Blood From Rolling Stones

I regularly use words like 'wrestle' and 'grapple' when I'm talking about the writing process. I may have mentioned 'blood' and 'stone' in the same sentence on more than one occasion.



Today I woke up thinking that I would 'just do the Iser bit' of the Literature Review. I lay in bed thinking that I might squeeze an hour of work before the rest of the household surfaced. That hour turned into four.

By lunchtime I had stopped for a quick cuppa and 'good morning' to my family, and managed 2000 words: my biggest ever daily total that isn't 'free' writing. Iser, Rosenblatt, Stanovich, and Benton's paradoxes. On a roll. Perhaps a rolling stone, bleeding a little while not gathering moss. I have to be so precise in the writing ordinarily that it's quite nice to mix a metaphor and ruin a perfectly good idiom.



'Just' text world theory tomorrow. Perhaps the same approach will work again!

Wrestling with the Literature Review

Of those 80,000 words, I have written about 25,000. I am awaiting feedback on three chapters and getting stuck into the literature review. 

It's hard. And painfully slow. Writing for this doctorate is like nothing I've ever done before. It feels as though I have to wrestle with every sentence; at times every word. They are slippery little suckers. 

And the literature review is particularly slow. I have begun with the literature review that I originally wrote for the proposal - although I have read more than 150 books and papers since then - so there are one or two things to add. But it is slow because it involves reference after reference, most of which I am having to reread, since it is abundantly clear that when I wrote the proposal with the original literature review I understood far less about what I was reading. 

The most astonishing thing, though, are the non sequiturs and the lack of coherence and organisation over all. The literature review for my proposal reads now like a bunch of notes about things I happened to be reading - with no system of organisation whatsoever. I had imposed one, but five years later it makes no sense.

I suppose, looking on the bright side, this is evidence of how far I have come on this journey. conceptually.

Remote Supervision

After my prevarication yesterday, I sent off three chapters last night - the opening rationale and two revised data chapters - and 'zoomed' into my first remote supervision session this afternoon.

The main feedback was the need for me to capture the ethos of the department and the responsive culture of receptive teachers ready to embrace change back in 2014, and to acknowledge that the seeds of theorisation and reflection had already been sown.

My supervisor suggested reading Pajares and acknowledging the disruptions to the 'apprenticeship of observation' that were already taking place, whilst emphasising the advantage of experiential and practice-based knowledge and learning.

I should consider the identification of boys and PPG students as problematic in this early part of the study.

And, above all I need to ensure the introduction of the idea of action research and my leaning towards participatory design early on in the writing, as a continuation or formalisation of a process already begun; which in itself epitomises the messy nature of this kind of research design.

We also talked about my reference to the book arch and student response to it in the opening chapter and the multiplicity of interpretations it may offer: students perhaps demonstrating a reverence and respect for books as sacred objects; and using this as a platform and culture from which to build.

A further remote supervision for two weeks time as a way of making up for time lost during the period of intermitting, and the university shutdown. I can't decide if that two week deadline is a cloud or a silver-lining.

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.

Intermitting

I have felt stressed at different points during this process. Of course I have. The hardest part was probably towards the end of the first year with the extensive revisions that needed to be made to my proposal in a short time frame - and then the nerves brought on by the proposal presentation and the mini viva.

Going part time was a good move. For most of the last eighteen months I have felt that the workload was manageable and there was slow, but relatively steady progress. The downside of being part time and relinquishing my head of department role has been financial. We took quite a hit, exacerbated when my husband decided to change jobs, too.

To the point where it has no longer become financially possible to do this. And so now going part time seems like not such a good idea. I have, sadly, begun the process of intermitting. For three months, initially, to see if I can try and get funds together for the start of next term.

Of course I can keep reading and writing all the while but it is the supervision that is so important. That is the bit that has been keeping me going.

But times are tough and just getting tougher, as the Boss once said.

I have 15,000 words of the 80,000 written.

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.