Academic Life Your Lived Experience Makes You a Better Scholar What you know from your own life can become the question that shapes your strongest work. By Tanya Golash-Boza During my first semester of graduate school, I took a course on the sociology of education. Midway through the semester, we read John Ogbu and Signithia Fordham’s famous article on “acting White.” The research had been conducted in Washington, D.C., where I grew up, around the same time I was in high school. As I read, I kep