Goals and Assessment for June 11
I devoted myself to revising according to all the marginal comments and tracked changes the authors gave me.  I have one more change to go--they questioned how I had reviewed their case study in the book.  I will have to reread it to assure my summary of it is accurate.  Also, I will only use part of their case study to review--the part that's most similar to our study.  The entire case study is way to confusing to communicate to readers anyway.  They took a whole chapter to describe what they did; I have only a sentence or two. Removing the complete explanation will actually free up some words I can use to clarify or expand other parts.

Goals and Assessment for June 12
Because of a crisis in my department--the sudden and unexpected firing of three instructors--we had a 2-hour faculty meeting this morning so I couldn't get much work done.  But I did respond to our Writing Center's long Writing Across the Curriculum survey that we're piloting, I did write an important letter about what happened to us.  Also, after camp, I edited my ex-grad student's abstract that she is submitting for a prestigious dissertation award that I need to write her a letter of recommendation for by June 15.

Overall Evaluation of the Camp Experience
This camp was one of my favorites camps we've done. I was skeptical about Zoom, but it worked! Attendance was good, dissertators were forthcoming, and I learned a lot from the presentations, which I thought was the best set of presentations yet.  I am looking forward though to regulating my own writing time and to get some of the writing chores done (like that letter of rec, like the review of the faculty member, like recruiting faculty for writing fellows) that have been piling up.  Also, I helped get two collaborative articles underway--the one I write about above and one I'm doing with the above award applicant based on her qualitative dissertation data.  I also launched with her and another ex-student from Spanish/FLARE a big "arm chair" review of all the studies about writing in Spanish in the US published in the 21st century.

Assessment of June 9 goals
I got a satisfactory, not-so-critical draft written and sent it to the 2 authors so they could check my interpretation of the coding.  I sent them the draft last night and they sent it back with comments today! It turns out I had some of the codes and terms wrong, which they corrected and explained. They also questioned what I meant by some of my own terms.  Their comments and corrections will really help me as I revise.

Focus for Today, June 10
To educate myself about race and discrimination (macro and micro-agressions) in my profession, I chose to read a section of a book I needed to read in order to evaluate a faculty member from another university for full professor.  The section of 5 essays was about black writing center tutors and administrators and writing teachers and their both positive and negative experiences in the writing center and writing classroom. Some of the narratives were quite powerful, eye-opening, and well-written.  One in particular I'd like to use for the  Undergrad Writing Fellows and the Grad Writing Center classes I'll teach in the fall.  

Assessment of June 8 goals
I finished a draft although I'm not satisfied with it, since I didn't explicitly address Research Question #3. I'm using a coding scheme I really like that 2 authors came up with.  I had written an article for the edited collection one of those authors did. I had also told both of them about the conference presentation I had done based on the data and the feedback I had gotten on it from the audience.  I made the rather bold decision to ask them if they'd look over my draft to make sure I hadn't misunderstood anything, and they said yes! I'll probably send it to them this afternoon. 

Goals for today June 9
Go back and figure out how to more explicitly address RQ #3 and also possibly remove some of my comments that could be construed by the authors I'm sending it to as critical; for example, when I say their scaffolding strategies "don't tell the whole story."  Does any research instrument ever tell the whole story?

Assessment of June 5 goals
I have a rough draft down of the article and had more words left than I thought (I had been counting some outtakes).

Goals for June 8
Now I can go back and fill in some details, for example, about the strategies and sub-strategies and explain the coding scheme a little more for readers.  I also need to refine what I mean by the terms context and dynamics, because sometimes I say dynamics and I mean procedures.  I also need to make sure I'm making sense in my cause and effect structures.

I was going to go back and re-code everything and do rater-reliability. Now I wonder if it's worth it for such a short article on such an exploratory study.

Assessment of June 4 Goals:
I got 1/2 of the results laid out and started on the other half, after reading what I had so far, this morning before camp.  I

June 5 Goals:
I'm just going to see how far I can get with the results today, which will probably have to be a Results/Discussion section as I have only 800 more words left.

Assessment of June 3 goals:
I would say I met my goals. I got through the entire 31-page article draft (although I felt my attention and energy flagging at times), responded to my co-author's marginal questions and comments, and edited it to cut words: we're limited by this journal to 10,000 words and we already 8800 without the References and still need to add a few informational items). I assessed what needed to be done before we submit it and emailed it back to her. In the afternoon, we met for 2 hours over Zoom to go over the comments and plan our next steps.

June 4 goals:
I've returned to the tutorial project to work on results. I probably won't finish them today because I need to read and revise what I've written so far and make the results from Tuesday less chart-like and more prose-like. 

Assessment of yesterday's (June 2) goals:
I did get a brief Methods section down and started on results and realized i had to change the order of the research questions and therefore the order in which I presented the results. I was copying the results from my ppt., which didn't always work.  Also, I realized I should put the contrasting (earlier and later tutorial) in tables so the contrasts are more easily seen.  Of course, I need to work on my table skills.

Today's goals: June 3.
I have a meeting this afternoon with my lead co-author about the article from her dissertation so I will need to reread the draft today with our lengthy marginal comments on what still needs work to prepare for our Zoom discussion. I'm not used to working on two projects at the same time and switching gears.

Assessment of meeting yesterday's goals and today's goals for June 2, 2020

I wrote about a page and a half, but I had to go back and read some of the literature because I had summarized it incorrectly.  In this compressed article format (only 3000 words) I'm ready for a short methods section today.

Monday, June 1: A New Beginning
I queried a journal over the weekend and the editor got back to me right away and said that my proposed article sounded OK.  I don't have that much data, only one case study of 2 tutorials, so that's why I chose this journal since its articles are brief--only 3000 words.  I'm going to use my ppt presentation to derive an outline and start working on the introduction/review of the literature. Those are my modest goals for today.

May 30, 2020

Welcome to Summer 2020 Dissertation Camp! I'm looking forward to getting to know you and to discovering how a virtual dissertation camp works!  In my research I've been using writing center data, as well as my own second language learning and writing experiences to illustrate and explore concepts in second language writing and more recently second language acquisition. Every two years I've been teaching a seminar on second language writing research.  I also write creatively, especially about travel, and teach a travel writing course every fall as a first-year seminar. As Writing Center Director, I also teach tutor training courses. 

I'm going to use this camp to make progress on two of my own projects:

1) I want to translate a conference ppt about an pilot study we did in the Writing Center last summer into a 3000-word article for WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship.  

      a) I'm going to have to re-code the transcribed tutorial data because I cannot find my original coding sheets. That means reacquainting myself with the coding scheme. I'll work with my co-authors on coder-reliability.

       b) Studies using the same coding scheme but focusing on different issues and research questions have been published since my conference presentation last November, so I will continue to follow up on them. 

2) My ex-grad student, now a Spanish instructor at Cornell University, asked me to collaborate on an article based on a section of her dissertation on profiles and stances of peer reviewers in a Spanish Writing class--the way they approach their task of commenting on peers' work. We have a rough draft of the article intended for Foreign Language Annals, but the discussion and conclusion still need a lot of work so as not to simply repeat the results. I plan to draft those sections during part of the second week of the camp.