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.

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.

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  10 weeks of 'searching' or trying to capture what I thought my intentions where re: PhD study
  
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    Key issues
    
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      Curriculum
      
      
      
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      Academic literacies
      
      
      
    
    
  
  
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  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
  
  
  
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  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
  
  
  
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  What has been difficult – my dislocation from a place of practice, context to inform the research
  
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    This distancing has created a distortion of what I saw as the 'problem' and how I wanted to conceptualise the 'problem'
    
    
    
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    Thus a distortion of the focus of my research
    
    
    
  
  
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  Within the last week I read two article 'by accident'/serendipitously and this helped to realign my thinking – even bringing me back to reality.
  
  
  
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  Realisation that I've been fixated on Bernstein
  
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    Red herring
    
    
    
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    The processing of trying to 'fit' Bernstein's theoretical frameworks into a research design was illuminating
    
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      Helped redirect my gaze back to my initial interest
      
      
      
    
    
  
  

ACCESS to disciplinary / practice based knowledge.

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

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!

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.

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?