Postscript

Media, Culture, Technology

Author: Harris Risell

Harris graduated from Dickinson College in 2016 with a BA in English. He now teaches and tutors adult English language learners near his home in Blue Bell, PA. He also plays the ukulele, using primarily songs from Steven Universe for inspiration and practice.

photo for greg

Holly Kosiewicz

January 29, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Holly Kosiewicz is Director of Policy Development at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jordan and El Salvador and has worked on research teams in Colombia, Peru, and the United States. Her work has been included and published in several book projects as well as The Journal of Higher Education, The Journal of Economic Psychology, and Education Week. Holly earned her Master’s at Brandeis University (2007) and completed her PhD at the University of Southern California (2015).  

HARRIS: What were your immediate plans after finishing undergrad and did they work out the way you imagined they would?

HOLLY: I graduated from UT Austin in 2002, and my intent was to do international development work. I’m a first-generation American, and my Polish parents instilled in me the importance of understanding different cultures. So, after UT, I joined the Peace Corps and worked in Jordan. Unfortunately, we were evacuated after six months of service. That sent me back to the States for about half a year. After that I returned to the Peace Corps in El Salvador but I realized it wasn’t really a good fit; nevertheless I still wanted to do something related to international development work. So, afterwards, I decided to get a Master’s in International Development from Brandeis University. As a student there, I became a research assistant on a project that was examining the well-being of a Bolivian indigenous group: the Tsimane’. That experience is what sparked my interest in doing research.

After I graduated with my Master’s degree, I got a job working as a research assistant at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. There, I worked on a number of projects, but the project that most interested me was one that investigated the impacts of a financial aid program intended to help lower-income students attend and succeed in college. What I liked about that project was that I was able to work with economists and psychologists who were studying the behavioral dimensions of student aid. I worked at Los Andes for a year before returning to the States to start paying off my student loans. When I returned, I began my work in DC as a researcher for an education newspaper called Education Week. If you’re interested in education, or K-12, I would recommend looking into it and reading its articles.

After working there for two years, I enrolled in the education policy Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California. USC gave me the best opportunity to do my own research and gave me the best financial support. While there, I studied developmental education in community colleges. To give you some context, developmental education is largely used by community colleges to help underprepared students succeed at the college level. Some people call it “remedial coursework.” And there’s been a lot of debate about the effectiveness of developmental education. I did a wide range of research—I do mixed methods research, which means it involves both quantitative and qualitative approaches—trying to test the effectiveness of different assessment instruments to determine which ones can adequately assess if a student is prepared for college or not.

In my last year of school, I was laboring on whether I should go to academia or whether I should enter the government. It was a hard decision. Deep down, I really wanted to conduct research that could make a meaningful impact on the education that students receive, and I wanted to work directly with state and local policy makers.

So instead of taking a job in academia, I decided to take a job as Director of Policy Development at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Because the work I’m doing has a clear impact on state higher education policy, I think it is the right place to be, at least for now. But only time will tell if I transition to a research organization or try being an academic later.

HARRIS: You’re back in Texas, right? Did a longing to be home bring you back?

HOLLY: Yeah, for sure. I wanted to be closer to my parents, especially as they get older. My husband and I have a family here and want to make sure our kids have a close relationship with our relatives.

HARRIS: Can you describe for me what you do during a typical day at work?

HOLLY: Well, my work really ebbs and flows. I don’t really have a typical day, but I can tell you what I do. My official title is Director of Policy Development at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, and I work in a relatively new division at the agency called Innovation and Policy Development. And the short of it is: we’re considered a think tank within the state agency, that supports and conducts research that has the potential to inform higher education policy and practice in the state. For the past year, I have been developing relationships with external researchers—these might be researchers in academic institutions, like Dickinson, or in think tanks—to work on studies that answer the big questions that state policy makers have around higher education.

For example, one of the things I’m currently working on is dual-credit education. Dual-credit education is a process by which a high school student can simultaneously earn high school and college credit from a single course. In Texas, participation in dual-credit education has been expanding rapidly for the last 15 years. But recently, due to new legislation, it’s also seen a significant increase in the percent of 14- and 15-year-olds participating in it. As a result of these shifts, state and local policymakers are raising questions about whether dual-credit education is being effectively scaled. Are students academically prepared to succeed in dual-credit courses, which are college-level courses? Are the academic standards used to teach dual-credit courses the same as those used to teach regular college courses? What are the costs of delivering dual-credit education? And very broadly, how are high school students benefitting from dual-credit education? These are some questions that the Coordinating Board, in collaboration with the RAND Corporation, is trying to answer, and we hope that these answers can help state legislators and policymakers decide what kinds of reform should take place.

HARRIS: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges to developing and implementing policies in higher education?

HOLLY: I think one big challenge is how to go about improving education policy and practice when working with very limited resources. In other words, where can you introduce reforms that generate the largest gains for the least amount of money? That question is always at the forefront of policymaking at all levels of government.

Another challenge is the political pressure that policymakers encounter continuously to get things done. Many times, the pressure to get things done quickly runs counter to the long time it takes research to inform what policy should look like. Research is typically very methodical and it’s slow to produce results. Policymakers, however, need to make decisions quickly, and so they are not going to wait for research that takes five years to complete. The challenge is thus designing research that can produce results relatively quickly while meaningfully informing the decisions that policymakers need to make.

Another challenge is that there are a lot of stakeholders involved, and each of them has its own interests and concerns. It’s sometimes difficult to understand what all of these interests and concerns are, not to mention determining how to balance them in such a way that everyone benefits. Not only students, for instance, but also teachers and faculty, advisors and administrators.

HARRIS: You’ve worked in different educational systems and in several capacities related to education: development projects, policy research abroad. How have these experiences informed the work you do now?

HOLLY: Well, I’ve always believed that education can make society more equal. And that belief has shaped the work that I have done since I’ve graduated from college. I’ve always wanted to ensure that my work could really improve education quality, particularly for the underserved. If I wasn’t doing that—if my work was helping maintain the status quo, for instance—that would make me feel very uncomfortable.

HARRIS: Some people might cast or imagine policy research as being a separate project from what could be called “on the ground” work, or work that interacts directly with the people affected by policy.

HOLLY: I don’t think policy research has to be detached at all from the people you are trying to affect. There are all different types of research. There is research that uses administrative records from state government agencies or federal government agencies. But there is also policy work or policy research where the researcher engages directly with students, with teachers, with community organizers to really get a better grasp of what is happening in the trenches and to give voice to those who have been silenced by more dominant groups. I think the experiences of people who deliver education or experience education is extremely valuable, especially when you’re trying to contextualize, for example, quantitative findings. And the only real way you can get at that is by actually talking to the people who are directly involved in overseeing and delivering education.

HARRIS: What advice do you have for someone trying to determine the best way to have an impact on the educational systems that surround them?

HOLLY: I took some time off after earning an undergraduate degree—I didn’t go straight into my PhD because I think it is really important to figure out where your passion lies. And I think one way of doing that is working in the trenches and really trying to figure out what are the challenges that students are facing and what are the challenges that teachers are facing. I think those experiences can really help you figure out what you are interested in and what you like to do. For example, I was a teacher in the Peace Corps and I discovered that I wasn’t particularly good at it. But that experience also helped me to better understand that there are so many external factors, like nutrition and outside demands, that can impact if a child learns and performs well. I saw that with my own eyes, and I don’t think I would have learned about that sitting behind a computer screen or reading a report, you know? Or at least, I wouldn’t have learned it so profoundly.

So I would recommend to anyone who is interested in making an impact on education policy to work side-by-side with educators, parents, students and educational organizations. Get to really know the challenges that they are facing before trying to make change. Once you get a good grasp of what those challenges are, the way you approach education policy research will be more thoughtful, and probably will gain more respect.

ComicsStill Life

Between American Comics and Hollywood

September 14, 2015 / / 0 Comments

During the summer months, Dickinson College’s campus is largely uninhabited, save for a small collection of staff members, faculty, and students. So when folks who saw me at the college then asked me to explain why I chose to spend my vacation from the academic halls and the library—where I exhausted countless hours studying, writing papers, and snacking on Kashi granola bars and Chobani yogurt cups (I admit that I am among the few who survives without caffeine)—back in those spaces, you might imagine, reader, that I felt motivated to offer some spectacular response. To satisfy most inquiries, saying very plainly “I’m doing research on comic books” was an exciting enough phrase.

In the presence of interrogators who possessed stronger senses of doubt, though, I needed to elaborate in order to show them that research on comics is a real thing; “Greg Steirer, a professor in the English department who taught of few of the classes I have taken, is writing a book with Alisa Perren, a professor at University of Texas at Austin, about the relationships between Hollywood studios and American comic book companies,” I would start.

“What got you interested in that topic?” one questioner asked at some point.

“I haven’t read many comic books and generally enjoy films, but what interests me most is my professor’s approach: he intends to move away from looking at the language, be it words or images, of comics and focus on how they function as products of industry: titles and symbols are trademarks, characters are copyrighted properties, and markets change as printing and film technology becomes more sophisticated,” I typically responded.

“Oh, so you won’t be comparing stories to their adaptations?” another interrogator asked.

“Only if the differences revealed through that kind of comparison affect the legal actions carried out by a company or studio, the money earned by comics artists and directors, producers, etc., adaptations for television, spin-offs, or the promotions and selling of ancillary products like toys, clothing, DVDs, and video games,” I have replied.

“You know, I have not thought about it much before now, but I have noticed a ton of comics-related things around within the last few years. I can see how you could learn a lot using that kind of approach,” the freshly convinced admitted.

Though I experienced several a-ha moments of my own as I was working on my project, many of them were similar to ones I witnessed others having: there existed this shared notion that comic books as well as films and merchandise inspired by comics have been a part of American popular culture for a while, yet the fact that this phenomenon would be examined in academia is generally surprising.

“Where Did You Begin?”

My first task was to familiarize myself with the terms in use within the works that discuss comic books. Effective research addresses the basis of knowledge about a topic or field that is maintained by a particular academic community before covering new ground, by using either traditional methodologies to add information to that basis or by suggesting that different tools be implemented to expand the breadth of the topic. To do this, I looked to two texts—Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (2013) and Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (2012)—that Professor Steirer assigned to me in order to gain a better sense of the history of comics as a medium and some of the prominent comic book artists who helped keep the art form alive (with some attention to its place within film, television, and other entertainment industries). Gabilliet’s book offers a comprehensive, yet not exhaustive, description of the birth and evolution of comics, highlighting different eras in which comic books were marked as pure entertainment, censored for being detrimental to the lives of American youth, hailed as art, and acknowledged as forums for ideological agendas.

Howe’s book focuses on the story of the founding and growth of Marvel Comics, one of the largest comic book companies to date, describing the artists, writers, corporate heads, organizations, and families involved in the creation of iconic characters, the most popular of whom are superheroes like Spiderman, Iron Man, Elektra, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, and the Incredible Hulk. Using personal interviews, recorded conversations, letters, and hearsay, Howe presents the company’s moments of decline and extreme commercial success during the Golden (late 1930s to the early 1950s), the Silver (late 1950s to around 1970), the Bronze (1970 to 1985), and portions of the Modern Ages (1985 to the present) of American comics. It is during this latter phase of time that comic book companies in the United States begin to integrate with Hollywood studios in order to build franchises around popular characters that inspire the development of ancillary products and allow both industries to thrive.

While I was reading through those books, Professor Steirer also shared with me his essay “The State of Comics Scholarship: Comics Studies and Disciplinarity,” in which argued that there is no established academic community for comics scholars and hence little opportunity for debate about what methodologies are to become standard and what theoretical direction ought to be taken within comics studies. He goes on to say that most of the research produced about comics either presents facts about the medium or puts forth critiques about the language within comics, their implicit ideological pretenses, authorship, the medium’s effect on readers (i.e. fan culture, social studies on children), and the comic book’s place as a commercial entity.

As a result of the prevalence of these kinds of isolated analyses, “comics studies” is often grouped together with traditional academic fields like literary studies, culture and media studies, and American studies rather than treated as its own discipline. Without any formal disciplinarity attributed to itself by comics scholars, research on comics does not have its own institutional locus. The solution to this lack of administrative organization and clarity of objective that Steirer offers redirects scholars’ attention to the fact that comic books were first printed to satisfy one goal: to earn money and continue selling products. Companies like Marvel, DC Comics, Image Comics, and Dark Horse have helped turn comics into a fully-fledged and continuously expanding industry. What is more, the Modern Age of American comics would likely have already ended and comics would largely be obscure by now if most comic book publishers did not combine forces with Hollywood studios such as Warner Bros., Sony, Disney, 20th Century Fox, and Universal Pictures, among others.

Both comic book companies and film studios in the United States now share the more sophisticated goal of mass-producing popular and accessible fare that is franchise-able. Thus, Professor Steirer identifies the industrial approach to the study of comics as the most productive mode of analysis on the subject of comic books because of their relationship to issues like production, marketing, consumption practices, and intellectual property law and because of the success of this approach in film and media studies. He does reference some examples of comics scholarship that explore texts through this lens, but he explains that these few pieces exist in the margins of an already marginalized scholarly space.

“What’s in the ‘doing’? What were you looking for?”

After I had finished reading through the basis of knowledge on comic books and comics studies, I was better equipped to search for information directly relevant to Professor Steirer and Professor Perren’s book. Since industry-oriented scholarship on comic books is not a common approach, the sources of information about deals between publishers and studios, legal battles over the copyrights on a particular character or name, and advertising techniques used to promote comics, movies, and ancillary products is buried, so to speak, in non-scholarly articles, reports, and databases. I was tasked with the job of searching through the digital archives of the trade magazine (a general resource for news targeted toward people working in a particular industry) known as Variety, which publishes articles about issues related to Hollywood. I sifted through roughly a thousand separate pieces using search terms like “Marvel Comics,” “Avengers movies,” “Batman,” and “comics and television” in order to find reports that could give Professors Steirer and Perren a greater sense of how issues within these industries are handled tonally in comparison to legal documents and other online forums that mention comic books, movies inspired by comics, or the individuals involved in the processes that maintain these industries’ activity and influence their success. I compiled these writings into a digital annotated bibliography that can be viewed at any point of the book project’s development. Currently, there are over 300 applicable entries listed and summarized.

“What have you gained from this experience and where do you go next?”

Professor Steirer and Professor Perren’s book is scheduled to be published a few years from now, so the work I completed for them was rather simple compared to the work that is going to need to be done at the later stages of the project. However, Professor Steirer and I have discussed the prospect of our picking up where I left off next year. Aside from the large amount of knowledge I have learned this past summer, I have discovered an interest in research and at the moment have not ruled it out among my post-graduation goals. Also, as a student who now has worked and studied using both techniques typically utilized in literary studies and those that are more unconventional, like looking at the commercial or industrial issues, I have become much more aware of and sensitive to what common words like “book,” “art,” “study,” and “American” can mean.

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