For my first timed blog post reflecting for our reflection journal I made sure to set the scene for myself. I have a stopwatch on my IPhone that started exactly when I typed out my first word, I am sitting in one of the most recommended coffee shops in Fremont overlooking the water near the Fremont troll and a homemade vanilla latte to my right.
My environment
On my way here, Ridley and I took the bus together from the university and the biggest thing on my mind right now as I reflect on my existing reading practices is this summer. I spent this summer reading "for fun" and it was beautiful. When I think about reading, setting the scene, much similar to my setting for this first blog post is very important. My favorite place to read is in my grandparent's home in Zocoteaca, Oaxaca, Mexico. My maternal grandparents live in a very rural community in Mexico with less than 2,000 inhabitants engulfed and surrounded by the mountains. I am one of the oldest granddaughters and if I do say so myself both my grandma Romelia and my grandpa Panuncio love me and spoil me. This summer when my family and I arrived at my grandparents house my grandma pulled out a bag she had been saving just for me with three beautifully covered hammocks. My grandpa got up right away and told me he would put them up for me whenever I was ready wherever I wanted on their large patio. This brings me to reflect about the meaning of reading for me and the importance of the setting I have that ties close to home. This summer I read:
(It's interesting here for me to note that I just went back to my Amazon order account to think back to exactly what books I bought the title and the author, and which books I read to take me back [using the internet to reflect!])
Americanah by Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
Between the World and Me by Coates, Ta-Nehisi
Milk and Honey by Kaur, Rupi
This is How You Lose Her by Díaz, Junot
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Brown, Daniel James
Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Banaji, Mahzarin R.
Reading these books and reflecting on what the practice of reading - I think I currently separate reading for fun and reading for school. The school setting I am in now is different than my undergraduate experience but I am looking forward to thinking about how during my phd journey I shift my mindset on what I am told to read vs. what I see as reading for pleasure vs. what I read because I am encouraged to read and potentially even novels vs. research papers. How do I combine both activities and how do I translate the skills or the experience I have reading those novels for fun in my grandparent's backyard to reading the paper about engineering and mental health in our 543 class.
[I am not sure about how much I can write about my personal thoughts as I engage in this activity or if I need to go back and proofread and edit the run-on sentence I recognize I wrote above. For now I am free writing my thoughts about reading for 30mins.]
My platform
I have recently been thinking a lot about practices and personal preference in the context of what will work for me in graduate school and particularly I have been thinking about this through an analysis of how I read. Personally, I prefer physical copies of books and papers to read. I recognize that having a kindle for when I read on the bus or when I am traveling is a lot more space efficient (my luggage to my trip to Mexico this summer was overweight because of my heavy physical books!) but I enjoy the feeling of having a book or paper in my hands to fully engage and appreciate the reading I am doing. There are other factors like note-taking and how I look up things if I am reading on paper but I think I will figure it out as I go and try different things then iterate.
The content
When it comes to content -- I get really excited about reading new things. I am not picky if it means reading a book comes highly recommended by my peers or if it means reading a research paper about data science, I enjoy the act of learning something new. Someone once told me that there is no need to purchase a book everyday to read. There are so many words everywhere around you -- all the time. Whether that is the local Trader Joe's newsletter that arrived in my apartment yesterday, the HCDE brochure we got during orientation, or the research paper published in CSCW about how individuals disclose mental health illness on social media I have access to reading materials everywhere.
Having the opportunity to think more about reading will make me a more intentional reader in my practices, in the content I chose, in my analysis of reading whatever material I chose, and to document my process of understanding what I do now and how I will become a better reader at the end of this course and beyond. There are many things I listed during class as notes for what I would like to improve about my reading but the two I want to touch on here are:
Reading things I don't know yet exist
Formulating disagreement arguments effectively
1 - When I first read a scholarly piece that my graduate mentor Julie recommended about retention in engineering for minority students and about strategies and analysis and just so much research that looked into the practice of teaching engineering I remember my first thought I shared when Julie and I discussed was "Wow there are people that write about my experience. There are real scholars who dedicate their research to understanding the experiences of underrepresented minorities and they find it worthy to document and publish. I know there are many fields of research and topics I don't even know exist yet and as I look forward to what I would like to improve about my reading is knowing how to find interesting papers about topics I don't even know the keywords for yet.
2 - Thinking introspectively I believe I am not a very argumentative person. I tend to read things and generally be excited about their content, their potential, their connection to something I already know or care about but I am looking forward to being more argumentative in an organized and logical method. Maybe I am not reading things that I completely disagree with yet. How do I find pieces that challenge me or provide a very different perspective than what I used to towards engineering education or how do I find authors with different values and ethics towards their work that I can challenge me. Or maybe I am not yet thinking critically after reading a paper and questioning their research methods or their population set. Maybe I need to create a sort of rubric for myself so that after I read something I have a reminder of things to question. I know I am capable of getting an inkling when I read something that I don't completely agree with, or a study I think is not encompassing of minority perspectives but I am looking forward to making a compelling argument of why I get that inkling and being able to articulate it.
My timer went off now and I am a little over the 30min mark I know we were able to go over anyways but just quickly, although I am not sure if I accomplished the task at hand, I really enjoyed this process of reflecting on what the word reading meant to me.