"Sorry to hear that, but those are my mentors."

I walked in to Dr. Eskew's office thinking we would have to interview him about all aspects of his academic career and professional life to find the people he had interacted with and who had provided the most influence for him. That turned out not to be necessary. Doug was very definite about who had made the biggest contributions for him: his dissertation directors. He had even done some research of his own to discover who their mentors had been, and he presented us with his findings based on acknowledgments in published works by his dissertation directors. It was anticlimactic really, as we'd expected to have to begin this on the basis of our own research. Oh, but that was coming. It became clear early on that there were seemingly infinite ways to go, just based off of two people. The research was complicated by the fact that you had to infer whether someone was merely in the same sphere as your subject, or if that person had made a significant enough contribution to be another link in your chain. Toward the end of the chain, around the 1700s, it became an exercise just to find someone who had been in the same physical space at the same time.

What does that say about influence? It's clear to me that we are influenced academically in many ways by many different people, not just those we consider to be our direct mentors. The books we read for papers, the emails we send to prominent or not so prominent theorists, our classmates, our professors, our class interaction all have the power to provide ideas and theories that influence our pedagogies. I do admire Dr. Eskew's conviction on his own influences, though. At one point we contacted him for additional names as the ones we had were looking like dead ends stuck in turn of the century Czechoslovakia. His response was, "Sorry to hear that, Erin, but those are my mentors." That is a man who knows where his ideas came from.

It was pleasure working with Jennifer and kimi on the project, though we did most of our work independently and only then came together to discuss and plan. I suspect that my attitude about the project was more linear in that I wanted to find one clear line with prominent names and stick with it. Jennifer and Kimi came with many more names and directions and wanted to incorporate them in the final project. As it turned out, that would have possible and would have shown all the extra work. It was a good lesson for me in the limitations of linear thinking on a project like. This project had the potential to shoot off in many different directions, interconnected and highly collaborative. We achieved some of that, though I think we had to tone down or discard much of the work we did due to time and space restrictions. We could have spent a whole semester doing this project and still had things to add.

Thank you, Dr. Souder, for the opportunity to see the communities we are a part of!