Roles & Contributions

As the Principal Investigator, Professor Helmer has always been the visionary, designer, and driver of the project. By working with and observing students in the classroom, Professor Helmer came to develop our research questions about student wellness and writing pedagogy. 

Each day, Professor Helmer brings the knowledge gained through data analysis into the classroom, be it through grounding exercises or deep listening activities. 

In weekly team meetings Professor Helmer is a primary source of information, answering questions RAs may have about topics ranging from transcription conventions to contemplative pedagogy while leading the team in discussion. The result is an efficient and productive research process, and, perhaps more outstandingly, an increasingly fulfilling and enlightening classroom experience.

In partnership with prior RA Millie Hacker, Professor Helmer is currently in the process of writing an academic article that discusses the project with a focus on the impact of gratitude in particular. Professor Helmer insists on giving each of the RAs a tremendous amount of credit for their diligence, attention to detail, and thoughtful insights. The work so far has been extremely collaborative, and she is excited to continue working with these exceptional fellows.

Last year, prior RA Millie Hacker, Maxine Altura, and current RA Grace Nighswonger dedicated over 100 combined hours to transcribing interviews with international students who had previously taken writing courses with Professor Helmer. The original purpose of the interviews was to understand how international students had experienced the multilingual curriculum that Dr. Helmer had designed and if they had been adequately prepared for their upper division studies. However, the focus group interviews took an unexpected turn. Students were doing great academically, but not so great emotionally.

Using conversation analysis, RAs then reviewed and annotated these transcripts, looking for discourse that touched on such things as sadness and isolation, happiness and gratefulness, or the international student experience at UCSC. 

This quarter, the hard work continues as RAs Alexa Ballesteros, Tyler Kay, and Carolyn Mish have joined the team! Their current work focuses on qualitative data analysis: They extract written responses from student metacognitive forms (e.g., “Describe how delight writing affected your life?”) and organize them into spreadsheets using detailed data entry protocols.

Each response is then coded, allowing researchers to efficiently identify trends and group responses into thematic categories. These themes inform both pedagogical decisions and broader understandings of the project’s impact.

Once this round of data analysis is complete, the team will conduct follow-up interviews with former Happiness Project students to explore how the project influenced their learning and wellbeing. These interviews will also be transcribed and analyzed through conversation analysis as the next phase of research.