I am.

This post is because my mom and my Uncle John have pestered me, pointing out that I haven’t posted in quite awhile.

What’s new?

Oh gosh, what isn’t new? I’m now officially a second year PhD student at Mizzou. I watched my 2010 College of Education undergraduate students graduate tonight. I finished my year-long role as the National Issues Coordinator with the Graduate Professional Council.

I will be 26 in a few weeks. I’ve been quite sick this semester, and was diagnosed at the beginning of March with an inflammatory disease, Eosinophilic Esophagitis, as well as allergy-induced asthma in May. Most importantly, I lost my cousin April Hacker after a life-long battle with Cystic Fibrosis on January 25th.

It has been a very, very long semester, and I’m looking forward to summer, and to a new school year.

What’s going on this summer and next year?

You mean, am I going anywhere? Nope. I’m consigned to the boredom of Missouri and of classes for the foreseeable future. I’m taking a Case Study class with the awesome Dr. Tony Castro this summer, and working with the amazingly talented head of the Missouri Geographic Alliance, Shannon White, to do a Geography camp. This will accompany a Geographic Education class, so I’m psyched.

Next fall we have an AMAZING new full-time doc student, Ms. Sarah Shear, who is moving in across the hall from me in my apartment complex. We will be posting happy hour pictures towards the end of the summer.

What’s up with grad school?

I decided about a month ago that I would be doing a fourth year, giving myself extra time to take classes that I need, and work on publications. That pushes my graduation date from May 2012 to May 2013. C’est la vie.

I presented Visions of powerful integrative elementary social studies. with Linda at the National Council for Social Studies national conference in November in Atlanta, GA.

The College and University Faculty Assembly conference is a smaller conference for (you guessed it) college and university faculty, and I presented Are there roots running underground? Examining the nature and extent of powerful integrative elementary social studies with Linda and researchers from other universities.

I presented at the Consortium for Research in Teacher Education at the University of Texas-Austin in March. Tony and I did Exploring perspectives of global citizenship in 21st century preservice teachers, which we’ve really been focusing on recently. It’s just the first part in a larger look at our study. He’s been putting in some global citizenship questions for me. It makes me happy, since this is my dissertation area.

Tony and I are presenting Challenges in Preparing 21st Century Teachers for Citizenship Education at the Association of Teacher Educators conference in Kansas City in August.

We have another paper in for submission for AATC, called Preparing Teachers for the world within the classroom: Investigating preservice teachers views on multicultural and global citizenship. .

This post is beginning to awkwardly sound like a longer version of my CV.

What is the future of the blog?

WELL, I’ve been asking myself that. I’ve got an interview that I’ll be putting online soon, and might start looking at doing other interviews. I would LOVE to go back to Malawi for my dissertation with World Camp, so let’s cross our fingers, shall we? At this point, I’m not sure. I do promise to update more, though.

What would you like to see?

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