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Sunday 20 December 2009

Teaching beats reading any day!


It's been three months since I started the PhD, it's also fast approaching the end of 2009. I'm in a slight panic. What do I have to show for my three months of scholarship? I'm worrying that it's not very much. The more I read, the more I realise that there is so much I need to know, so much I don't know, and so much that seems out of my intellectual reach. All the 'isms' out there, just when I think, hell I understand this – I then read something else about the same 'ism' and it doesn't make sense anymore…arggghhh! It's almost as if my level of understanding is simply at the basic descriptive level, within that particularly temporal moment, the moment is fleeting – once the moment is gone, so is my understanding. I fail to transfer the understanding into other contexts. But I love when I read other people's work and see how well they understand the object of their analysis. How they actually unpack the actual nature of complexity that they invariably find. I like this idea that I must be able to explain the nature of 'complexity' in how student learn, how they come to be a graduate, how they understand and use the various academic literacy practices they encounter in the educational environment they find themselves. And for that of course I must understand all these freaking 'isms'. So I need to read, read, read…and read some more. But one thing reading can't give you, is experience and the time to develop that level of experience. Again the more I read the work of some really insightful people in my field, or even listen to them in seminars or discussion groups, I realise how their understanding of one concept or idea has developed over time to a level of refinement that I can only dream of. They just know – how to use the concepts in different contexts, how to critique the concept from different positions, the origins of the concept and its evolution. I think getting to this point of insight only comes from working with the concept – theoretically and practically. Often I wish I was teaching the very concepts and theories I am trying to understand, so that I could internalise it. In order to teach something you really need to understand it – because your students will ask questions and demand that you deconstruct the concept and/or theory so that it makes sense to them. I miss teaching and I miss having a focus, a real life situation where the validity, the applicability, the dynamism, the changeability of a theory or concept can be 'tested'. It makes the theory/concept a real, living thing – not the abstract lifeless 'thing' I am trying to understand. I wonder if I will ever get over not being a teacher anymore.

Friday 11 December 2009

Supervision Preparation Notes 10 December 2010


I presented these notes along with a discussion that focused on three different ways I had tried to incorporate Bernstein's concepts into a research design. This discussion became the basis around which I made an argument for why I had selected one of the designs.

  • 10 weeks of 'searching' or trying to capture what I thought my intentions where re: PhD study

    • Key issues

      • Curriculum


      • Academic literacies




  • I see academic literacies are bringing new insights, more textured understanding of student experiences into curriculum work. This is what inspired my initial appeal to academic literacies


  • Past year at the OU has expanded my understanding of the full scope (almost) of academic literacies and I've developed a more sophisticated understanding of what the field is about and where I fit in (almost). I've also started to understand it as a perspective and how to distinguish its work – epistemologically, methodologically and contextually


  • What has been difficult – my dislocation from a place of practice, context to inform the research

    • This distancing has created a distortion of what I saw as the 'problem' and how I wanted to conceptualise the 'problem'


    • Thus a distortion of the focus of my research



  • Within the last week I read two article 'by accident'/serendipitously and this helped to realign my thinking – even bringing me back to reality.


  • Realisation that I've been fixated on Bernstein

    • Red herring


    • The processing of trying to 'fit' Bernstein's theoretical frameworks into a research design was illuminating

      • Helped redirect my gaze back to my initial interest



ACCESS to disciplinary / practice based knowledge.

  • What are the implications of literacy practices for access agendas into disciplinary knowledge?


  • What are the implications of literacy practices for identity in relation to academia and industry/practice

Keywords : Access, academic literacy practice, constructions of knowledge (disciplinary knowledge, recontextualised knowledge, professional knowledge), identity



Sunday 6 December 2009

So what’s this all about again? Access what?...


For the better part of the last two months I have been wrestling with a conceptual problem. Whether to use, and how to use the theoretical work of Basil Bernstein, to inform my research agenda. I've been struggling not only to understand this theories and concepts, but also how I might want to use it in my own work. On Friday I sent my supervisors a draft document that outlined three possible options on how I might use these conceptual frameworks and how it might impact on my original research agenda and my data collection. Then two things happened – I read some academic literacies work, by UCT academics, Rochelle Kapp and Bongi Bangeni (2009) and critical literacy researchers, Allan Luke and Elizabeth Moje (2009), and I had a conversation with some non-academic people where I tried (miserably) to explain my research agenda. Reflecting on both these events while sitting on a London tube to an inter-university academic literacies forum at the Institute of Education at the University of London on Saturday - it all came together. I had forgotten why I started working in this field in the first place. I was interested in student access to their disciplinary environments – not just surface level access – like getting into the course and then getting mediocre results – but in depth epistemological access – access to the knowledge structures of the discipline, understanding how things work in the discipline and field of practice so that they could challenge, transform and change it – put their own stamp on it, not simply technicians operating one process in a machine that is their professional field, but actors with insight and eventually power to change how things actually work.


I forgot all of this and became bogged down by the specifics of Bernstein, important as his work is to my research; it is only a means to an end. Access and identity needs to be foregrounded in my work. My research needs to answer questions about the implications for access to disciplinary knowledge and how students' literacy practices reflect professional or academic identities, which in turn have particular implications for access to the field of academia or practice. This is a significant realisation and I feel I can move forward with some clear direction. Yay…finally!

Thursday 3 December 2009

Rah, Rah, Rah…the British and all that

Yesterday I attended a session on Interviewing Political Elites, hosted by the Social Science Student Forum. The session was brilliant! The presenter (http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/staff/people-profile.php?name=Richard_Heffernan) was knowledgeable, insightful, humorous (with at times, a rather lovely dry British wit) but also extremely engaging and encouraging of dialogue with the participants. His was also really eloquent, using just the right but sophisticated words to create this almost lyrical narrative. You could just sit and listen to him – he commanded interest from his audience. For me he epitomised the British academic or dare I say the British middle class intellectual. When I first saw him I thought "Who is this person in a suit, tie and braces, he looks like someone from the city or parliament – certainly not a lecturer!" But as a lecturer of political science and someone interested in British politics, especially the Labour Party – who even interviewed Thatcher – he was dressing the part. This advice about interviewing these specific respondents, I felt would hold equally true for any interview. And I found so much of what he was saying of practical value – he could of course back up every little suggestion with anecdotal evidence, that made his advice all the more valid.


 

I have been paying attention recently to how people construct their own little narrative and discourses – using particular phrases and words – and to the uninitiated, (like me very often) I think – Wow! And am in awe of how articulate, intelligent, sophisticated they sound, juxtaposed to me, deficient of all these wonderful charms, mumbling along with my incorrect pronunciations and flat and dull vocabulary. But to be fair everyone develops a presentation style and presentation persona – complete with appropriate theoretical terms, relevant to your discipline etc…I think it might be better to appreciate the fact that good speakers have grown confident in their disciplinary discourse, and developed their own style, their own voice, able to hold up in different contextual situations, over time. So my time will come.


 

Comparing the two 'training' sessions, the quality and value were seriously variable, making me think that maybe not all training is good for you. Or rather that even if a session does not meet your expectations – if you focus in on other aspects of the event – like the facilitation style or try to uncover the meta-narrative of the event or even really dig down to unpack why it is you don't like what is going on – you learn. I wonder if this is the adult educator and budding ethnographer talking here! Interesting too that intellectually I got more from the session facilitated by the almost austere British academic, and not the touchy-feely and all laid back ex-South African.

Wednesday 2 December 2009

Professional networking...so what?

Yesterday as part of the OU’s Doctoral Training Workshop Session – I spent two hours pondering the topic of “Developing personal and professional support networks” run by an expat South African boytjie nogals. Not it helped the session anyway!.


In the session yesterday, even though the facilitators used various experiential pedagogies and tried the whole touchy-feely approach, I had to ask myself “So what is the point of all of this, other than having two hours to talk about your own personal experiences or rather listen to the facilitators own personal experiences?” Also I had to say something right? So of course it was me being devil’s advocate and saying “Sure it’s great to have fellow students to talk to because only another PhD student will understand what you are going through, but what about all the competition between students!” I don’t think people there even considered that there might be competition in this game. Today I actually thought about sending the facilitator an e-mail and saying that I wasn’t sure what the purpose of the session was all about, maybe he could point it out to me. I was keen to attend the session because on Sunday I’m off to the SRHE Conference (Society for Research in Higher Education) http://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2009/pgnr.info.asp
and simply wanted to learn something about networking, especially that ‘small talk thing’ that I just can’t seem to master. Its fine when people approach me and ask me questions, but I can’t seem to do the same in return. I actually remember telling a friend this when she dropped me off at the airport on my way to Dublin about 3 years ago. So the session didn’t bring me any closer to uncovering the great secrets of how to be good at breaking the ice at these big conferences. What I did however gain some insight about, is how networking can be a really organised and structured activity (my American discussion partner seemed to be so clued up on this, she even uses software and had management system to organise her networking activities, complete with an approach to fellow up e-mail post conference). The old adage applies “It’s who you know, more than what you know that will get you places”, and the session was just a fancy way of expressing this.

Also I became aware how important it is to be able to explain what your research is about in 2-3 sentences. To strip down all the juicy (but often complex) bits and just express the overall ideas – usually by referring to the general topic, rather than the specifics. This is something I must pay more attention to, and work out some strategy, especially for those small talk ice breakers I will probably encounter in South Wales on Monday. I have to add, that I was happy to brag about my ‘support’ network in South African and I guess this ties in with what I mentioned in my last entry – that I find the English PhD process more inclined to support a more individualistic approach, which often sits at odds with my needs and wants. I do however wonder, if all I am seeing are examples of practices that reinforces my existing perception, my somewhat ‘pejorative’ perception, that the processes here just does not work for me – that all they do is exclude me. An alternative question therefore is, “Am I (un) consciously excluding myself?

Sunday 29 November 2009

Only two months old


Looking back over the entries in my blog, it seems rather strange that I have only been a PhD student for 2 months because there are so many layers of complexity captured in these few reflections. I'm almost scared what two years at this game might produce. The past week has once again forced me to reflect on my positioning and identity. At one point this week I just said to myself – "Why the hell do you have to think in the way you do and ask questions? Why don't you just sit quietly in the corner and not draw attention to yourself". By speaking, asking questions, expressing your view point – you position yourself either in opposition or in solidarity to someone else's position. Of course this can be to your benefit or detriment. In many ways the PhD process is in part about learning, understanding, articulating and defending your particular position on a topic, so why was I so ruffled by this process this week. Guess it depends on how many people in the audience identifies and supports your position or whether you are simply just creating a disconnection. Sorry, I'm not being very clear. I went to a series of seminars this week – dealing with ethics, analysis methods and academic literacies. At each of these sessions I was vocal and just couldn't stop articulating my opinion. Great you say, yes finally I'm finding my voice. But what does this voice say about me? How do I see myself and how do others see me through the questions I ask and the comments I make. In the academic literacies reading group – I certainly positioned myself as a South African curriculum development practitioner; in the ethics seminar – as an ethnographer who will make certain decisions that will seek to protect my research participants and if necessary not disclose unsavoury activities if it negatively affects the reputation of the participants/institution but doesn't really affect the quality of the data I am able to obtain; in the analysis seminar - I was someone who wants to understand the epistemological basis of a particular methodology before buying into its approach. BUT this is my reading of my positioning and I know I might not have been seen in this light by colleagues listening to me. Importantly, do I want to stick out as different – do I want to accentuate my difference? Because I do feel very different in this context. In all these sessions I felt different; my difference was highlighted – through my accent, in my choice of words and use of phrases, in the stance I took on the topic, even through my use of Bernstein in academic literacies research.
But I see my difference not only in the view I take on a particular topic, I also see this whole PhD process differently. For me it's a collaborative process – I engage with my supervisors, mentors, other academics, research participants, colleagues and friends and so carefully weave a highly collaborative even communal construction of my understanding(s) over time. I don't do this alone – it's not an individual project or process. So I need people all the time, to hear me speak, to listen to, to ask questions, to engage with (even if they are dead or only speak to me through their words in articles and books), to explore and to be. And I seek people out – I want to see my supervisors as many times a month as I can – I want their opinions on the work I am doing, on my thinking and the ideas buzzing around in my head. I want to hear what other colleagues are doing and how they are managing this process – not for any malicious reasons, but simply as a way of sharing and learning from them. My position is that of – "I am, because of everyone else" – that sense of ubuntu. It's how I am in my personal life and certainly how I am academically. And this might be mistaken in rather disingenuous ways by some who are more inclined to an individualistic positionality. As was the case this week in what seemed a rather innocuous conversation about progress and supervision processes, where I inadvertently took some flak from a colleague who may have interpreted my engagement attempts as in some way negatively reflecting on the different way she was handling the whole PhD process.

As I said earlier this whole thing is about staking a claim on a particular aspect of a specific topic, developing an in depth, critical understanding and then defending that understanding. I also increasingly think that for me, it is about identifying how I want to position myself in relation to the underlying PhD process I want to follow, while becoming confident in the value of that process for me. Bring on the next two years…yeah right!

Tuesday 24 November 2009

Over the top of my head


I read a paper last night by Karl Maton – a scholar who works with Basil Bernstein's theoretical frame but has also extended his concepts in innovative and intellectually stimulating ways. This paper was about theories that enable cumulative knowledge building and why Bernstein's theories have not enjoyed the same warm and positive reception as say Bourdieu. Well I managed to understand the overall gist of his argument, but actually grasped about 20% of the paper – the rest, well woooosh! over my head. But I was happy that I managed to finish reading the paper anyway. A common critique of Bernstein's writing and his theoretical exposition is that it is dense and highly abstract. To this Maton replies
"So while it is not necessarily more difficult to read and understand, whether it is experienced as such depends on whether one has the knowledge to understand the condensed concepts and/or the disposition to acquire that knowledge. This demands intellectual effort and the belief that this effort will yield rewards" (2008:34)
Makes one think hey!

Today at a seminar on thematic analysis (which was really great and did not go over my head, yet pushed me beyond my limits of understanding about this analysis method), I realised that there are so many 'things' I will have to juggle in my brain. All these bits and pieces about theoretical frameworks, their meta-histories and epistemologies, the data collection methods, the analysis methods and on, and on and on. All of these elements with their own rules, regulations and principles that need to be understood and applied. I asked a friend how the hell I will manage to keep all of this in my head. His simple reply was "Are you meant to keep them all in your head? Surely if you understand the principles, you don't have to store all the detail in your head?" See I'm thinking again.

Friday 20 November 2009

Fireworks going off in my brain

From the title you can probably guess that I had a good supervision meeting yesterday. It was hard going for me, but so stimulating and challenging. We focused our discussion on the piece I had written with both my supervisors raising questions – in effect getting me to explain my understanding of BB and his theories. But their questions also forced me to think about how ‘others’ might view his work, along with how I would substantiate my use of his theories. I came away thinking, well I feel more confident about what I know about BB’s work and I am more astute at judging the perspectives other authors take when reading or engaging with his work. I can also see the gaps in my own understanding – primarily around the sociology of education – all those wonderful little “isms”. We also spoke about the relevance of BB’s work for my research – importantly the relationship between BB and academic literacies. An area I need to think and write about in the coming weeks.



On a more reflective note I was confront by two sort of related issues

• My own identity work

• How I give expression to my voice



Identity work

As yet I haven’t taken a firm position on my identity – I’m still struggling with this notion of ‘PhD student’ and would much rather be the ‘teacher-as-researcher’ I was a mere 13-14 months ago. Also I see myself as an academic developer, not an academic literacies researcher, yet I am working in the field of academic literacies without a background language, literacies or linguistics. So who am I and what position do I take? Mary made the point yesterday in our meeting that she was reading BB from an academic literacies perspective and couldn’t see his work with any other lens. As such she struggled to understand his position and questioned the use of his terminology etc…My experience had been an almost ‘neutral’ reading, seeing connections with my MRes research and my experiences of working in the HE field as a teacher. This connected a bit with the workshop I attended yesterday where the facilitator was stressing the importance of scholarly identity and authority in writing. I had to ask myself – so where are you located? I felt I couldn’t answer, but of course I have a stand – working with BB and academic literacies means I have taken a stand. One of the questions Robin asked me was whether I was still committed to the agenda which Bernstein’s work is aligned to – namely “deconstructing the ideological, political and social basis of knowledge and curriculum, while focusing on a concern for the consequences on these constructions for different social classes as they enter and engage with the educational system” So I have a stance, but I don’t feel I have taken on the authority of that stance (well not in a pure academic rhetorical way) – I am still tentatively testing the water, maybe as I forge and development a new identity and grapple with the boundaries that define those identities.



My voice

Two incidents made me think about this – firstly, during supervision, listening to myself try and explain my ideas and thoughts and thinking – hell I sound like a babbling fool. No sophistication or refinement in my word choices or vocabulary. Robin asked me if I could explain the controversy surrounding BB’s code theory – yes of course I could, but what came out of my mouth was another story all together. Secondly, while writing my blog last night, which took me almost an hour I was conscious that I was constantly editing my thoughts and expression – I wasn’t just saying what I thought, capturing my impressions and reflections, no I was constructing a position, fashioned in a sort of pseudo academic-come-casual voice. Was that the real me, was that really my voice? Then a comment from a friend today, referring specifically to how my writing was giving expression to my academic, and therefore formal rhetorical writing, development. I’m wondering if this is how I want this blog to develop. Is this ‘formalised’ writing curtailing my more reflective and affective insights? I looked at a hand written research journal I kept during my MRes and it was a gritty, raw and unmasked exploration of my thoughts and ideas – an aspect I don’t see in this blog. As I move towards one position I drift away from the other – and within the cultural context of the OU I perceive I should be talking, sounding, writing in a particular way, creating more internal conflict and contestation.



My voice and identity – two sides of the same coin, reflective of my current context, underlying intentions to project a version of my own reality, always aware of the audience and their interpretation of my voice and identity. Where the hell is that capeflatsgirl??? Heavy stuff hey!

Thursday 19 November 2009

Research as writing


 

Sjoe! Had a full day today! Workshop on "Turning a conference presentation into a publication" from 10am – 4pm, and then a supervision meeting immediately after that until 5:30 (separate instalment to follow tomorrow!). So I'm feeling exhausted but enthused about the road ahead and all its scholarly possibilities.


 

The workshop was presented by Pat Thomson, an Australian academic based at Nottingham University, who seems to be able, within a matter of seconds, to come up with just the right sentence to articulate that core point you've been stumbling over in a whole paragraph. Interestingly she framed her approach to writing for publication the following ways

  • Research as writing
  • Scholarly writing as text work/identity work
  • Scholarly writing as dialogic
  • Scholarly writing as discursive social practice

So her approach was very different from what she describes as 'tips and tricks' methodologies which present the whole process of writing for publication as a de-contextualised competence, simply involving a good understanding of the rules of the game, i.e. what the journal editors want in terms of structure and content. Her approach gets closer to the multiple elements that are needed when you write for publication in academia, including how identity as a scholar/academic is immersed in the act of writing. Of course she also placed emphasis on the practicalities of understanding the writing game such as picking the right journal, understanding the genre of the journal article, common problems etc…And in this respect provided a useful laundry list of question and concerns that should be addressed so you avoid the pitfalls of having your articles rejected (as if it were so simple!). We spent a considerable amount of time looking at writing abstracts for journal publication. A useful insight for me was that journal abstract need to be written in a different way from conference abstracts – "that's obvious" you might say – but it hadn't sunk in for me until today. She got us to write up an abstract that focused on five moves namely; locate (naming the angle), focus (identify what the paper will explore), anchor (establish the basis for the argument by outlining the research approach), report (summarise findings pertinent to the argument) and argue (open out the argument returning to the angle). A key insight that I took from the workshop was this notion that you have to take a stand and make a point through your writing (any writing that is, from the thesis, to a conference paper or a more high stakes journal article), engage and invite the broader community to enter into a conversation about your position and in so doing add to the knowledge in that community.


 

At a practical level, I started to construct an abstract and skeleton structure for a paper I want to present at the Higher Education Close Up (HECU) 5 Conference at Lancaster University in July 2010. I need to have a proposal ready for submission by the end of January 2010. I was forced to think about just ONE point I want to make about my MRes research. What makes it different from what has already been said in my field and how it might engage the broader academic community? I came up with it during the session. The draft while basic and in need of refinement in relation to its language, captures the main issue I think my MRes research highlights – addressing the "so what?" element associated with the research (I'll post it when it's slightly more polished).

I have to say that I'm somewhat cynical about the message promoted by people like Pat, who are experienced and well published, about the seeming simplicity of getting journal articles published. But I have to say I was inspired to focus on maybe one thing I wanted to say about my MRes research and hone this into a possible article (I also managed to get Pat to recommend possible journals that might be an appropriate platform). I have also been encouraged to look at the literature around writing as part of developing and projecting a scholarly identity – an area I previously avoided for fear that it merely presented a de-contextualised "how to guide" that almost also makes you feel inadequate because you don't manage to do all they say, or that fails to accommodate the many complexities associated with the act of academic and scholarly writing. We will have to see how all of that comes together.

Sunday 15 November 2009

The salt mines (or minds?)

I had a productive Saturday – went to the Open University to work because my bed was proving way to inviting, especially with the Cape like storm outside. Since Thursday I’ve been in a determined mood following positive feedback from my supervisors about my request for another meeting to discuss my understanding of BB (I like the sound of that, nice ring to it). Also got some encouraging and cape flavoured comments from my friends relating to my serious attempt to get close and personal with BB – one suggested I develop some chemistry while another recommended some fingering – I have taken both comments on board and it has done wonders for my relationship. So the chemistry and fingering has continued in earnest and smiles abound. The more I read about his work the more I understand – I’ve even drifted, although tentatively, to reading his own writings, so things are coming together it would seem. But the proof is in the pudding – all set for Thursday @4pm with the supervisors. I will have to prepare for this meeting and make sure the pudding is up to refined English palate.




My determination suffered a bit on Sunday – maybe because it’s Sunday and my internal dispositions say it’s the day of rest. I just couldn’t get going today no matter how much I tried, so I’m somewhat disappointed at myself, hopeful that I can catch up in the coming week. I’ve also started taking Gingko Biloba in the hope that my concentration will improve, which hopefully will help me to focus more, especially on the niggly, careless mistakes I make when typing or writing and reading – the do’s that should be don’ts, the left out words, and the misunderstandings created when I don’t read the e-mail or sms correctly the first time and in so doing get my dates all scrambled. Let’s see if helps, I’m forever hopeful. So, back to the salt mines, and a productive and purposive week ahead.

Thursday 12 November 2009

A clean house leads to a clean mind


 

Had a mad day, scrabbled up my scheduling so only realised at 12 realised that I needed to go to a very important 'training' session at 2pm. I had this meeting down to happen next week Thursday – but actually next week I have a full day workshop on writing for publishing that I signed up for and of course forgot about. Lekker deurmakaar! At the training session today I learnt that I would learn/develop 36 skills over the duration of the PhD. Great! And of course for quality assurance purposes, I am required to document and provide evidence for this development. Double great! Really looking forward to this. Might have to go on a training course on micro-time management or using Google Calendar. Maybe that will cure my scatty 'brainedness' at the moment. So got home tonight and thought…maybe if I clean the house and especially declutter my room, my brain will be decluttered. Someone told me once (Linda?!)…the house of a PhD student is ALWAYS clean and tidy, lovely distraction tactic. Once I clean the house I am going to do….a), b), c) then save the world by producing my PhD.

Seriously, I'm seeing my supervisors again next week on Thursday (right after the daylong workshop. Great scheduling hey?) to finish off what I was hoping to do at our meeting this Tuesday. That means I need to be on top on my game, so will be working this weekend and making sure that while I can articulate Basil Bernstein's theories, I can also outline what I don't understand and why. Now to write up a to-do list for tomorrow and correct my diary dates !

Wednesday 11 November 2009

The PhD condition



I had my second supervision session yesterday and unfortunately due to various 'things' I'm only sitting down now to write my reflections on that meeting. As a result, so much of what I was feeling, rather acutely, yesterday has eased away and been tempered by the passing of time (that sounds rather melodramatic). But after yesterday's meeting I had two distinct realisation and their associated feelings, that seems to me, to define this idea of 'the PhD condition' – having 'problems' with the supervision experience, and/or (because often these two go together, although not always at the same time) feeling like you are the most stupid person on the face of the earth. Based on the MAGNATUDE of this statement, maybe it was better that I waited a day to write down my reflections J
These two issues go hand in hand, are interrelated, are interrelational – darn whichever way you want to define it – you can't talk about the one without the other. I'm grappling with Basil Bernstein – so as per my agreement with my supervisors I write up a 2000 word piece explaining my understanding of his work, focusing specifically on the pedagogic device. I even spend 2 hours trying to graphically illustrate this theory (included to add entertainment value and as evidence that I'm not talking crap). As agreed I send my piece to my supervisors ready for Monday morning. I get to the supervision meeting; unfortunately they either haven't finished reading it or haven't read it at all. So we don't talk about the pedagogic device, but I get asked analytical questions about why I want to use the work, how will the work add value to my research, why has he used the terminology he has – and I start reeling. Hell I don't know? I spend the rest of the hour repeating what I don't know or don't understand and expressing how hard it's been for me to process the elements of his theory. Seemingly excuse after excuse! Stating how I'm still grappling at the descriptive level so can't answer their questions. Nothing wrong with these questions, they're good, critical, challenging – but I'm not ready for the challenge, I don't expect this challenge at this time, not yet anyway.
And here in lies the second issue – feeling like a total twit! I've spent almost a month reading the man's work and come out of my meeting feeling like I have nothing to show for it. Arrggghhhh!!!! The PhD condition – conflicts around expectations about the role of the supervisor and feeling as if you are so so stupid. It's the nature of the game, the condition. These issues 'aint gonna go away' best for me to manage them. Or as a colleague of mine jokingly reflected "You have to manipulate your supervisors, not only manage them".


So two things to be done; first of course is to better manage the relationship with my supervisors. Maybe it's something 1st year PhD students need to learn, because the 'manage-the-supervisor' advice I've received has always been from 2nd and 3rd year students. Also one has to be assertive and most importantly know what it is that you want from the interaction. I think it's almost an expectation here in the UK, that as a PhD student you know what you want. ALMOST always you will be told – "Well it's your PhD, you have to do what you want" when asking for advice about direction, pace, relevance…you name it. "No!, No I say" just freaking tell me what you think – right or wrong, yes or no!!!! Can't it be that simple? Of course I hear myself-as-teacher, saying these very words to my students and probably frustrating the hell out of them at the same time. My sins are catching up with me, no doubt.
Second, I need to manage the self-doubt that doing a PhD inherently produces. Common sense suggests that because you are doing a PhD, you must be super confident about your ability and intelligence, after all 'stupid' people don't get to do PhD's? The paradox of being a PhD student is that your intellect, conceptualisations, ideas are constantly being challenged – you're constantly asked to think about something you might know very well in a new and novel way. NOTHING gets taken at face value. And most importantly – you don't freaking have all the answers. In fact you have very little answers. But knowing all of this doesn't make it easier when confronted with the harshness of this cold reality. I will have to manage the internal paradoxes that flood my brain and emotions. I guess that's why some PhD students appear to come across so self-assured and cocky – to overcompensate for the moments when they too feel like idiots.


I've requested some additional feedback from my supervisors relating to my understanding of Bernstein – darn I didn't do that graphic for nothing. I know I'm not 'stupid' I just need a more suitable platform when I can demonstrate what I know, on my terms. I like the blurring of the boundaries between manage and manipulate. One also needs perspective – its early days yet…this kind of thing is going to happen again and again, I can't control every single aspect of the PhD. Talking about perspective, it was better that I waited a day to write this.

Wednesday 4 November 2009

Number of words

I saw one of my fellow students from the MRes today. He doesn't live in Milton Keynes so only comes up to the OU maybe once a month or so. This was the first time I had seen him in maybe a month. Anyway he was talking about the PhD process and went on to explain that while doing the MRes he wrote a total of maybe 50 000 words for the various assignments and the final dissertation. According to his logic the PhD only requires about 80 000 words, so, because of the word count he had amassed during the MRes, writing 80 000 words for the PhD would not be a problem - because he had practically reached that figured already, save for a missing 30 000 words? This kind of reasoning was common last year as we all seemingly rushed to complete our essays, and comments like "only 1000 words left to go" or "I need to find another 500 words before this essay is done" littered Facebook status updates.




I could never understand this mentality (and still don’t) - what difference does it make that you can write 50 000, 80 000, 100 000 words - surely anybody can write 50 000 words? What is this obsession with a meaningless attempt to quantify the task of writing an essay or indeed a PhD thesis? But this kind of thinking is pervasive here, I seem to be the lone voice saying - "word counts don’t tell you anything!" Recently one of my colleagues, who I also call a friend and respect greatly, was trying to sum up our first year by looking at the outcome expected i.e. a 10 000 - 12 000 word overview of the literature, research methodology and research proposal. Again in his mind the amount of words required indicated a fair minimal task for a year's work. Surely it's the quality of the words used and how they articulate and outline your ideas, thoughts, conceptualisations and analytical insights  and argument that is important - the word length acts to guide the structure and possible style of the discussion, but accounts for nothing more than that.

Monday 2 November 2009

Contributing to my intellectual stimulation




Think I should have done this earlier, immediately after the Battle of Ideas, rather than waiting for some spare time at practically 11pm on a Monday night. I obviously haven't learnt much from my fieldwork and fieldnote taking experiences in May and June. I went to the Battle of Ideas festival in the lush suburb (can it be called a suburb?) of Kensington, London on Saturday and Sunday. And I certainly got my intellect stimulated in rather unintended ways too. I went to talks that ranged from looking at the white working class in Britain, debating development, listening to music-developing a cultured ear, choice, rights and ethics in reproductive health, whether teachers should be role models, the role of critics in the arts, recession, the US and Obama and of course…South African 15 years after apartheid.


So a range of topics, facilitated in a very participatory and inclusive manner where dissident and divergent views were constructed, often in the makeup of the panel, and also encouraged by the engagement of the audience. An interesting theme that seems to resonate for me, and what I took from this event, was the role of ideological and political forces in shaping socio-cultural norms and values. What was also illuminated for me, was the hegemonic mechanism through which the status quo on all levels, is maintained; from how the working class is viewed in this country (who are referred to as chavs, basically a derogatory name given to mainly working class white people who unashamedly display their lack of taste in relation to fashion and style, seem to resist aspiration to better their lives, and generally behave poorly), down to the roles we think teachers should play in children's lives and whether classical music is inherently better than any other genre of music. Certainly on Saturday I came away thinking – Oh my goodness, I am looking at the 'other' with a value-laden, judgement lens, while recognising that these very values I personally hold have a socio-political and structural basis. So while I have been super resistant to being 'sucked' into middle class ideas, eager to assert my working class upbringing, the hegemonic forces where/are doing their work pretty well. And a key element of course, in all of this is the notion of education as the only valid means to social mobility and success.
So much research (including my own) has shown how education is more like to reproduce the inequalities between students of different class and racial backgrounds and entrench privileges already enjoyed by those with social, political and cultural power, education as the key to more choice and opportunity as been my mantra for years. I guess in my own defence I have always promoted learning for learning sake, rather than learning as a means to enhance your social or economic standing. Which brings me back to my fast becoming, favourite theorist of educational sociology at the moment, Basil Bernstein (interesting how once you start to understand what the hell a theorist is saying, you start to like them more). His whole theoretical project was to find ways to ensure that the curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation systems in schooling and education in general would accommodate working class kids in more meaningful ways and allow them to achieve and overcome a system specifically designed to exclude them. I am starting to see relevance in his work, or aspects of his work, for explaining how educational outcomes are linked to macro level socio-political influences and structures.

Friday 30 October 2009

PhD as Process

Yet another interesting but slow week in the progress of my PhD. Officially I’ve been at it for just about a month and psychologically it’s a big shift from what I was doing last year. I feel more relaxed, less anxious and probably more excited about my work than I was last year. At the moment I am worrying a bit about the pace of my progress and wonder if I should be working more. I’ve decided to work everyday even if it’s only for 2 hours and so far I have been able to maintain this work ethic. I had two insightful conversations this week about the nature of the PhD; one with a lecturer who works in my building, Jan – who inadvertently asked how things were going and then 15 minutes later we were still chatting while my tea got cold, and the other one with my supervisor Robin – again an informal chat meant to last 20-30 minutes, but that went on for at least an hour. The main thrust of both these conversations; or rather what I took out of these conversations is the notion of the PhD as process. The value of having an understanding of, and developing reflective insight about what, how and when you are doing something. Also how your research fits in or challenges current debates in your field and in broader arena of higher education. Most importantly I am in control of the process, I need to shape it and take out of it what I need most. Very scary thought!




Robin and I were also talking about Bernstein (of course) and his main project i.e. finding ways to make education more accessible and equal to working class kids. I was saying to Robin that I wasn’t sure of the extent to which I wanted to use Bernstein and whether my research agenda was overtly seeking to change pedagogic practices in favour of working class kids getting access to the ‘goods of the academy’. Reflecting a bit more on this issue, I realised that even if I don’t overtly seek to pursue this agenda – issues of discrimination and inequality inherent in education (irrespective of the context) will come to the surface and I will be confront with it and will have to make a decision about what I do about it. Ignore it, or confront it, highlighting the inequalities and provoke change. Thus making a politic stand or using my research to take a political position. Again scary stuff…



I’m starting to see the educational world and its processes through the lenses provided by Bernstein (without understanding all the complex bits and pieces) and I feel proud of myself in a small way – because I understand his theories in sufficient depth to conceptualise its working in the practices I encounter. Next week I have to put all these loose and floating thoughts into a coherent format and present some written motivation for why I want to use his work and the possible value it might offer.

Monday 26 October 2009

and my brain went blank!

It's been a slow start to the week. I just couldn't get my brain working today. It must have taken me all of 3 hours to write a 300 word abstract on the findings of my MRes research. I want to write a paper, ready for a conference or better yet submission to a journal, focusing specifically on the nature of student academic literacy practices in the web design and development course I investigated, while I have the time.

Browsing over my dissertation the words on the various pages seemed like they were written by an anonymous somebody, because I did not recognise it as being my own knowledge. Surely if someone asked me about my research, in general or the various concepts I used in particular, I would be unable to answer them in any articulate manner. This got me thinking...How the hell will I be able to 'hold' onto all the information I will no doubt gather over the next couple of year and coherently talk  about it? I always believed that one's knowledge is consolidated through its practical application. Once you work with concepts they become real for you, once you can apply them to other situations, you see how they can work in practice and through this process your understanding and indeed knowledge is enhanced. So how will all of this work when all I am doing is a theoretical, abstract and internal process with limited practical validation? Am I meant to wait for everything to come to me once I have written the thesis, defended it in the viva, been awarded with the degree and then unleached to the poor unsuspecting minons (no disrespect intended) who think I should now know it all? All these questions and so little answers. Process! I need to allow the process to do its 'thang' and make a self-respecting, knowledge harbouring and sharing academic/intellectual out of me.

Wednesday 21 October 2009

Different tribes

Things have been pretty slow these past couple of days. Went to the OU Social Science Students Praxis seminar today. Very interesting. Someone from SA talked about spaticality and the informal sector (I'll come back to this in a moment). I thought the seminar would focus on research methodologies etc, but the main focus seemed to be a 'space' where students could present their findings.

Reflecting on some of the work I've been reading around academic disciplines and how knowledge has been compartmentalised into different 'tribes' (not sure who first used this term in this way) it was interesting to see all of this being played out as students did their presentations. Also viewed from a academic literacy practice perspective the 'practices' evident in the room clearly delinated the group as 'social scientists' and in particular are Human Geography researchers. I was amazed at the nomalisation used and how everyone in the room seemed to automatically agree with the usage of certain terms. They were'nt contested althought I was saying to myself  "What the hell does governmentality mean?" Two of the presented were used ethnography methodologies and often these sounded like autoethnographies - yet no questions were raised about the methodologies or indeed the problems or concerns associated with participant observation or research reactivity/reflexivity. It was almost as if the methodology was taken as given. Another interesting issue was how their work was framed by a 'grand' (for want of a better word) social theory or philosophy (all three presenters drew extensively on Foucault) whereas my work and the work in my field, while acknowledging these ideas or base theoretically views, have used them to formulate theories about education or learning or literacy practices in education. These students are certainly doing research for research sake - producing knowledge for the purpose of understand a phenomena in more detail and adding to what is already known about it. Taking me back to a debate I had with a tutor last year - the very distinquished Martyn Hammersley - about the purpose of research and what its purpose should be. I am of the opinion that research needs to be directed by some purpose beyond simply doing it to enhance knowledge, rather there should be some practical outcome. Research for research sake is something of a luxury that very few of us can pursue - as a practitioner I feel the power of research lies in its ability to provide insights into practical everyday problems or dilemmas face by ordinary people.

The socio-cultural ways of using reading and writing in this context though was the most interesting to see and I'm pleased that I can look at these situations and almost automatically consider the literacy practices at play and what the 'sakes' are for those able to draw on and engage with the necessary practices. Also interesting is the issue of contextual influence of the discipline, the discourse, the field, the tribe that acts to regulate what knowledge is acceptable, recognised and sanctioned - and of course who gets left behind when not conforming to the social norms that governing the social interaction.

Monday 19 October 2009

British Library

Thanks to Stephen my friend and colleague from the OU, I was introduced to the 'glory' of the British Library today. I was most impressed. Sure I have often done a document delivery via the OU so gained access to their catalogue, but to actually use their library was amazing. The building is rather modern and their approach to the space and how a library should be used could be described as rather progressive. Free WiFi every where, cafes and open spaces for people to sit and chat and work. So the place is alive and a buzz with people and conversation and activity. But then they have these reading rooms, where you enter into silence and I guess into a community of like minded people all focused on gained the most from the books spread out in front them. I guess its this community that is so absent from my life at the OU and maybe I can find some of it at the British Library.

I've started to plot how I might use Bernstein's pedagogic device and its relationship with the core focus of my research, student academic literacy practices. But its early days yet!

Sunday 18 October 2009

Basil Berstein and me

I've been reading the work of Basil Bernstein - the leading sociologist of education who sadly died in September 2000. I'm trying to find a theoretical framework to understand and account for, what one of my supervisors, Mary Lea, calls 'institutional conditions'. All the structural things within an academic setting that has an influence on student academic literacy practices. So I'm looking at the immense and influential work of Bernstein. He proposes a theory of codes that allows one to describe how knowledge is produced, transmitted and reproduced - but most importantly, the consequences to different groups of these processes. Basically for Bernstein - education, rather than fulfilling its ideological role of eradicating social class advantages in schooling and society, reproduces the gross inequalities in society, which especially disadvantage children of the working class. His theory offers many concepts and rules, like classification (the degree of boundary maintence between areas of knowledge or subjects), framing (the control exercised over the selection, organisation, pacing and timing of knowledge transmission in the pedagogic relationship between students and teachers) and the pedagogic device (that helps to explain how knowledge is recontextualised into academic forms and structures). Ultimately, he links these processes to broader society especially social class and power relations. I'm wondering how I could use his theories, his work. How I will get to understand his theories and which would be most applicable. I've also wondered about the ontological value and linkage between his theories and those of academic literacies. Are they compatible? Can they be used together? But more importantly are my research aims similar to those of Bernstein's project is i.e. uncovering/accounting for the structural basis for educational inequality prevalent in the research site I'm exploring? I'm starting to think that I need to become clear about what exactly I want this project to become. What do I really want to focus on? What are the core issues and what are the issues that can happily sit on the perimeter? Is my study primarily about academic literacies or is it a sociological project? How can I marry these two theoretical aspects and what possible compromises need to be made by each marriage partner? Alternatively I might be seeing the whole thing in a rather reductionist way into an either/or choice I have to make. The sociological aspects of Bernstein's work is very exciting but also very daunting- his theories are complex and I'm struggling to make sense of all the rules and interpretations of the rules and of course the underlying philosophical/ideological tenants of his theories. Maybe I'm just too scared to embrace a critical theory perspective, being happy to inhabit an interpretativist realm where all views are possible.
My task then for the coming week is to unpack and unearth Mr Bernstein a little more, dig a bit deeper and see what I can find. Hopefully in this whole process my understanding will be enhanced and I can come a bit closer to answering some of the questions posed above or, even better, reframe them.

Saturday 17 October 2009

An so it starts

At my first supervision meeting on Tuesday this week, one of my supervisors, Robin, 'innocently' suggested I start a blog-as-reflective-research-journal. Since then I've had the though running through my brain. Should I? Should'nt I? Seems the 'should' option succeeded in winning this battle. Blogging seems to be the 'new' space academics are meant to crave out for themselves. A place where they can raise their profile or go digital. So I was rather cynical about having yet another digital profile, and what this might signal to the world out there. But Robin was clear about how I could regulate who could or could'nt have access to my post, and that sort-of provided some reassurances. Also having started the research process (whatever that might mean) I've had all these thoughts float around in my head. So writing it down seemed like the natural thing to do. With a blog the natural space for those writings. I've just been reading a book on English punctuation so very aware of my useless spelling and grammar and therefore think I need to place some proviso, for 'followers' or whatever you call people who follow and comment on blogs, about correcting my spelling and grammar. Mmm, that won't work well for theacademic profile I'm hoping to build with this blog. So my first post does'nt add anything significant associated with the supposed aim of this blog. Maybe next time.