Let's make this clear from the beginning: writing a thesis is one of the most psychologically challenging things I have ever been asked to do in college. The entire process was exhausting, anxiety producing, and personal. I realized very quickly that I knew very little about how to do research: I did not know how long it would take to schedule, conduct, transcribe, and analyze interviews. I had no idea how intimidating the writing process could be. I had no idea how to edit a document longer than 15 pages. 

 

My research initially began as an interest in critical pedagogy: I was eager to see how often this radical theory of education showed up in educational administrator training programs. Using the UW College of Education as a case study, I was going to attempt to discern how frequently and in what context this theory was taught to future administrators. My original thesis was that this theory was underrepresented in administrator training programs and that by increasing the presence of this theory, we could develop administrators who were more likely to push for revolutionizing school systems. By the end of this process, I had completely changed my thesis. At the end of it all, I was much more convinced that administrators possess an interpretive power that is more suited to pragmatically altering the climate of a district than it is effecting radical policy change and that the role of critical pedagogy was actually fairly minor and should remain that way.