Lyman Dispatch: Cherise McBride
Chelsea McBride received the 2019 Lyman Fellowship. The Peter Lyman Graduate Fellowship in new media, established in the memory of esteemed UC Berkeley Professor Peter Lyman, provides a stipend to a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate to support the writing of his or her Ph.D. dissertation on a topic related to new media. The fellowship is supported by donations from Professor Barrie Thorne, Sage Publications and many individual friends and faculty.
Here's what McBride said about the experience:
Thanks to the support of the Peter Lyman fellowship this summer, I was able to focus on writing my dissertation without competing task of working to fund my summer. I am so grateful for the opportunity to not only have this space opened up to focus on my research, but also, most honorably to have my work recognized by Berkeley Center for New Media in this way. I spent time this summer vigorously writing a draft of my findings and revising my methods chapter. Now as the summer comes to a close, I have a chapter of my findings in draft form, including a robust methods chapter which lays out the details of my data analysis and methodologically situates my work. I was able to scale back some of plan and realize that I have more than enough data for completion of my dissertation plus enough for continued analysis as I transition to next steps, which include, for Fall 2019 and beyond, potentially the academic job search or post-graduate fellowship support.
For the Fall semester, I will continue my dissertation writing alongside conference presentations, and begin a soft job search and preparation (tenure track faculty positions that align with my needs and interests) alongside research fellowship/post-doc inquiries. By early Spring, I plan to submit my findings and discussion chapters to my committee members for revision while simultaneously working toward my post-graduate endeavors including job preparation and hopefully, interviews.
Cherise McBride’s dissertation project is an exploration into how teachers enrolled in a graduate-level technology course came to understand, reveal and apply sociocultural knowledge in their designs of digitally-mediated learning. Using data from a larger research project entitled “Developing the Digital Pedagogy of Pre-Service Teachers,” the dissertation explores teacher learning from a sociocultural perspective (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 1994; Sannino & Engeström, 2010) and offers a model for culture knowledgeas a salient knowledge domain in designs of digitally-mediated learning (Mahiri, 2011).