Love January

I love January (especially the fact that I am not teaching in January)! At my college we offer a January term where students take one class for four weeks.  In my experience those are great classes to teach, especially when you plan a travel course, but this January I am not doing either.

This means that I can spend January working on scholarship and other projects. I submitted a revised paper to a journal last week. I also submitted a paper that I am co-writing back to the other writers. My next project is continued work on a disciplinary literacy paper. I hope to have that paper turned back to my team within two weeks. My last paper is one that I am writing with my students using birds as a focal point for developing both engineering and ecological science. 

One of the other projects that I will work on this January term is reorganizing and sorting through all my research files. As a researcher, I accumulate tens if not hundreds of articles, books, and essays while I am writing. You have to do the kind of thing in the writing I do. Every paper uses a different conceptual or theoretical framework and generally different research methodologies as well. The paper that was most recently accepted had 88 (!!) references and this was after I deleted probably a couple of dozen! My goal is to sort though all the videos, audiotapes and my own notes and get rid of most of them now that the articles are in press. I am trying to figure out the best way to organize all the research literature I use or used. I think I will organize them into categories rather than by paper as I have them now.  The next step will be developing a complete bibliography so I know what I have. That last step will be something that one of my lovely student workers will do.

I am off to a conference now for a few days in San Antonio. I am presenting a workshop with other colleagues on supporting students with exceptionalities in science teacher education. It will be nice to reconnect with a bunch of folks I only see at these events.

TTFN, Michele