After a 2-year hiatus, I am going to try to resurrect the blog “annamend and the multi/plural turn.” Before doing so, I would like to write this personal message for those who have been following this blog, which in its heyday (Jan. to Dec. 2022), had 16,000 visitors internationally. I want to express 1) why I started the blog nearly 4 years ago, 2) why I stopped posting for a while, and 3) what kind of content I would like to publish moving forward.
Why this blog exists
I started this blog in Dec. 2020, a few months into a tenure-track Assistant Professorship in the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. Having finished my PhD the previous spring, I would like to say that my motives were entirely altruistic, to address the need for public scholarship to reach beyond academia, but I was also trying to build my scholarly reputation.
Since then, there have been 70+ posts. I will say that my half-dozen favorites have been on (1) clearing up misconceptions about code-switching, (2) using students’ existing languages to teach additional languages when different languages are spoken in a class, whether most but not all students speak the same first language, or when there is no language majority but many different languages, and about (3) critical language awareness, (4) transformative pedagogy, and (5) postmethod pedagogy. I think people still have used this blog as a resource even when it went on hiatus.
Why I stopped posting around spring 2023
As this post from early 2023 shows, I fully intended to continue with the blog at the start of 2023, during my first academic year as Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But that spring semester, I discovered infertility struggles: by being diagnosed with an ovarian reserve of a woman in her mid-40s at age 37 due to having benign tumors removed from both ovaries in an operation in Hong Kong. By summer, I also had a breast cancer scare… at 37.
I largely stopped doing anything at all and spent many days in bed. Even after the breast cancer scare cleared up, I had a difficult fall 2023 semester. I woke up at 6 am every day or every other day to travel 3 hours by train to downtown Chicago, another 1 hour by local train to the fertility clinic, have a 20-minute blood test and pelvic ultrasound, teach my course on Zoom from a coffee house, travel another 1+3 hours by train back to Champaign… every (other) day during the first half of my menstrual cycle in September, October, and November 2023.
We became pregnant a year ago, in November 2023, on our 3rd and last cycle, and had our baby girl three months ago. Now I am ready to blog again.
What kind of content am I going to blog about moving forward?
I am trying to motivate myself to read, so I will first begin by doing something similar as what I promised in that post around New Year’s 2023: to blog by summarizing books. I choose methodological books for qualitative researchers because of all the things that graduate students ask me about, the two most common topics are methodological advice and career advice. I’m going to start by summarizing a book on Grounded Theory (in a 2-part post) and another on Qualitative Research (in a 3-part post). It is my hope, by summarizing these wonderful and accessible methodological books (highly recommend reading them yourself!!), that graduate students doing qualitative inquiry attend to four criteria: (1) Validity: high-quality studies conducted in a valid way, (2) Originality: original contribution studies telling us surprising things we didn’t know before, or only suspected but could not demonstrate, (3) Practicality: practical studies that address issues of concern to the public, avoiding research waste, and (4) Ethics: ethical studies adhering to the principles of “reciprocity and accountability” (to quote my colleague Christian Faltis) to those who play some part in our research.
That said, it is my goal to read and summarize these books, and others, in what remains of 2024 and in the coming year: I hope I can maintain it. It excites me when graduate students, originally intimidated by academia, blossom into confident, intellectually insightful, socially conscientious scholars by becoming well versed in their methods—while others who had some experience and confidence in research start questioning their prior assumptions about what research is and how to go about it, attending more to validity, originality, practicality, and/or ethics. I hope I can reach a wider audience than my own graduate students by resuming writing on the blog.
annamend 