Telling Our Stories: My Journey towards Becoming a Scholar

• In Event: Self as Instrument: Leveraging Qualitative Research to Develop Scholarly Voice in Minoritized Emerging Scholars

Abstract

As a master’s student in an Education Policy and Evaluation program, there were not many opportunities to conduct research. Most of the writing completed during my time in the program was a very specific style and measure of writing for specific types of mediums (.g., policy briefs). There was not much space to develop a scholarly voice—there was no space for individual voices in this type of writing. Conducting research was an elusive, mythical idea—I knew it happened, but I wasn’t sure how. Not only did I not understand how and where research was happening, I certainly did not identify as a researcher, let alone a scholar. PURPOSE, a research development program for underrepresented students, provided the opportunity to not only conduct research, but the opportunity to begin constructing my scholarly voice by deciding what is important to me as a researcher.

When I read articles for class, I would always ask why academics write “like this.” They used so many words to discuss what I felt were such simple yet powerful ideas. I often found myself getting lost in the verbosity of it all. It was not until I became a PURPOSE Fellow that I discovered I had the power to rewrite that narrative. As a budding scholar, I wanted my work to not only be representative of people that looked like me, a Black woman, but accessible. I wanted readers to read my research like a story, a narrative. I learned that I don’t have to speak in a particular way for my research to be valid.

But even in my aim to sculpt narratives that were digestible, I knew I wanted my work to be representative. I remember my advisor sharing the idea that research is simply a story, it doesn’t have to be some grandiose idea, but the idea that research exists around us and within us, within our friends and family, and strangers. This led me to conduct my qualitative study on the experiences of Black women graduate students at predominantly white institutions—a story that I was living in real time. The PURPOSE experience taught me that I did not have to go far to conduct research—the lived experiences of myself and those around me are research, I simply must tell the story.

Author

• Keturah E. Young, Florida State University