Building relationships to across research disciplines

A photo portrait of Nora Gross

Nora Gross

Education, Culture, and Society Ph.D., 2020

Before Penn GSE: Graduate student

After Penn GSE: Visiting Assistant Professor, Boston College

"This was really the only program like it, where I could be based in a school of education and be surrounded by people who were interested in education and social justice and also have a deep grounding in disciplinary and interdisciplinary study."

I’ve been a photographer my whole life, and prior to coming to Penn GSE I completed a one year graduate certificate program in documentary film. I was planning to apply to doctoral programs, but it was important to me to not lose that artistic side of myself and to incorporate it into my research. Penn GSE’s Education, Culture, and Society (ECS) doctoral program was really the only thing like it, where I could be based in a school of education and be surrounded by people who were interested in education and social justice and also have a deep grounding in disciplinary and interdisciplinary study – and where I could work with other people thinking about ways to share research beyond just text on a page.

At Penn, I chose to pursue a dual doctoral degree with sociology. The problems that I have been interested in studying and that I explored in my dissertation -- about how Black adolescent boys experience grief in the wake of neighborhood gun violence -- those are problems that don’t confine themselves to one discipline. In trying to holistically understand that experience I specifically used a sociological framework, but there are also intersections with social psychology, social work, public health, and obviously education is central to how I looked at it. If I had just been a student in the sociology department I don’t think I would have felt as free to explore some of these other lenses and read in other disciplines. Being at Penn GSE allowed me to be open-minded in exploring how do you answer this question or solve this problem, not how does sociology specifically solve this problem.

I also got involved with CAMRA (Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts) which became an important home base for me of people who were interested in similar approaches but focused on vastly different topics and could give me feedback on my work. Through CAMRA I made two films connected to my dissertation and also worked on a feature-length production with John Jackson. Having these opportunities and this group of people to work with on projects really improved my scholarship and my affective connection to the work. I was able to share the emotional dimensions of my work more directly with people, particularly people who might never read my dissertation or my book.

Today, I’m teaching in an interdisciplinary program at Boston College, and my interdisciplinary background at GSE has been helpful for this teaching experience. I have been trying to experiment with multimodality in my teaching; for example, the final project for my spring course required a traditional research paper and presentation, but also students had to develop a creative intervention to the problem they investigated. My confidence in doing that kind of project and also in thinking about how to grade it came out of my work at CAMRA and my work at Penn more broadly.

There’s no way to say this without sounding corny, but the community and the people at Penn GSE were a huge part of my experience. Because I had a very small cohort in the ECS program, we connected quickly with each other, and the students ahead of us and in other programs took us in. I quickly found a fantastic community both in terms of personal relationships and also of people who became collaborators. I’ve published articles now with colleagues from different GSE programs, and I’m currently editing a book with two other GSE alums. And as I work on developing my dissertation into its own book, I have continued to reconnect with my advisor. My friends and relationships are what I really hold onto from my experience at Penn GSE.