Christmas Reading and New Year's Study Resolutions

A question that I continually wrestle with is this: As a part-time PhD student, how much study am I meant to do?  How much study can I do? What are the most effective ways of studying? Working full-time within the education system means that the holidays become, naturally, my most 'productive' times in relation to my studies. But I am conscious of the need to make this work consistently throughout the year - certainly as best as I can.

So, in writing, here are my New Year's resolutions in relation to carving out time for my research:

• Sunday night is bath night.  It must also become 'reading' night. I can get a good two hours in before the water turns cold!
• Monday mornings need, therefore, to be an opportunity for reflection. The alarm must go off at 5am to make sure that I get at least an hour and a half in of quality work in before having to get ready for school.
• Monday evenings will continue to be my main study time. 7-10pm gives me three hours, and should include attending to my university emails. That block-booking of six and a half hours over an actual time span of about twenty eight hours is crucial to maintain some sort of consistency.
• The use of my research journal must become more rigorous. I need to build in time for regular re-reading of my research journal. The first hour of the Monday night session would work well.
• The second hour for new writing - either in research journal or with ongoing writing up; currently on the literature review for my research proposal. 

My Christmas reading has been very much about research and away from the substantive topic of reading. The Routledge Doctoral Student's Companion remains my main text.  I've read to Chapter 23 now. It continues to both reassure and unsettle in equal measure.

I'm preoccupied with the continued need to define 'values', that it is no longer enough to simply identify and then establish oneself within a constructivist or interpretive paradigm. But then there is the inevitable acknowledgement of the ethical problems inherent in researching in 'one's own backyard', alongside some warnings about reflexivity as a methodological tool. Sigh.

I also feel that I have been granted 'permission' to write in the first person, and in the active voice. This is something that I definitely struggled with on my Masters course, but I think that first person active might allow my writing to be 'truer' to the particular academic genre in which I find myself.

I am conscious of the emphasis that there needs to be on argument, even in the literature review. This is very hard to construct when I don't yet know exactly what it is that I wish to 'argue', but it is something that I intend to take to heart.

So onwards and upwards. I feel that it has been a good first term, but the much harder work is about to begin as I move towards actual deadlines in relation to the research proposal.

One Giant Leap Forward and Several Hasty Retreats

Supervisor, cheer me, for I have read. It is one month since my last meeting.

Brown, J. .S, Collins, A & Duguid, P. 1989. Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher. [Online]. 18(1), 32-42. [30 November 2015]. Available from: http://edr.sagepub.com/content/18/1/32
Kalenze, E (2014). Education is Upside-Down Reframing reform to focus on the right problems. (1st ed.). Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Merga, M.K. (2015). Access to Books in the Home and Adolescent Engagement in Recreational Book Reading: Considerations for secondary school educators. English in Education. 49(3), pp. 197-214.
Nationalcollegeorguk. 2015. Nationalcollegeorguk. [Online]. [24 November 2015]. Available from: https://network.nationalcollege.org.uk/collegediscussions/28075
Revisiting Margaret Meek

I was also lucky enough to attend Tom Bennett's Research Ed English conference at Swindon on the 7th November. I heard David Didau, Debra Kidd, Professor Ray Land of Durham University who gave the keynote address on threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. I took something from each. From Andy Tharby I am utilising an ideal: imagine if every English teacher read one paper every half term over a period of ten years...Eric Kalenze's discussion of context and his urge to 'put those comprehension strategies down' was compelling.  Each sent me scuttling in a different reading direction.

But of this month's new reading, Brown's Situated Cognition was the most interesting (and the most difficult to process!) I need to investigate much further, but this could be the start of a theoretical framework in which to root my research. I am definitely shaping around the building of a reading community, and the things that are within my power in the classroom and across the department. Influenced by Brown, I am questioning what it means to be a reader in the real world, and what that might look like translated into a classroom – so still maintaining those initial threads of ideas about teacher knowledge; systems, environment and opportunities; and knowledge of the students themselves as readers all contributing to some kind of departmental pedagogy about the teaching of reading.

From the eminently companionable Doctoral Student's Companion I have enjoyed a useful chapter on the Literature Review with really concrete examples of good and bad writing - so I have begun, and will have something by the January deadline. A timely and useful prod since I feel like I actually have to do something other than read and think in a bubble but it is, still, difficult to do without formulated research questions. I have too many of them and they are simply too big at the moment. Which is where Pryor's essay on constructing research questions has been invaluable. I have undertaken the suggested map of significance exercise to try and focus thinking.

It transpires that, currently, the profile and status of reading for pleasure institutionally, notions of ‘authentic’ reading and ‘authentic’ situations and opportunity for reading both in terms of access and curriculum are central. I suspect that, in spite of everything that might be going on to promote reading at the surface, teachers are still subconsciously but intrinsically and implicitly condemning it as an activity.  I think about the 'Currently I'm Reading...poster campaign at school and its now tired unsustainability; the half-hearted support amongst non-English staff for things like DEAR; the fact that reading in lessons is side-lined the minute exams or any kind of internal assessment are on the scene; even the language that we use to describe the most able readers, not to mention the lack of curriculum time currently allowed to pursuing reading for pleasure. All these initiatives which might be having the opposite effect of that which is intended. Perhaps school culture creates an unintentional devaluing of books and reading.

So, I have a more clearly defined focus than I have had since the heady days of my research proposal application for study, when I thought I knew what I was doing...!

The problem is that this is most definitely a case of one step forward and two steps backwards.

Until this point I have always thought about things that I would like to do…and then worked backwards to reading and theories.  I now find that whilst I think I have now narrowed down the area of focus, I have no idea now about what to actually do!

Supervision tomorrow.  Perhaps I will be absolved.