Research Writer Interview With Cheryl

I refer to myself as an edupreneur and have been working as an adjunct instructor at several locations in my area for 4 years. I am also active in the natural birth and parenting community and sometimes work as a birth and/or postpartum doula. I have 2 young sons and being their mother has taught me almost as much about research as going to graduate school did. I am married and my husband has a kidney transplant which always has me researching medications and procedures.

I use perspectives from both sociology and women’s studies to explore issues of gender and how they interact with birth and education. Do our society’s gender norms effect how fathers are viewed in the delivery room? is an example of a question I might explore from these perspectives. Or, are students less receptive to the use of technology when their professors are women?

My experiences in graduate school greatly shaped my interests and have had a lasting impact on my academic interests. As I was earning my graduate degree I had the experience of teaching in an online course and became very interested in the best way to reach students effectively in online environments and how to infuse those practices with feminist pedagogy. To this day I am constantly reading about best practices in online teaching and using technology to flip my in person classes. I tape all of my lectures and have students watch them before class so we can do work together in class. I greatly enjoy this method because we learn a great deal about the content and one another while working together on various topics.

I also was pregnant with my first child in graduate school and became used to people finding my decisions to birth and raise my children in more natural ways to be weird. This got me on the path of researching and learning more and more about natural birth and the work of doulas. This is a subject that I find myself researching during my free time along with the time I spend “working” on it. I participate in a lot of parenting groups and find the way fathers are portrayed to be most interesting!

When I had to write my first research paper using MLA format in high school it actually caused me to have a panic attack. I was completely unaware of this way of writing and became determined to conquer it. I got an “A” on that paper and decided I wanted to learn as much as I could to master academic writing. I learned MLA and APA format during my undergraduate education and learned Chicago style on my own. I went on to teach my siblings and cousins who attended college after me how to use writing guides and to become successful in these styles. I complied a great deal of resources to share with my students to help them learn the various writing styles once I began teaching. I love researching because I love the thrill of the hunt. I love formulating questions and firing up a database to see what information I can find. The feeling of finally finding something after several searches with no success is amazing. It makes me feel so accomplished and seeking that feeling makes me great research writer. My writing is always thorough because I so enjoy the hunt. I am an excellent writer because I used to fear it but became determined to conquer it and did so through repeated applications and research!