Looking Back and Looking Forward at the End of my M.A. Experience

The title of “scholar” was one that intimidated me since before I began my graduate studies -- it felt as though I would never be able to achieve it. Yet the final question asked during the defense of my culminating project for this M.A. in English degree was “how do you feel now that you have joined the scholarly community with your own unique intervention?” To hear that question of recognition and welcome was truly an honor. I can honestly say that I achieved what I had hoped to over the course of my two years in this grad program. Along the way, I’ve learned that becoming a scholar is less about being inherently intelligent and more about learning scholarly conventions in order to make a contribution to the conversations that already exist. I can definitely attest to the fact that hard work, humility, and perseverance made it possible.

The Culminating Experience:

To provide some context for my journey, I thought it would be helpful to share a little bit about the M.A. process at San Diego State. I chose the portfolio option, meaning I revised my star paper to the point that I might feasibly submit it for publication. The portfolio workshop began in January. It was truly a rigorous and demanding process. I was able to engage with children’s literature seriously and had very high standards to meet regarding the quality of my research and writing. One of the biggest takeaways was certainly my development of endurance. While I hadn’t really ever had a problem with working hard, I was used to completing and then submitting assignments -- done. Though I taught revision in my composition classes, I didn’t actually have to do it myself as a student. In the workshop, however, I had to submit section after section of my paper for the weekly assignments, then go back and revise based on the feedback I received from my peers and professor while also preparing another section for the following week. It got to the point where I dreaded reading my own words, and did all of my other assignments to avoid having to revise.

My main support throughout this process was the peers who endured it with me. We were all on the same schedule, which meant that we had to meet the same deadlines. Even so, the chance to chat in casual breakout room conversations at the beginning of class allowed us to destress. It is easy to complain about the detriments of online learning, but I believe having to undergo the portfolio workshop on Zoom while still in a global pandemic gave us the opportunity to be more vocal about all of the other things that affect the writing process. We were able to be vulnerable about impostor’s syndrome, about the struggle of researching, and about losing sight of what we had loved about our papers. Through it all, we supported one another emotionally and intellectually so that we all had intensely revised portfolios to submit by the beginning of April.

The portfolio was comprised of the star paper, a secondary paper, and an annotated bibliography, all of which I had to be prepared to discuss during my defense. My advisor and an examiner read the portfolio two weeks in advance, during which time I prepared for the questions I would likely receive. We practiced answering questions aloud in the portfolio workshop, and all too soon, it was time for the defense. Upon beginning, I was immediately overwhelmed with gratitude for the generous, thoughtful engagement of my advisor and examiner with my work. They expressed their interest in my subject matter even though Asian American children’s literature is a niche in the field of children’s literature. Their questions were specific to the content of my paper, indicating that they had read it thoroughly and could see new directions in which my ideas could expand. They were also curious about my overall journey as a student throughout my two years in the program. The conversation was very enjoyable. Terrifying at first, but ultimately very fun. It was an experience I will always be grateful for, and I expressed that sentiment in response to that final question I was posed. I feel confident taking this paper to present at ChLA 2021 to test out its readiness for eventual publication. My scholarly journey has only just begun.

 

Graduate Assistantship:

The rigors of graduate-level literary study were certainly rewarding, but I also had other opportunities outside of the classroom for which I am thankful. The graduate assistantship that allows me to write these blog posts has been a fun, informal way to engage with the scholarly community. I had the chance to read and write on hot-off-the-press books, learn about the use of social media, correspond with leading intellectuals in the field via email and Twitter, attend a conference, join professional organizations, and be involved in lectures by notable scholars. More importantly, being a graduate assistant allowed me to see and validate passion for the study of children’s literature. I am forever grateful to Dr. Joseph Thomas, our Director, as well as my fellow graduate assistants, Sofia and Natalie, for sharing this space with me.

 

Teaching:

As I’ve written about before, SDSU gives graduate students the opportunity to teach first-year composition and literature courses. I won’t take up too much space reiterating it here, but thanks to those opportunities, I can pursue teaching as a career with confidence. I received extensive pedagogical training before and during the courses I taught, and professional development events were frequent and timely. I am certain that I can take all that I learned at my time at SDSU to whatever campuses I am at in the future!

 

A final word:

It’s hard to not get sentimental, as this is likely the last blog post I will write for the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature. If even one person reads to the end, I will always be grateful that my words were worth your time. Thank you for this space, and I truly look forward to ongoing engagement with the study of children’s and young adult literature as a newly minted scholar.

 - (A.N.)

 

 

 

 

 

Teaching Literature Online

 

This semester, I taught a section of Introduction to Literature for the first time. I had been looking forward to this opportunity since I had heard of it, but creating my own syllabus was more difficult than I had imagined. My literary interests are scattered, so nothing I could come up with was a broad enough theme to trace across a survey of literature. Thankfully, I had support for this brainstorming process and for the theme I eventually came up with during my Introduction to Graduate Studies course.

My course is titled: “The Hero(ine)’s Journey.” Unsurprisingly, most of the texts ended up falling into the category of children’s literature. We began the semester by reading a section of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces to introduce “The Hero’s Journey,” as it would be the foundational theory from which we would begin our analysis of heroes in literature. Campbell was followed by a poetry unit on the characters of Beowulf and Psyche to compare older notions of heroes with heroines. Those texts were then examined in contrast to the contemporary novels The Lightning Thief and Children of Blood and Bone.

Truth be told, I can hardly remember what the first day of class was like, though it was evident that the students and I were both cautious about the new virtual environment we were learning in. The pressure to make a good first impression was both compounded and eased by Zoom. As the host of the meeting, I felt in control about how I would present myself – but at the same time, I had no experience with the format of a hybrid online course. I could see how I appeared to students, but it was much harder to tell how they perceived me. I was upfront about my position as a graduate student specializing in children’s literature, and the students seemed to respond favorably. There was more shuffling during the add/drop period than I had experienced when teaching rhetoric and writing studies last semester, but I took nothing personally as I knew that academic advising was difficult to access. As the class roster settled, we fell into a routine that the students and I felt comfortable with.

            Here’s a look into a regular week of our hybrid online course! On Mondays and Wednesdays, we meet via Zoom for fifty minutes. Before class, students read the assigned text and then submit a short meeting prep/reading quiz. This is a small-stakes assignment meant to assess reading comprehension or prepare students for the topic of that day’s class. During our Zoom time, I often begin with a plot check for the more complicated texts, then introduce whatever concept I have planned for the day. Occasionally, I squeeze in a video, poll question, or article relevant to our topic. We spend most of our time on the discussion questions I have prepped ahead of time. Discussion takes various forms: verbal conversations, chat quick replies or detailed responses, and breakout groups.

I found that it was difficult to build a sense of community on Zoom, particularly when students were not able or willing to turn their cameras on. As a result, group work has been awkward and generally results in lackluster responses. What seems to work best with this group of students is for me to lead them through the concept or article for the day, converse with discussion questions, and then assign some individual work to be completed and sent in the chat box. Fifty minutes is a short amount of time to get this done, but I have been impressed with how students engaged with the text and the concepts I threw at them. On Fridays, students submit a discussion post on Canvas responding to a question or on whatever free-write topic they would like to bring up. This is a chance to think deeply about the text, elaborate on topics briefly discussed, and to practice MLA citing. They can also “like” each other’s posts.  

Having just finished our “reading half” of the semester after Children of Blood and Bone, we paused reading and discussing texts to begin the “writing half.” Their first major assignment was a literary analysis essay. A couple of weeks were dedicated to the writing and conferencing process, and students submitted a three to four-page paper on one of three prompts. Online peer review was something of a nightmare: if one student submitted late or in the wrong place, the other students would not have access to their peer’s paper. Canvas closed the peer review deadline a day early, so we had to work around it by using email. Conferencing, on the other hand, was much more efficient with Zoom. I made a simple sign-up sheet and hopped into Zoom when I knew a student was coming. I was able to share my screen to point students to where I had left feedback on their rough drafts, and could affirm whether or not they could see it on their end. It also seemed to work better for people’s schedules; they could open up the Zoom app during a work break and didn’t have to worry about commuting.

Once the literary analysis essays were successfully submitted, we took a “break” with a picture book and graphic novel section analyzing ethnicity and disability through Super Cilantro Girl and El Deafo. The conversation about representation that these texts engendered led into the research essays that students are currently developing as I write this. The prompt is quite open-ended: “What kind of representation should we see more of?” Students are tasked with selecting a topic and genre – for example, an essay that focuses on Chicanas in picture books could use Super Cilantro Girl as the main text – to argue that representation is lacking or insufficient. I am excited by the range of topics and genres that students have expressed interest in, and hope that the writing and research process will be enjoyable because of how flexible the prompt is.

I cannot end this blog post without mentioning the fantastic internship course, ENGL 796, that is paired with the first semester of teaching as a graduate student in SDSU’s English department. ENGL 796 is guided by an associate professor and, this semester, is comprised of two M.A. students teaching Intro to Literature and two M.F.A. students teaching Intro to Creative Writing. This course has kept me abreast of current issues and innovations in pedagogy as well as gave me the chance to prepare a portfolio for future hiring. Most importantly, I can share my concerns and successes with peers as we use Zoom to teach our first ENGL classes.  

I am very grateful for the opportunity to teach an introductory course during my time as a graduate student. So far, despite the less-than-ideal online format, it has been wonderful to delve deeply into topics in literature that my non-English major students would rarely discuss otherwise. Though varied in academic year, all of them are taking the study of children’s literature seriously and have shared profound insights in class and in their written work. It is a bit sad to look back at how much we have completed, knowing that there are only four weeks left until the semester ends. Yet I can already see students making connections between their lives and the texts we read, which I hope they will take away with them even after they move on to other courses. My goal as a novice teacher is to encourage students to do this critical analytical work, discovering its relevance to their lives so that they can enact the change they want to see in the world. With this first class, I hope that analyzing “The Hero(ine)’s Journey” will lead to students becoming the hero(in)es they themselves need no matter where they go.