Million Dollar Questions

I'm reading again. And this time, a handbook.

Specifically, The Routledge Doctoral Student's Companion edited by Pat Thomson and Melanie Walker.

It is simultaneously reassuring and terrifying.

The introduction and first chapter deal with positioning oneself as a researcher, and therefore moving from a deficit model – ‘I am not a statistician’; as well as the tensions within the process of moving between professional self and researcher-as-professional.  The personal versus the economic, for example.

So – I am dimly aware of the ‘enchantment and delight that comes with and from engaging with challenge and ideas and making then one’s own’ (29) but I’m not feeling it yet because I am confused about everything and can no longer blame the lack of access and all the other technical, practical and logistical issues that were bothering me a month ago.

I’m heartened by Chapter 2’s reduction of ‘the expectation that graduate students conduct original research that generates new knowledge’ into ‘research with more modest claims for reducing ignorance’ (37) alongside the recognition that the former is ‘formidable – especially for people just beginning their acquaintance with the old knowledge’ (28). Also that ‘focusing on particular blank spots always generates some corresponding blindspots’(35). The explanations went some way towards convincing me that my very ignorance – which feels utterly, utterly overwhelming at this stages, could actually be part of the key to enabling me to contribute something in the field.

It was also helpful to consider the form and function of the literature review as ‘providing the introduction to a lesson’, and ‘orienting other scholars to what the author thinks they ought to know and why this might be important’ (37). 

Chapter 3 forced me to consider what it is that I am actually curious about and acknowledge what might be inherently problematic in that. I am interested in 'things to do with reading', but I am interested in them with the express aim of getting better at teaching it, delivering it, facilitating it and I can’t even begin to figure out which one of those verbs I would prefer to use. I feel how I think I would feel at the million dollar question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire where I suspect I would begin to my conviction in knowing my own name. But I think that this might be problematic: that at this stage I have a purpose beyond wanting to find out a thing for its own sake.  I may need to consciously and actively position myself differently from the outset.

I’m sitting on a plane as I write this and so I am ‘suspended’ – quite literally, but also metaphorically and I need to figure out how I can regularly create this suspended space in which to think given the incredible demands of the job and, well, life.

I must, perhaps, ‘temporarily suspend entrenched epistemological and disciplinary knowledge, so that my mind and the doctoral meetings could become authentic spaces of pedagogical possibility’ (47) And wonder, simultaneously, how long it will be before I can genuinely use the word ‘epistemological’ without feeling ever so slightly fraudulent, and without having to redefine it internally at each use.

The most interesting shift is probably that I care about this stuff, finally – in a way that I very much didn’t when I was studying for my Masters and the focus was on the ‘thing’ itself and that I am finally ready to engage in ‘ongoing conversations about the nature of knowledge’(45).