Another Summer of Reading

Not a surprise, of course.

But I am much better at it than I was two years ago. I am much more discerning and much more critical; more methodical in note-taking on individual books and articles, and better at organising those notes so that they are of greater use and easier to return to. The reading alternates between journal articles, books and blog-posts, which, although perhaps of less 'academic' value, often offer useful insights and perspectives, and allow consideration of how reading and reading teaching is perceived in the social media and the popular press.

The reading also seems like a luxury, when I should be coding data, and I have therefore enjoyed it almost as much as I did that first summer when I was just reading whatever came to hand next.

Here is this summer's reading list:

Clark, C. (2016) Children’s and Young People’s Reading in 2015. Findings from the National Literacy Trust’s annual survey 2015. London: National Literacy Trust

Clark, C. & Teravainen, A. (2017). Celebrating Reading for Enjoyment: Findings from our Annual Literacy Survey 2016. London: National Literacy Trust.

Cliff Hodges, G. (2011). Textual Drama: The Value of Reading Aloud. EnglishDramaMedia, Issue 19, 19-26.

Cremin, T. (2011) Reading for Pleasure and Wider Reading - UKLA Resources https://ukla.org/downloads/November_11_Resource_TC_Reading_for_Pleasure.pdf [Acessed 4th August 2017]

Cushing, I. (2016) Words on the page, Worlds in the mind. The English and Media Magazine (71) 26-29

Fogarty, M., Clemens, N., Simmons, D., Anderson, L., Davis, J., Smith, A., Wang, H., Kwok, O,. Simmons, L., Oslund, E. (2017) Impact of a Technology-Mediated Reading Intervention on Adolescents’ Reading Comprehension, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness. 10:2, 326-353.

Jamshidi, K. (2016) You’re An English Student Who Doesn’t Read?: An exploration of how assessment-driven literary study does not require students to read in order to succeed.

https://studyingfiction.wordpress.com [Accessed 2nd August 2017]

NATIONAL READING PANEL (U.S.). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: teaching children to read : an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction : reports of the subgroups. [Washington, D.C.], National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health.

Robinson, V., Hohepa, M., Lloyd, C. (2009) School Leadership and Student Outcomes: Identifying What Works and Why. Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration [BES]. Wellington: Ministry of Education.

Speaks, H. (2017) ‘Reading is Knowledge’ https://horatiospeaks.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/reading-is-knowledge/ [Accessed 30th August 2017)

Speaks, H. (2016) ‘Seven Steps to Improving Reading Comprehension’ Thinking Reading http://www.thinkingreading.net/files/files/7%20Steps%20to%20Improve%20Reading%20Comprehension.pdf [Accessed 14th August 2017]

Sutherland, J., Westbrook, J., Oakhill, J. and Sullivan, S. (2017) An ‘immersive’, faster read: increasing adolescent poor readers’ comprehension of text, using an inference-based, whole-text model of reading (under review).

The Secret Teacher (2017) We’re not reading - so why do we assume children will? The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2017/may/20/secret-teacher-were-not-reading-so-why-do-we-assume-children-will [Accessed 3rd September 2017]

Wigfield, A. & Guthrie, J.T. (1997). Relations of children’s motivation for reading to the amount and breadth of their reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89, 420-432.

And I'm looking forward to next Friday which will be my first official PhD day at home as I move down to four days a week at school. Roll on my first ever part-time term.

States of Mind

The idea of this blog originally was to try and capture some of the experience of undertaking part-time doctoral study. I knew it would be a long and arduous journey and that there would be ups and downs. I actually wasn't prepared for how big those ups and downs have been so far, but I have also noticed that I seem to oscillate between different 'states' of feeling as I work.

In no particular order, they are:

• Feeling overwhelmed by the absolute enormity of the substantive topic. Each reading I undertake generates a dozen more so that the literature I want to read grows exponentially. I can never 'know' enough.
• Feeling self-doubt, which turns into a kind of paralysis at the thought that I am contributing nothing at all. That my little 'project' (the word I tend to opt for in my head when I'm in this particular state) is tiny and pointless.
• Feeling frustrated, because I wish I'd done things differently. A feeling of, if only I'd known 'then' what I know now. But of course, that is the point of doing this, precisely because I didn't 'know then'. 
• Feeling 'mixed up', unable to clearly separates elements of the substantive topic in my mind; confusing ideas with each other continuously. This tends to be in relation particularly to big areas like reading for pleasure versus reading for study, or different aspects of reading comprehension. They are too big to mix up, but I do. Regularly.
• Feeling spurred on by tiny little moments of epiphany, often where I wake up in the morning and have to very quickly make some notes about a thought or an idea that I have had. (Presumably at a sub-conscious level, whilst sleeping.)

During the first two, I try to overcome them by maintaining some kind of routine, by plodding on with a straightforward task. Is there any such thing? Reading and making notes from a single article, or a limited target: 300 words, say. The third one is the most avenue because whilst I can acknowledge this, I can't do anything more about it in relation to the data already collected. The final one is best, that goes without saying; because then I become really ignited by the whole thing. Sometimes it morphs into the second one though, where I write down that exciting thought and then realise that it, too, is a nothing, or is just 'stating the bleedin' obvious'.

This summer, though, I have invested quite a lot of time in creating my room of one's own. Time which I perhaps should have spent on the research itself. My hands have often been paint-splattered rather than ink-splattered. However, it is now nearing completion, awaiting electricity on Tuesday and some internal painting.

I have named what my long-suffering husband calls 'the PhD hut' Little Acorns. So, look out academic world...I'm sure that this was the only thing holding me back.

A Room of One's Own

This is where the mighty tome will be written.

It looks unpromising at the moment and I'm certainly not going to do it on that bench.

No; this is the spot where my garden study is to be built. Component parts are arriving on Tuesday and so we need to clear the area and lay concrete over the next couple of days.

So, a break from the study for some manual labour, but some that will enhance the study, eventually!

The Sisyphean Routine of Summer

Supervisor, commend me for I have worked. It is four months since my last post. And how I have worked. The time between posts a measure, really, of the 'grind' that I now feel.

Two summers ago I skipped through my summer reading list, confident that each tome was contributing clearly to my knowledge and understanding of my substantive topic. I look back fondly at an early post like Summer Holiday Versus Term Time, and whilst I clearly felt overwhelmed as term began, there was so much fun in those first forays into the literature. Today I wade through the ever-increasing pile, knowing in my heart of hearts that I can never read or do enough to complete this Sisyphean task because the pile grows more quickly than I can deal with it. (Would people just stop researching and publishing stuff so that I can keep up?!) Reading also seems to take longer than it did because I need to join everything up; whereas in the beginning it was all fresh and new and exciting and differentiated in its own right.

There have, of course, been some breakthroughs; a few more of those milestones (I remember the first, vividly) which are so important in keeping going:

• I successfully completed the requirements for the second year and will move into my third year of doctoral study.
• I completed the Introduction to Qualitative Methods course and an essay on a 'research method'. I have called this the 'study group research interview'. It shares some characteristics with a focus group interview, but it is also very different in lots of ways.
• I participated in the first five of the study group research interviews and have transcribed four fifths of the recordings.
• I have begun (very tentatively) coding.
• I found a book which has unified lots of my reading. I wish I'd read it near the start, but it wasn't published then. Still - happy days.
• I was (fortuitously) invited to review another journal paper which has helped me to consolidate all sorts of theoretical ideas in relation to the classroom.

So, I have my first sets of data. I have a date with 'NVivo'. And I have some of the feelings associated with a first date: the nerves, the great expectations, the overwhelming inadequacy, the restlessness...
But coupled with this is the mundane of the routine, the drudgery, the predictability of a marriage - in for the long haul.

My routine for the summer amounts to between five and ten minutes of transcription daily (which is still taking me up to an hour) followed by at least one hour of reading, note-making and reflection and a crossing of something else from the 'to do' list. So it amounts to about two hours per day, but probably equates to fifteen or so hours a week. It should be more, but there are these small things called children that require entertaining over the summer. Even so, that is more than double my term-time work-rate. There are four and a half more weeks of the summer holidays remaining, so another sixty hours or so to go. It is strange to think that when I go back to school I shall be sixty hours further ahead.

A Treadle! A Treadle! My Kingdom for a Treadle!

Newly ethics-approved and now officially 'in the field', I have undertaken my first group interviews with the teachers in my department.

I have about an hour and a half's worth of audio split across two sessions, so far, and have now begun the process of transcription. I've been trying to use a well know transcription app (one that sounds like St George may have tried to fight it at one stage) and, it would be fair to say that has not been terribly successful.

The first ten minutes of audio took me nearly four hours to transcribe that way.

Then I remembered that in a past life I was an audio typist (those long summer holidays had to be spent somehow) and so I just ditched the technology and got on with the transcription manually. Oh for a treadle like in the good old days at the insurance firm...

I have got faster and faster and I am up to approximately an hour's labour for twenty minutes of talk. 1:3. I don't know if this is a good ratio or not. What I do know is that I feel thoroughly familiar with these discussions - I know them inside out. They are fascinating, incredibly rich; dialogue which felt pretty ordinary as it happened is absolutely loaded with ideas and suggestions for reading teaching - ideas which might easily get lost if such careful attention were not being paid to them. Which makes me wonder what gems might get passed by, acknowledged but then not acted upon, in an ordinary department meeting when pedagogy is under discussion.

At least through the collaborative action research model that I am using participating teachers will be able to review exactly what has been said at each stage as we shape our project more fully.

Now, on to coding...shudder.

Back In the Room

The 'Drowning in Data' courses offered at the university seem particularly attractive now, since that is what is beginning to happen.

Session 1 of the Introduction to Qualitative Methods course has galvanized me into action. I was put into a 'group' and had actual 'homework' with a deadline. That's been a while. An essay is required at the end of this module. That has also been a while.

And, since our next topic is interviews, in preparation I have been busy transcribing the first of my group interviews.

I have begun to arrive at some (unscientific) conclusions:

1. The dictation app I am trying to use is worthless.
2. Transcription is extremely labour intensive. The first ten minutes' worth of talk took nearly four hours to transcribe.
3. It gets a bit quicker. The next ten minutes I managed in an hour. Though this is still an unfeasible ratio.
4. These interviews generate a huge amount of data (insightful, this one).
5. I need to back out of the talk more. I seem to have dominated the discussion at one stage in the middle.  Note to self: shut up!

Still, if nothing else, it seems I am definitely back in the room. I have the second class today, followed by my first supervision session of the year, and I feel that I have been working at it non-stop since last week. I have done (most of) the reading for today's class. Deadlines, gulp. Odd being taught again, but I quite like it.

Full Steam Ahead

Ethical approval for my research was finally granted on the 11th January. It was a strangely muted moment; after all the fuss and fight through November and December perhaps there ought to have been fanfares and popping corks. Alas, there was nothing more than the funny buzzing vibration that signals an email notification to mark it.

So I now have the green light to go ahead and my first two 'declarable' sessions with teachers take place in the next fortnight. The data collection therefore begins in earnest from this point, and it is, perhaps, somewhat fortuitous that these two professional learning meetings fall so close together: a happy accident of the mock exam marking period just before Christmas which meant that December's session had to be postponed until now.

I have also applied to undertake a fifteen hour introduction to qualitative methods course which runs, ordinarily, as part of the MSc. If nothing else it may help me get back into the right frame of mind to immerse myself in my studies once more. (From which comment the keen reader might infer that I am not, currently, in such a frame of mind.)

And a further step in the right direction may occur as I prepare for a presentation this Friday to PGCE students at another south coast university on developing a reading culture in school: it will require a revision of material and thinking and I am looking forward to it.

Waiting Game

After last term's hiatus, I am still not entirely sure if I am back on track.

I have revised my timeline, rewritten my proposal, managed to avoid intermitting, eaten humble pie, submitted for ethical approval, and survived.

But I am yet to pass ethical review and the clock is ticking. And all the while that I don't have it, the scheduled research sessions with my teachers and the rich data collected therein can not count.

Still, I remain, for the time being at least, a PhD student, and enjoyed a little fillip this week as my first article appeared in a peer-reviewed academic journal. (And read by at least one person, according to Twitter!)