Week 1-3: Trying my best
Over the break, I honestly tried not to think of my project. The whole idea was stressing me out. So my first step was to reread my project proposal and figure out what I had put down (and whether or not now this was a good plan. This became a great exercise because I essentially came at the project with completely fresh eyes. I have place my thoughts after reflecting to my paper below:
- I reflected on my inability to express myself without the use of a prompt and struggled with this during the blog last semester, and this has still been seen to be true this semester.
- I repeated one of my posts from Week 10: “My project’s identity is an attempt to get down to the true reason why teacher retention continues to nose-dive throughout America, especially since COVID-19″. While I still am interested in looking into the decline in teacher retention, I have been debating not exclusively picking the USA as my focus and rather using something from the UK or another country.
- I next discuss potentially analysing this from a public policy perspective. Potentially looking more into why teacher pay is low as a reaction to public policy as well as how the public affects public policy is the lens I was debating coming from. As I am interested in doing a ethnographic study, I believe looking into how people view teachers and how this affects public policy could be an interesting take (although this would be difficult to prove and connect to actual data).
- One thing I discovered was missing from this paper was choosing a method of production. I had deliberated in some of the blogs last semester about doing either a documentary or a public policy briefing. While I believe it would be far easier personally to do a public policy briefing, I have been debating doing the more “creative” output. this is something I am a lot less comfortable with, which could be a good or bad thing. I plan for the next couple of blogs to 1) land on a method of production (either firmly or semi-firmly) and 2) debate the pros and cons of taking my original project identity from a public policy perspective.
Still struggling!
-Kate 🙂
Hey Kate, it’s been a few weeks since you posted, but I’m just catching up on some reading. Have you decided on a method of production? I too found the ‘creative’ output daunting and pushed myself to try a format for one of my assignments – I still feel a bit uncomfortable about it and probably will until I get some feedback, but glad I tried it. Do you think you will have a chance to try your production method before the project on an alternative assignment?
I am really intrigued by your project topic, it’s definitely an important one and I imagine there will be lots of content out there to lean on. The point where you suggest expanding outside of the USA. Would it be helpful if you are thinking of doing a policy briefing to find a country where retention is doing well and use that as a comparison region to support any suggestions you want to make to solve the retention problem? or are you not going as far as making recommendations?