Connections Made and Nearly Missed

That was close! Almost missed my train connection at East Croydon.

I looked up amidst a pile of papers and there we suddenly were. Passengers had disembarked and more had got on. The doors were closed and whistles were blowing signalling imminent departure when I suddenly registered the 'East Croydon' sign leapt from my seat, grabbed suitcase, rucksack and documents and yelled at a startled woman to, 'Open the door, open the DOOR!'

I had been travelling on the 10.02 from Billingshurst, transferring to the Cambridge line for Farringdon at East Croydon; ultimate destination: Norwich and a writing retreat at Belsey Bridge.

What does this have to do with the doctorate?

Well, my supervisors have been going on about the need to be 'raking through' my data over and over again. But I know my data, I thought: I've lived it, breathed it, transcribed it, read it, annotated it, coded it, discussed it, shared it. That's 'raking through', surely?

Feedback on early drafts of findings chapters has praised the big ideas (hooray - I have ideas!) while criticising the lack of supporting data as evidence. And on one occasion where I offered five examples (that's a lot, for me), it was suggested that I hadn't 'done enough' with them.

My first supervisor suggested that the solution might lie in tabulating the data, and suggested a couple of places where I might insert a table. Now, the vignettes suggestion in my last post was really productive, but this was even more helpful. It means that I really do have to, yes, 'rake through' the data in order to amass the information for tabulation.

It is utterly absorbing and I lose all sense of time and space and awareness of an outside world when I am immersed in doing it - which is what I was doing to provoke the very uncharacteristic East Croydon incident. 

But I get it now. And I understand, finally, why everyone keeps telling me that this is the good bit!

And I'm safely on the 12.00 from Liverpool Street, and Norwich is the end of the line: so I think I'm safe for the final leg!

Surely Not Tunnels and Light?

The university are being audited and therefore goalposts move, all of a sudden. I have had to do more 'admin' in recent weeks: logging attendance at DRiP (Doctoral Research in Progress) sessions and recording email contact with my supervisors.

But they have been some developments. Painful though the vignette writing was (and I am working on number four, now) it has yielded fruit. At this month's supervision meeting there was general agreement that these were more vignettes; they were sections within finding chapters. We  discussed the possibility of the first three vignettes being woven together, with perhaps the second one as the start of a ‘Theorising teachers and how teachers learn’ section within a first findings chapter, with a second chapter to explore themes of access, barriers and engagement - which relate more to the experience for students.

This is both liberating and crippling, simultaneously. Liberating, since it feels as though writing is now really underway. We actually created a writing timeline with a suggestion for Christmas as a deadline for both findings chapters and the start of a conclusion, and a tentative suggestion that a submission next summer might be possible. Crippling, because I found the vignettes hard enough to write knowing that they were allowing me to freely explore ideas - let alone considering that they might be actual words that I might actually use.

I have received extensive feedback on the first of the vignettes, and the general points on the second one, 'But I've Always Done It That Way'. Though the research was not intended to be about the specific nature of continuing professional development (CPD) for teachers, an interesting pattern emerged in the data in terms of teachers’ knowledge about reading at different stages which seems to be attributable to the research design itself and its function as CPD for the participating teachers - but was denied by the teachers who claimed that they had always taught like that.

Heron and Reason (2011) describe four ways of knowing: Experiential, presentational, propositional and practical. Experiential knowing is ‘essentially tacit and pre-verbal’ but it is also described as being ‘profoundly real’ (Heron & Reason, 2011: p7). In the circumstances above this kind of experiential learning seems to have become a lived experience for the participating teachers who display ‘a tendency to become so engrossed in their everyday world, so engaged in the moment, that they forget that they are part of an inquiry, and their experiential knowing reverts to becoming almost completely tacit’ (ibid, p15). It seems that the research participants are embodying a ‘virtuous circle’ where ‘skilled action leads into enriched encounter, thence into wider imaginal portrayal of the pattern of events, thence into more comprehensive conceptual models, thence into more developed practice, and so on’ (ibid, p6-7).

Heron and Reason also explore ways that in propositional form ‘knowing’ may easily become ‘reified as ‘knowledge’ forming ‘regimes of truth which create our reality’ (ibid, p38). These regimes of truth seem to have been so powerfully constructed that teachers’ conceptual models appear to have always existed that way: a powerful form of CPD indeed.

The main points in the feedback were the need to  provide more detailed, robust evidence, drawn from across the data-sets, to extend the vignettes into fuller explorations;  and ways that I can  use classroom observations and all the other data to enable triangulation. In addition, there was a focus on my need to be more assertive in terms of claims that I might be making.