On Being and Becoming
As a young child, when I had to be quiet and still, I used to play a game. I would ask myself the question “What would the world be like if I never existed?” In my mind, I would list my impressions: My parents might have had just one child, or maybe another in place of me – if so, who would that child be? I wondered if it might be a boy. What would he be like? I thought about how having a son might affect my parents, and imagined that my sister would be a different person, having a brother instead of me. I worried about my best friend. Would she play in the neighborhood by herself, or find a new best friend? This game would go on and on, until I lost interest, or was somehow released from my imposed silence to run and play. My impressions of the world without me varied, but I would always end my game with the same conclusion: If I never existed, then I could not possibly imagine the world without me! The fact of my existence defined a small part of the world. If I did not exist, then the world would not be the world that I know. Childish and self centered? Yes, but isn’t this kind of thinking a very basic example of ontology - the nature of existence; the nature of being? I do exist, and the next logical step to consider is how my existence, along with my acquired knowledge and life experience has made me the person that I am today, and has influenced how I view the world. This intellectual autobiography presents my story: My unique epistemology.

I am the younger of my parent’s two daughters. They raised my sister and me with a deep religious faith, strict discipline and unconditional love. I knew with certainly, from a very young age, that I was a valued, precious member of our family, our church and our community. We lived in rural upstate New York. I took a 45-minute bus ride to and from my school in a nearby town. The town was only 20 minutes away, but we had to wind along many, carsick, country roads to gather all of the children on the outskirts. My world was not culturally diverse: My friends and I were a homogenous group, all very similar in culture and economic status. My father worked as an engineer at a new, growing company in our area – the Xerox Corporation. My mom stayed at home to raise her daughters, and worked as a substitute teacher when we were old enough to attend school. My father never completed his college education (World War 2 intervened) but still worked as a successful engineer. He was and is to this day one of the most innovative, gifted designers that I have ever known. My mother earned her Master’s degree in education when I was growing up. I remember sitting on the floor in our spare bedroom, to be close to her while she typed her research papers (using carbon paper so that she would have a copy of her work). My mom was and is to this day one of the most caring, talented teachers (and mothers) that I have ever known.

I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, in a time when gender roles, educational opportunities and career expectations for girls were changing. I was an average student – nothing really special. I had a tendency to daydream during class – often about what the world would be like if I never existed! I loved to read, and had many creative interests, but did not excel in any particular discipline. Except for math - I did enjoy math, and because of this aptitude, I was advised to pursue engineering in college. Young women were encouraged to explore “non-traditional” careers in the late seventies, and I selected a program that focused on applied engineering skills – just like my dad. I loved college and the camaraderie with my fellow students that resulted from intense coursework and “all nighters”. Our program was a rigorous five-year co-op curriculum that allowed little time for non-technical courses. I took a very limited series of courses in the social sciences and humanities, and never had the opportunity to explore the “gray areas” of life, intellectually. In my curriculum courses, every subject was black and white; every answer was right or wrong.

After graduation, I worked for a number of years in manufacturing. I enjoyed my work, to a certain extent, but never felt the passion that I had hoped for in my career. The fact that I spent significant hours looking through the Sunday want ads during that time is indicative of my professional discord. It resulted, however, in the fairly dramatic decision to change my career path, and to accept a position as a drafting and design instructor. So, then I became a teacher – just like my mom.

I was living in New Jersey at this time, in what seemed like a perpetual state of culture shock. The sheer population of the area was stunning to me. I had never driven on a highway that went from five to fifteen lanes, then back again every twenty miles or so. I had never been in a traffic jam that spanned an entire fifteen lanes! The institution in which I taught served an urban community of students from very different social and economic backgrounds than I. I found myself completely out of my comfort zone and the happiest that I had ever been in my career. My students were wonderful. They accepted me easily, and were eager to learn. I loved to teach, and I learned as much from my students as I taught them. I saw, first hand, the struggles of low-income students who had lived with poverty and hardship for their entire lives. I grew to love these young people, many of whom felt victimized by people of my own cultural and social background. They saw beyond the way that I looked, and loved me right back.

My career change ultimately led me to NJIT, and the MSPTC program. I was required to complete a graduate program in order to advance in my career in higher education, and this simple need resulted in a significant opening of my intellectual world. The program exposed me to social and philosophical ideas that I had never before encountered. My course on Cultural and Technological Change affected me in particular. Readings by Walter Ong, Don Ihde and Katherine Hayles fascinated me. I read progressive works chronicling the transition from orality to literacy, and beyond to the past, present and future changes brought by accelerating technology.

Walter Ong significantly influenced my thinking about my students. In his book Orality and Literacy, Ong talks about how Plato viewed writing as an external, alien technology and contrasted this fear to how humans originally responded to computers in modern culture. He draws parallels to Plato’s concerns in moving from primary orality to literacy with our changing technology. This historical viewpoint on changing technology helped me to put into perspective the potentially alarming, changing behaviors that I had been seeing in our students – in the way that they interacted with each other, and with their professors. At the time, I was working with Latino students at a non-residential community college in New Jersey through a federal grant to improve the retention and persistence rate of this population. I realized, as we struggled to inspire and encourage our students, that technology was actually having a negative impact on their success. Student’s communication skills, particularly when interacting with faculty, were poor, ineffective, and at times even destructive. The advent of instant messaging and text messaging seemed to make communicating in person, with appropriate body language and tone of voice, difficult for many students. In addition, technology made new students available at all times to the lives and influences that they had left behind, before college. Students did not engage with people at the institution, and could (and did) easily disappear without ever having left a mark. This disconnect between students and professors as well as students and students had a clear, detrimental effect on new student’s efforts to move forward in their education. I realized that we, as educators, have a clear choice ahead. We can view this new frontier of technology as “external and alien” or embrace changing technology and develop new programs to help our students thrive.

As I near the completion of my formal education in the MSPTC program, I hope to use this course in Communication Theory and Research to prepare for my continuing intellectual journey. As I develop my research methods in this seminar, I plan to prepare a research proposal that I will carry out after my graduation to include in my institution’s grant sponsored monograph of research. My research interests center around the puzzle of student retention at the community college level. Specifically, I would like to look at the correlation between changing technology and student engagement, then perhaps to narrow my research to focus on the relationship between student engagement and student success.