Monday, 9 April 2018

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.

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