosphere.

Duggan-Haas:	I don’t know how much is going to end up falling in my dissertation, but I know that I couldn’t have moved forward without writing that stuff that I wrote for the proposal.  When I did my proposal defense, I thought my conceptual framework was fairly well laid out.  Adapting CP Snow’s Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, to look at the two classroom cultures of college science and TE.  Since then, just to give you an idea of the change of focus, at that point and time, the title of my proposal was Two Programs, Two Cultures:  The Dichotomy of Science Teacher Preparation.  Since that time I’ve had a shift in my thinking and the difference in cultures is very important and very interesting, but it’s also very obvious.  Looking at just the differences between the two isn’t enough.  The relationship is really key.  And now my working title is Scientists are from Mars, Educators are from Venus, the Dysfunctional Marriage of College Science and Teacher Education.  You may notice I read another book outside the educational literature.  But I couldn’t have gone there without being where I was before.  And that was true of, in a lot of ways of steps along the way.  My proposal was very similar to a paper I had written for David.  I took two David Labaree courses in a row.  Fall of ‘96 and spring of ‘97.  The final papers for those two courses, the one in the fall was not very good.  I couldn’t have written the one in the spring without having written the other one first.  The same is true of my dissertation.  I couldn’t write the dissertation I want to write without having written that proposal first.  

Sarroub:  I just want to add something quickly.  Although I'm not at the dissertation writing stage yet, I can already see that the proposal is important in other ways.  Some of us have applied for dissertation grants.  I have totally relied on my proposal to write those grants, but since I’m in my second year of field work, some of those ideas I had have evolved and some are more important than others.  Some theories are more pertinent than others.  And, in writing these grant applications, I’ve actually moved forward in different ways intellectually. I think that when I’m ready write the dissertation I will use pertinent parts of the proposal but they will have evolved because I’m reading all the time as I go along.  The proposal does provide a structure for me, but I feel that I have flexibility within that structure.  So for those of you who feel like writing grant proposals, it’s really nice to have the dissertation proposal already finished.

Haojing Cheng:  I actually have a question regarding a conceptual framework as some of you have mentioned.  So when you write your proposal, I mean, after you have your literature review, is your conceptual framework based on what you’ve reviewed or on some other stuff?  And the second question is: after that, I’m analyzing some data and I’ve found something, I’ve found some new stuff that doesn’t fit my conceptual work or review or whatever.  I don’t know, what do you think?

Rose:	I’m at the stage of writing the dissertation and part of the process of analyzing the data is that you’re going to find things you didn’t anticipate.  Then you’re going to wish you had collected more on the thing you didn’t anticipate.  That’s one of my problems.  I keep wanting to go back and collect more data.  Suzanne keeps saying to me,  “No more data.”  You couldn’t know what you’re going to find out before hand.

Cheng:  Do you need to revise your conceptual work?  

Rose:	I’m drawing on different literature now than when I wrote the proposal. While you’re doing your dissertation, keep reading a lot.  

Duggan-Haas:  It may not seem to have a very direct relationship on your work....Self help books.  

David Pearson:  Just a couple a quick comments from the other side of the table.  I actually want to argue for going into your proposal defense without a fully developed literature.  I actually think people end up going in directions where they find what they end up using.  So much of the way in which you’re going to structure your arguments will depend upon what you find in your field.  I like the idea of continuing to read.  In fact I will argue that one of the outcomes of your proposal depends on your reading list.  I think you need the literature to demonstrate to yourself and the committee that you know enough about the area to know the problem you want to investigate.  And that it has potential to have value.  Beyond that you can worry too much about it.  The second reason to leave room for change is that -- I don’t know about the rest of the professors but my interaction with individuals one-on-one and the way I think about the problem is not the same as when I’m with a collection of people.  And I might be persuaded that the point of view I have wasn’t a valid point of view.  I might also be persuaded that there’s something that I hadn’t thought of before, that suddenly occurs to me in this community setting.  So I would argue that the proposal period is not so much a sign off that this is a great idea.  This is a great opportunity for discussion with four or five other interested colleagues about how it is you might reshape your work.  I’m a little bit more supportive of something a little more open.  The other reason for that, I think, and this relates to Heather’s comment, is that the idea of having a couple meetings with your faculty members is a great one.  

Pleasants:  I learned a lot.

Pearson:  The first time through, the type of thing that happens to everybody is that they find out how they feel about the problem in that community session.  The second time is much more focused.  If you could negotiate an informal meeting with faculty members beforehand, I think that’s much more to your advantage.

Wanda May:  I wanted to say something about the lit review.  If you keep thinking of a very traditional structure with one chapter that has the lit review, you’re really going to bind yourself.  Some of the best pieces I’ve read have literature in every chapter.  It makes sense instead of putting it all together in one place.  You use the literature where it makes sense in the final writing up of it.  

Brian Yusko:  I’m sort of curious.  At the beginning when you were describing the path you took to get to your proposal.  Something that I noticed is that none of you mentioned the practicum.  And I’m just curious if that’s something that you just didn’t mention in that way.  Did that experience of doing a practicum contribute in any way, or didn’t it?

Pleasants:  I couldn’t have done my dissertation without doing my practicum.  And I think I spent way too much time with my research practicum. However, in doing so, I think I really got a knowledge of the issues that I expanded on in my dissertation proposal.  So even though I didn’t know how valuable the experience was going to be to me at the beginning and while I was doing it, I think it proved to be very influential in shaping how I thought about the issues included in my proposal.

Yusko:  So maybe the question I was trying to ask is what was the relationship between your practicum and your ultimate dissertation.  Would you say that the practicum was a positive part of what the dissertation became, or was it the thing that caused you to turn away and do something different, or did it help you develop a set of ideas that became central to your dissertation?

Pleasants:  I think if you asked all of us we might say all of the above.  Because different people had different experiences.  For me it was a beginning, tentative step.  I wouldn’t by any means call it a pilot.  But by doing the practicum, I understood issues that were probably a lot more interesting and important than what I originally did for the practicum.  And that helped me say, okay now what am I going to do for my dissertation?

Rose:	When I did my practicum, I was teaching at Otto, and that was my first time teaching.  I was much more focused on what I was doing so the focus was on me, the teacher.  What I found most interesting through that experience was what I was learning about my kids’ thinking.  Anyway, writing about your own practice was just too hard to do for a dissertation.  But that’s how I made a transition to deciding that I wanted to write about children’s’ historical thinking and to use my teaching as a site, rather than to use it as the focus of the research like Ruth Heaton’s dissertation for example.  

Sarroub:  For me my practicum project had absolutely nothing to do with my dissertation topic.  First of all, I did my practicum early enough when I arrived here that I hadn’t even developed my dissertation ideas yet; it was too soon.  But looking back, the practicum served as a way to fine tune methodological approaches.  In that project I tried some things I’d never tried before in college or out in the work world.  I read a lot and started thinking about ethnography and discourse analysis. I also remember thinking about how some statistical approaches might be useful.  So, my practicum prepared me for what I might do in the future.  My practicum was really about how one goes about designing a project.  And, in that sense it’s related to how I might conceive a dissertation topic later on.  But in the end the two projects are worlds apart...

Duggan-Haas:  My practicum was kind of done in a funny way.  My work on the Salish project.  And really the Salish project was finishing and I met with my committee and said, well this is what I’ve done with Salish, and they said okay, that’s your practicum.  I didn’t do anything separate for it.  It was very important for informing my thinking for how I was going to go about this.  For one thing, working in this community of scholars we did some things that I would never do again.  And it was important to see that from the inside of a large research project thinking about my small research project.

Topper: My first time I developed a theoretical framework and some analytical tools that I never use in my dissertation because it was so different.  But the best thing about the practicum experience for me was that I learned who not to have in my dissertation committee.  

Duggan-Haas:  One thing that we haven’t mentioned very much is tying in the stuff you’re paid to do.  We’ve kind of alluded to it but haven’t talked about it specifically, but making pieces fit together I found very important.  When we met to talk about this meeting a week ago or so, some people talked about getting fellowship applications together as helping them think about their dissertation and their proposal.  For me right now I have two assistantships, teaching 802 secondary science with Andy Anderson and Gail Richmond, and working on a project called the Collaborative Vision for Science and Mathematics Education.  It’s an organization that’s intended to improve communication and collaboration between people interested in science and mathematics education in this college and the College of Natural Science.  Both of these assistantships relate directly to my dissertation.  Working in both of those settings helps me to think about my dissertation all of the time.  And I know that some folks here have fellowships to help fund their dissertation work and therefore not doing assistantships.  For me that would not make sense.  Both of my assistantships tie directly into my dissertation.  And if I had that much flexibility I would get nothing done, because that’s the type of person I am.  So, you need to think about that.  

Kevin Pugh:  Sort of what you’re saying is don’t isolate your dissertation work from the other things you’re doing in college?

Duggan-Haas:  If you can make it work, make it work.

Topper: I would also say that you could think about your dissertation proposal in terms of presentations or publications and not just as an isolated piece of writing that you’re doing.  I know for mine, well I wrote an early version of my dissertation proposal for a course, then I took a section of that and developed it into a proposal for AERA over the summer.  And then I took that and put it back in my dissertation proposal, the actual one.  And then it turned out that the AERA proposal actually got accepted.  Now I’m extracting it back out and expanding on it some more.  And now I almost have a whole paper.

Duggan-Haas:  My AERA paper was essentially my proposal.

Sarroub:  This was the same for me.  A part of my proposal is going to be an NRC paper and another part is going to be an AERA paper.  To me, those are natural deadlines for finishing analysis of some data and for putting some thoughts on paper. I need those deadlines or else it’s really easy to say I need to do more field work, or I need another two months to collect more data, or I should read ten more books. 

Duggan-Haas:  Or I would say I need to play more solitaire.  

Topper:	Any more questions or comments?  If not we’re right about where we need to be to end.  So thanks for your time.