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My Notes from #CLS2022: Rising Scholars - Exploring Pathways: Finding Your Place of Impact
introducing the panel Exploring Pathways: Finding Your Place of Impact
is a UX researcher at Google, place of impact with users in studies at work
UX researcher at Duolingo with ABC app focused on kids' reading in their native language, impact is with learners, kids, families, parents, teachers, and the product itself
works for Utah State University but lives in Long Beach, CA, does curriculum design, teacher education, and research, always exploring new pathways for impact
based in Bogota, Colombia, Associate Professor at Universidad Javeriana, research center in Colombia, and Berkman at Harvard. Impact follows a winding and networked pathway. Part of the Digital Media & Learning Initiative since the beginning.
I (Kimberly) love hearing how varied Andres's pathway has been! Focuses on projects & collaborations as much as positions/institutions. <3!
UX Researcher at YouTube working on fan-funding, also instructor and affiliated researcher at universities
What strategies/values/criteria did you use to navigate your own process of finding your place of impact? What helped ground you? What did you prioritize?
Find the heart of who you are and what you want to do and keep it at the center as you try a bunch of different things.
is knitting right now. I'm (Kimberly) crocheting right now!
goal was to support youth across their lives & now does so through curriculum design, teacher education, research.
Be open to relationships and opportunities. Sometimes you feel like you're pushing against a wall. Take a break from pushing against the wall and look for what's already open.
Making connections across spaces (eg families & institutions, communities & workspace) is the heart of Debbie's work. Allowing parts of life outside research to come through in research life.
Impact is a moving target in the face of change. Be attuned to your context. Grasp opportunities as they appear.
Pay attention to communities and mentors who give you space to join your interests.
It takes energy to keep finding projects, grow, connect, build communities.
Searching for the intersections where your impact will be takes time and work. Think about the types of impact you want your work to have, what outcomes do you want your work to have? Who do you want to be affected? In what ways?
YouTube team leveraged specific work from Jen's dissertation to impact product development and that was really exciting.
tried a lot of things out in grad school. Academic research, contributing to academic community & body of knowledge, direct impact on kids in classrooms, volunteered at conferences, TAed, volunteered in early childhood classroom, internships.
Applied to lots of different jobs, teaching postdocs at liberal arts, faculty at R1, UX at big tech company, research scientist at non-profit. Paid attention to what held a draw.
Started @ Joan Ganz Cooney Center impacting policy from 30,000 feet view, wanted next to get experience working on a specific project. Important to recognize that whatever you're trying now isn't something your locked into forever.
Any standout moments that led to the work you're doing now?
The interview process gave specific signal into whether community was energizing.
Unsuccessful job search led to postdoc with mentor Yasmin Kafai on e-textiles grants. Didn't get job at Cooney Center that Kiley did but DID get work from them doing a lit review with a colleague from a different grad school.
Sometimes saying NO is what leads you to your impact.
Echoes Wendy's point. Saying no clarifies priorities: I want to live in a particular place, I don't want to live away from my partner. Also echoes Kiley's point about gut checks.
How would you suggest going about finding opportunities to explore places of potential impact?
Try & apply to different things. Doing an internship during PhD program in a crisis led to connecting with a community of mentors and peers encouraging a networked, omnivorous mindset.
You need a lot of luck. The more that you try, the more opportunities you'll be able to grasp.
Sometimes the closed doors are powerful in opening up new opportunities.
Apply to jobs in places you might not have thought you would end up.
You might need to be more assertive than you would normally be, introduce yourself to people whose work you admire.
Relationships are important even if you have to foster them yourself.
Academic mentors are good at academia but you might have to look outside academia for people who can mentor you in other areas.
If you're following up on a connection, you may need to remind them how you connected before. You don't know where relationships will lead.
It might not be someone who is already in a position more advanced than yours. Might be another student or someone you met when you were both students.
How important were relationships to finding your opportunities? How did you navigate the awkwardness of asking for referrals or help finding positions? How did someone else extend an opportunity for you in a way that felt graceful?
Make connections BEFORE the exact opportunity is available. Don't wait until you see a particular job. Build relationships with people who are making the kind of impact you want. That feels more genuine.
Relationships start early and you don't know where they will lead.
Maintain connections with people mentors introduce you to.
Sometimes you connect over hobbies - people just approach me because I knit publicly.
Approach people with deep respect.
For Andres: How do you make an impact in the diverse Colombian context? How do you meet the expectations of your boss and your own expectations?
There is a shortage of resources in Colombia. It can be difficult to find research funding. At universities you need to start negotiating your agenda as a researcher and balance it with the teaching aspects. The emphasis here is more on teaching.
If you can create your own non-profit/institution, you will have more control over your own priorities because there's not a boss to tell you no.
What last thoughts or pieces of advice do you have for people wanting to find their place of impact?
Be open to new opportunities. Find ways to blend and combine your multiple interests. Carve out space to have more exploratory or informational conversations with people.
Reaching out early sets you up for having relationships and networks later.
Find the heart that keeps you going. You will have to do things that aren't part of your passion. You will find places where your passion stretches out beyond your job. You can't predict where things will happen.
Protect that heart. Find ways that feel authentic to you. Be open to places that will connect with it that you didn't expect.
Find communities whose interests and heart resonate with yours. As you join them and exchange ideas, you may find the pathway that connects your personal interests with the places that you can have an impact.
Be open to learning through the experience. Through the experience of getting somewhere you might find what fulfills you in an unexpected way.
Things will change and that's okay.
What's one thing you're looking forward to continuing or trying new as you navigate your path?
Supporting and studying K-12 computer science teachers without having prior experience in K-12. Advocating for them through publications and academia. Find ways to support them, their creativity & impact on students.
My Notes from #CLS2022: Rising Scholars - Sharing Work Beyond Academic Publishing
Alexis worked on hackathons including the Make the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon (love it!) and others to bring people together to hack policy, services, & norms related to postpartum experience.
loves Alexis's work. Breast pumps are awful! Jean is director of CompSci equity project at UCLA. Jean taught high school & middle school English and social studies and got excited about critical pedagogy & addressing systemic issues.
Jean's research focuses on equity issues in computer science education.
Jean's recent research tries to elevate the voices of youth who have been pushed out of the world of computing and are experiencing their first computing class in high school.
How can we push the tech industry to recognize that they are responsible for the ethical implications of what they create? How can we get involved in changing this? Jean wrote a graphic novel called Power On about teens + CS & CS heroes addressing inequity.
Cliff works in teacher education and the same project as Jean, also with YR Media where youth produce and create media.
Cliff's work is at the intersection of computational thinking, critical pedagogy, and creative arts expression.
Marisa shares about porous authorship structures as opposed to the black box model of academic publishing.
Co-design process is reciprocal, traditional publishing is extractive.
Takeaways: Who are you trying to reach? Why now? Who is the right person to distribute the info? What kind of media does your audience consume? When?
Santiago asks what resources were helpful to panelists in beginning sharing beyond academia.
All the work from YR media is meant to be shared with the public. Research focuses on pedagogy, curriculum, and process.
Cliff makes it a point to present to educators, publish op eds, trade pubs.
It's important to consider the writing style in trade publishing & for non-academic audiences to make it readable, break the mold grad school may have pushed you into.
Have conversations about your work with people outside of your work and relationships and partnerships can develop. "Academia's not necessarily meant to get you to be a public intellectual." Read more journalistic writing, academics who write trade books
"Academia's not necessarily meant to get you to be a public intellectual." Read more journalistic writing, academics who write trade books.
Think about who surrounds you. Are you only talking to other academics? Don't drop your non-academic friends & family. Meet people outside academia.
Jean was an avid reader of graphic novels & manga but hadn't written one before and had to learn to write a comic script instead of description.
"Graphic Novel Writing for Dummies"-type resources can be helpful to learn how experts in the medium work (like Neil Gaiman or Superman writers).
Academic publishers often do a small run like 400 copies. Other outlets have wider reach.
Popular media is a lot of eyes if the people who you're trying to reach consume that outlet. "Where are people's eyeballs?"
There's value in directly impacting fewer people, too.
There's the question of impact and the question of scale and how you should negotiate that depends on the project and your goals.
For the Breast Pump hackathon, the goal was to change the narrative of breastfeeding from personal choice to structural one (importance of employment policies, healthcare) and prepped for communicating with the media.
https://makethebreastpumpnotsuck.com/research
Another goal was to change the culture of the media lab because the breastpump project wasn't future-focused enough or was too weird; deliberately targeted academic publishing as well to push back against that perception.
How do you balance the output demands & needs of academia/academic publishing with these non-traditional forms of sharing your work? How do you communicate the impact and value of this work within the academic context? How do we move past the h-index?
Why should I spend so much time on the peer review process? How deep is that impact? It can feel hard to justify but toggling or balancing and using academic vocabulary with peers can sharpen our thinking about those issues.
You can increase citations to underrepresented scholars and include voices from outside academia when you author academic work.
"Balance doesn't exist in my life right now... COVID has made things work."
Jean has an academic position as a researcher but steps of advancement aren't tied to tenure because the work is grant-based. Getting academic AND non-academic audiences excited about a graphic novel because it's based on research & translating research is important.
Getting academic AND non-academic audiences excited about a graphic novel because it's based on research & translating research is important.
I'm excited that my first, maybe only book, is a graphic novel because the kids in my family are reading it.
It's a graphic novel published by an academic publisher (MIT press).
We need to speak to academic audiences AND other audiences. Be intentional and strategic.
Being at a liberal arts institution is different than being at an R1. What department, school, or college you're in will affect what kind of output is considered as impact.
Some institutions will value podcasts and other media.
published an academic paper about the breastpump hackathon and followed that with a toolkit for people who want to host hackathons. It can be helpful to think through things as you write academic work and then leverage that thought process when writing popular work.
It can be helpful to think through things as you write academic work and then leverage that thought process when writing popular work.
What advice would you give to early career scholars who want to pursue academic careers and also sharpen their skills for creating art/writing outside academia?
You panelists are inspiring. Who inspired you?
Mike Rose from UCLA. Both Cliff & Jean had him as a professor. He translated academic knowledge to a mainstream audience. Cliff learned about the writing process from him.
How do I convey through storytelling the same message as research, but in a powerful, motivating, engaging way?
Mike was always practicing the art of beautiful writing. Every day he was writing on a yellow notepad with a pencil. It wasn't an egotistical, egocentric practice. He was thinking deeply about the people he had met & trying to convey their stories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Rose_(educator)
Artists we enjoy like David Bowie, Yayoi Kusama. Re-read books like you want to write - Jean re-read the March trilogy. Be inspired by the different ways a story can be told.
Catherine D'Ignazio (<3 Data Feminism)
Mitch Resnick & Natalie Rusk
Get in the habit of doing primary ethnography, engage with real people in real life that you're accountable to, transcribe your conversations with them, it's transformative for you as a speaker & them as a listener.
The Shakers thought about rendering their own religious views through arts, which is close to the practice of making public scholarship.
Ethan Zuckerman had students practice non-academic writing
Sarah Pink's Sensory Ethnography
Dealing with SDCC envy
About 7 years ago, Geek and Sundry (RIP) published a post titled HOW TO HAVE A GREAT, GEEKY WEEKEND WHEN YOU’RE NOT GOING TO SDCC.
As a chronically ill person with an immunocompromised mom, I have no idea when I’ll feel safe going to cons again. G&S’s advice was for a PRE-COVID world. Here’s my updated set of tips, inspired by their original article.
Get into some trivia with the Dorky, Geeky, Nerdy Podcast. This podcast shares their trivia questions as playable text pages online and on YouTube if you want to share with friends and play together over Zoom or something. They cover tons of different topics and have three difficulty levels. They even have rules and scoring advice. I enjoyed the Star Trek: The Next Generation trivia, of course.
Catch up on comics with your local comic shop, library, or favorite online service. I’ve got some unread books left over from Free Comic Book Day. My local shop does online ordering and curbside pickup. My library offers comics both in physical form and digitally via Hoopla and Libby. And of course there are your bigger operations like Marvel Unlimited and DC Universe Infinite. I’m going to try some of the Eisner Award nominees in the Early Readers category to share with my kid.
Work on a cosplay project. I’m putting together a vaguely genderbent (in that I’m a woman and won’t be making any effort to crossplay) Eddie Munson (BEWARE OF SPOILERS AT THAT LINK!) from Stranger Things 4. I’ve got a jacket and vest. I’m waiting for my Hellfire Club shirt to arrive. Next, I want to dig out my black jeans and try distressing them.
Do some gaming. I’ll probably play some Metroid: Zero Mission myself, but I’m also going to go prep the first Magical Kitties Save the Day adventure to play with my family as soon as I’m done writing this post.
Watch something geeky. For me, it’ll probably be Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I might also rock the 1976 Carrie. If you want to stay home but not watch alone, you can try a virtual watch party tool. I like Scener.
I hope you have some fun this weekend, wherever you are!
It's my birthday! Here's who I want to be and how we should celebrate.
I’m 41 today and it’s a big deal because every day that I live is a day I chose to be in the world and a whole year of sticking around is huge.
40 has been by turns amazing and rough. But mostly I’ve loved how it feels like the perfect age to really go all in on unapologetically being myself and to completely bail on caring about any superficial opinion anyone has of me. It’s also a great age to realize mostly people aren’t silently criticizing me, because they’re too focused on themselves to pay attention to me.
Who I wanted to be at 40 is also who I want to be at 41. I’m doing a good job on all of those. 41 will be a year of maintaining that and having new adventures.
If you want to be part of the virtual celebration of Kimbertide, I offered some good suggestions in 2020 and 2021. I’ll probably do some of those.
Thanks for hanging out with me on the Internet this year, y’all. You bring a lot of love and connection into my life.