Giant Waves

December 2020 and I need another metaphor for 'rollercoaster' because that doesn't really cover the highs and lows of this thing. 

It is more like being tossed around on giant waves that make you violently seasick at the same time as feeling that you have no hope of making it to shore in your tiny, insubstantial boat, to which you are clinging on for dear life. 

After all last month's bravado and excitement, I was cut down once again by what felt like brutal feedback on my (fourth revision) of my data chapters.

I have had to be very systematic about picking myself back up and addressing what is required, remembering not to take it personally and not giving up.

But - with all but the conclusions chapter in some sort of draft form, I will move to 'pre-submission' status at the end of March. (Where I am hoping for calmer waters.)

The Time Is Out of Joint

I officially became a fully paid-up doctoral student again on the 1st February, but it has taken until today to become fully re-enrolled with access to all the modules and course information that I need.

It hasn't helped that the university updated their VLE to the end of last year, and their email system at the start of this year, meaning that I struggled to access either. I'd actually been deleted from the entire doctoral programme on one platform.

And then there was a virus that shut everything down.
The time is out of joint.

My first official supervision session for sixth months will take place tomorrow afternoon via Zoom.

In preparation I have to send my revised data chapters, and the other writing that I have been doing in the intervening period. Unfortunately, all my old anxieties about academic writing have returned. I feel unable to send 'chapters', and have requested that we return to calling them 'vignettes' and 'writing in progress' instead, which feels less threatening.

And I don't feel much further forward than the 15,000 words that were written by last October. In fact, it feels messier than it ever has - in spite of delivering three different conference presentations relating to my research during my period of intermission. They should have enabled me to clarify my thinking - and felt at the time as though they were doing so. That feeling is yet to translate itself into my writing.

On the upside, isolation and quarantine give the gift of time. It has taken a while for me to settle to the new rhythms of my family being at home, and having to deliver online lessons, but study time has expanded.

I have also discovered (now that I have access to the handbooks again!) that I may be able to apply for pre-submission status, involving a reduction in fees next term.

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.

Troublesome Words

I am finding writing tough.

Much tougher than I thought I would.

At the helpful suggestion of my supervisor I am tackling 'vignettes': short little hunches or observations; which is how I am managing to fool myself into undertaking small bits of data analysis that don't feel too 'I'm writing my doctorate' scary. 

The current vignette focuses on a process of 'misremembering' that I have observed repeatedly in the data. This is essentially to do with teachers absorbing, embedding and then embodying pedagogical ideas to the extent that they cannot recall not knowing the thing.

Yesterday I spent the whole day writing. I tucked myself away in Little Acorns and set to it. In the morning, I worked on some commercial non-fiction and wrote about 2,500 words in under three hours. In the afternoon I switched to the doctorate and barely squeezed out 500 in a longer time period. It is crushingly, numbingly hard to do. Especially in the wake of feedback on my first vignette - that was detailed, helpful and, well, stifling.

I feel as if every single sentence has to be checked and double checked for precision and accuracy in a way that doesn't happen with other forms of writing. There is no freedom just to write. And I have become obsessed with word counts. Just like my GCSE students, who ignore my claims that it is 'quality not quantity' that matters.

Tomorrow I shall be attempting blood from stones. It will be more productive. 

Grinding To A Halt

I was feeling good at the start of term, when the majority of the data was in and I felt 'on track'; but things have nearly ground to a halt now. Apparently that expression comes from the idea of an engine getting clogged up, or ship running aground, and it's apt because that is exactly how I feel.

I have uploaded most of my data to 'Dedoose' and played around with some preliminary coding, but not really in a consistent or systematic way. And apart from some half-hearted reading of loosely connected articles, I have done nothing in the last month.

I can blame: pressures of work, pressures of the part time work, other writing deadlines, my supervisor being absent for a couple of months with her own writing deadlines, doing a play last month, some extended periods of international travel....

I can console myself that this term is always difficult - after the luxury of summer to work uninterrupted for long periods. Looking back at this blog I can see that Autumn has repeatedly been a relatively unproductive time in the year.

Even so, I know that I am procrastinating, and worse, just blatantly avoiding, doing any work at all. I think my fear is that I must actually start writing, and I'm scared about doing that. I need to know what the structure is going to be, and - and this quite ridiculous - the university have just changed the website and software that we use to access materials and I haven't got my head around that yet. I'm feeling bad for not sorting something that should be relatively simple, and it's turned into a major barrier. 

This blogpost is acting as an admission of guilt. I'm just hoping it is enough to kickstart me doing something about it, and finding The Cure.

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.

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.