Epiphany Amongst the Tulips

This week, whilst on international duty with a school trip in the Netherlands, I am reading papers 91, 92 and 93. I wish now that I had catalogued them differently and distinguished between a book and a journal article, but it is a little late for that.

From out of nowhere, or rather from simply being next on the list, Paper 92 was Norman, J. Unrau & Matthew Quirk (2014) Reading Motivation and Reading Engagement: Clarifying Commingled Conceptions, Reading Psychology, 35:3,260-284; and, as the title suggests it focused on sorting out the tricky concepts of engagement and motivation which are fundamental to my study.

I think this would become one of my 'desert island papers' if I had to write this thing in splendid isolation, and feels like a moment of breakthrough in terms of defining these ideas. In a week where I should have been enjoying the cycling and the tulips and the stroop waffles, I was busy trying to articulate ideas in relation to the focus group interview questions and lesson observation schedules so that they could be more clearly tied to either engagement or motivation.

I enjoy these moments where writing and thinking are inescapable forces. Often, it seems, I am forcing myself to sit down and read or write something, but this paper seemed to force me, so that on my glorious morning cycling commute to work which took me along the Harderwijk waterfront, I was busy mentally composing sentences and revising questions which I had to commit to paper as soon as I arrived in school. 

Or perhaps it is simply travel broadening the mind! 

Easter Promise

My Easter holiday promise to myself has been a minimum of an hour a day working on the doctorate. It is day 10, and apart from Easter Day itself, I have managed this.

For the first week of the holiday this hour was mostly spent transcribing teacher interviews. I'm still waiting to get on an NVivo course at the university, so coding is tentative at this stage. I have made preliminary narrative notes on some of the data, and have identified some potential codes. This is in addition to themes which emerged from the first round of study group research interviews. It will therefore be a hybrid process of inductive and deductive thematic analysis to interpret the raw interview data.

We have agreed that the next supervision should involve a coding comparison, so I have sent two of the interviews to my supervisor.  I am looking forward to a rich discussion as a result.

There are a mounting pile of papers waiting to be read. They seem to grow exponentially. I finished reading and making notes on Willingham's The Reading Mind this afternoon. It always feels more satisfying to have worked through an entire book rather than a paper.

But, as ever, progress seems slow. Process seems painstaking. The sheer size of the undertaking requires that I am logical and organised. No more haphazard note taking and notebook scribbles a la the MA.  Shhh. And that makes things much more laborious. It will be worth it in the end. This time round I can more or less lay my hand on the quotation or idea that I am looking for.

The annual review also looms ahead. I know it is important, but as a part-time student with limited hours to give, it seems a tedious administrative task.

Financially, I am struggling a bit. Going part-time and relinquishing my responsibility means that the termly fees are harder than ever to find. I have applied for a small bursary externally. If successful then I will be required to deliver some related CPD in return. But since I seem to be doing this regularly that will be no great burden. Fingers crossed.