A Room of One's Own

This is where the mighty tome will be written.

It looks unpromising at the moment and I'm certainly not going to do it on that bench.

No; this is the spot where my garden study is to be built. Component parts are arriving on Tuesday and so we need to clear the area and lay concrete over the next couple of days.

So, a break from the study for some manual labour, but some that will enhance the study, eventually!

The Sisyphean Routine of Summer

Supervisor, commend me for I have worked. It is four months since my last post. And how I have worked. The time between posts a measure, really, of the 'grind' that I now feel.

Two summers ago I skipped through my summer reading list, confident that each tome was contributing clearly to my knowledge and understanding of my substantive topic. I look back fondly at an early post like Summer Holiday Versus Term Time, and whilst I clearly felt overwhelmed as term began, there was so much fun in those first forays into the literature. Today I wade through the ever-increasing pile, knowing in my heart of hearts that I can never read or do enough to complete this Sisyphean task because the pile grows more quickly than I can deal with it. (Would people just stop researching and publishing stuff so that I can keep up?!) Reading also seems to take longer than it did because I need to join everything up; whereas in the beginning it was all fresh and new and exciting and differentiated in its own right.

There have, of course, been some breakthroughs; a few more of those milestones (I remember the first, vividly) which are so important in keeping going:

• I successfully completed the requirements for the second year and will move into my third year of doctoral study.
• I completed the Introduction to Qualitative Methods course and an essay on a 'research method'. I have called this the 'study group research interview'. It shares some characteristics with a focus group interview, but it is also very different in lots of ways.
• I participated in the first five of the study group research interviews and have transcribed four fifths of the recordings.
• I have begun (very tentatively) coding.
• I found a book which has unified lots of my reading. I wish I'd read it near the start, but it wasn't published then. Still - happy days.
• I was (fortuitously) invited to review another journal paper which has helped me to consolidate all sorts of theoretical ideas in relation to the classroom.

So, I have my first sets of data. I have a date with 'NVivo'. And I have some of the feelings associated with a first date: the nerves, the great expectations, the overwhelming inadequacy, the restlessness...
But coupled with this is the mundane of the routine, the drudgery, the predictability of a marriage - in for the long haul.

My routine for the summer amounts to between five and ten minutes of transcription daily (which is still taking me up to an hour) followed by at least one hour of reading, note-making and reflection and a crossing of something else from the 'to do' list. So it amounts to about two hours per day, but probably equates to fifteen or so hours a week. It should be more, but there are these small things called children that require entertaining over the summer. Even so, that is more than double my term-time work-rate. There are four and a half more weeks of the summer holidays remaining, so another sixty hours or so to go. It is strange to think that when I go back to school I shall be sixty hours further ahead.

A Treadle! A Treadle! My Kingdom for a Treadle!

Newly ethics-approved and now officially 'in the field', I have undertaken my first group interviews with the teachers in my department.

I have about an hour and a half's worth of audio split across two sessions, so far, and have now begun the process of transcription. I've been trying to use a well know transcription app (one that sounds like St George may have tried to fight it at one stage) and, it would be fair to say that has not been terribly successful.

The first ten minutes of audio took me nearly four hours to transcribe that way.

Then I remembered that in a past life I was an audio typist (those long summer holidays had to be spent somehow) and so I just ditched the technology and got on with the transcription manually. Oh for a treadle like in the good old days at the insurance firm...

I have got faster and faster and I am up to approximately an hour's labour for twenty minutes of talk. 1:3. I don't know if this is a good ratio or not. What I do know is that I feel thoroughly familiar with these discussions - I know them inside out. They are fascinating, incredibly rich; dialogue which felt pretty ordinary as it happened is absolutely loaded with ideas and suggestions for reading teaching - ideas which might easily get lost if such careful attention were not being paid to them. Which makes me wonder what gems might get passed by, acknowledged but then not acted upon, in an ordinary department meeting when pedagogy is under discussion.

At least through the collaborative action research model that I am using participating teachers will be able to review exactly what has been said at each stage as we shape our project more fully.

Now, on to coding...shudder.

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.

Full Steam Ahead

Ethical approval for my research was finally granted on the 11th January. It was a strangely muted moment; after all the fuss and fight through November and December perhaps there ought to have been fanfares and popping corks. Alas, there was nothing more than the funny buzzing vibration that signals an email notification to mark it.

So I now have the green light to go ahead and my first two 'declarable' sessions with teachers take place in the next fortnight. The data collection therefore begins in earnest from this point, and it is, perhaps, somewhat fortuitous that these two professional learning meetings fall so close together: a happy accident of the mock exam marking period just before Christmas which meant that December's session had to be postponed until now.

I have also applied to undertake a fifteen hour introduction to qualitative methods course which runs, ordinarily, as part of the MSc. If nothing else it may help me get back into the right frame of mind to immerse myself in my studies once more. (From which comment the keen reader might infer that I am not, currently, in such a frame of mind.)

And a further step in the right direction may occur as I prepare for a presentation this Friday to PGCE students at another south coast university on developing a reading culture in school: it will require a revision of material and thinking and I am looking forward to it.

Waiting Game

After last term's hiatus, I am still not entirely sure if I am back on track.

I have revised my timeline, rewritten my proposal, managed to avoid intermitting, eaten humble pie, submitted for ethical approval, and survived.

But I am yet to pass ethical review and the clock is ticking. And all the while that I don't have it, the scheduled research sessions with my teachers and the rich data collected therein can not count.

Still, I remain, for the time being at least, a PhD student, and enjoyed a little fillip this week as my first article appeared in a peer-reviewed academic journal. (And read by at least one person, according to Twitter!)

Hard Times

I have called this post 'Hard Times', but in truth it is from another of Dickens' novels that I find the quotation to capture my mood... 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way...'

I have, for the last week or so, considered giving up, known that was definitely not an option, decided to do it anyway, convinced myself not to. Been elated by what I have done so far, and nearly destroyed by the thought of what has to come. I have written some difficult emails to important people and spent hours and hours and hours making what I hope might be final revisions to my proposal.

I am caught between the timetables of the university and of my institution. I have been encouraged to reach for the stars by one of my supervisors, dragged back down to earth and devastated by the other, patronised by the attempted consolation in relation to 'the difficulties of doing a PhD while working full time in a school!'

Right now, I don't know quite what will happen. This could be my last blog post.

No one said it would be easy...