and the world is a better place

Especially when you have a good supervision meeting. I had a great supervision meeting yesterday. I cant quite put my finger on what exactly made it so great, maybe it was the easy conversation, the fact that I felt I could express myself, the confidence I felt about what I was saying, that I felt I learnt something, that I valued the input, suggestions, comments and advice suggested by my supervisors, that I appreciated their feedback and affirmation of the progress I was making and their confidence in my abilities to do "this thing". There is a subtlety in how they communicate with me, and I think I am beginning to notice what they are signally to me. An important point about this is their sense that I have I grasped the fundamentals of the aclits field and that I now need to move on to broader issues that will help me to really contribute to the theorising about academic literacy practices in my research context. I cant remember exactly how it was phrased (luckily I have the recording so can check later...) but I remember feeling - ah! I am being valued for the contribution my study could make, I am being gently chauffeured into a path that will allow me to make this contribute. The world is certainly a better place when supervision has been a positive experience.

Officially I have 3 masters degrees - and I now have the certificate to prove it. But what the hell does this mean? I was discussing with a colleague if we will receive our 'results', the actual marks attained for the dissertation - if somehow the world out there will be able to judge our abilities and obvious 'intelligence' quantitatively and so objectively compare the worth of the paper the degree is printed on. Without the marks - surely anyone with the same certificate could be judged in the same way? Then I had a chat with my sister, who told me about someone in SA doing a masters and being offered the possibility of having the degree upgraded to a PhD. Its a sort-of common practice in SA. And it got me thinking, not always positively, about the ideological nature of educational attainment - all degrees are not equal, because some are more equal than others. And we have all been feed this and it has been naturalised - we believe this to be true, and of course there is a whole regulatory system to institutionalise the rigours and standards associated with attaining these high level qualification that in turn provides evidence for its worth in status and quality in relation to others. Hell I was sprouting the value of a PhD attained in the UK in comparison to one attained elsewhere or to other  doctoral level qualifications. Basically trying to set myself apart from the 'others'. In many ways begging the question - why the hell do I have 3 masters degrees?

The natural progression is to move from masters to PhD - but for me, I wasn't ready to move onto the PhD after the first masters, I probably would have been able to do it, but I don't think I would have gained much from the process. I remember being rather resentful when I got to the Open University about doing another masters degree - one I didn't think was necessary. In hindsight, it was necessary, because I wasn't ready (on all sorts of levels) then for the PhD either. Nobody can determine what you learn from an educational encountered or whether you will learn anything at all - that is the nature of learning, it's something which the learner has to make sense of by themselves and derive their own personal value. Masters level research however, I do believe, is very different to PhD research and the path isn't always linear or progressive.

I see a similarity with my research and my reflections here about degree status and value. My research is hoping to challenge the dominance of specific kinds of  literacy practices that retain their high status because of ideological framing and institutionalisation that makes their dominance a common sense ideal. While I acknowledge the problem with this picture, I have been conditioned and acculturated into acceptance of this very unequal scenario in often subtle ways, evident in the awkwardness associated with proving the worth of 'my' qualification in relation to similar qualifications attained by others. I hope that the learning associated with this PhD degree will be more about acceptance of the personalised learning experience, rather than an evaluative display of my personal intellectual and cognitive abilities. Maybe if it results in such an outcome, I will honestly be making a real commitment to educational equality and justice for everyone. Or is this just an idealised, egalitarian dream?

Another ordinary day in the life of...

Dare I say PhD student? Of course PhD student. I spent the day - filing - yes, filing. My old system just isn't working for me anymore - I need to be able to find a specific author's paper when I need it and also establish which papers I have, and which I don't. And hopefully save me from recalling books from another poor diligent student, because my copied version has suddenly disappeared in a myriad of papers neatly stacked on my bookshelf.
Simply filing according to topics just isn't good enough for a PhD student...no it just doesn't cut it anymore. I spent the rest of the day cooking. I had some colleagues over for dinner and we discussed our supervisors, note taking and our lives as foreigner in this country. The kinds of things us serious PhD students talk about!

I've been reflecting more on what I wrote in my post yesterday, which also generated an interesting array of comments. I also did a very cursory reading of a rather well known author (Roz Ivanic) who also works within the academic literacies frame, but focuses specifically on writing and identity. She was trying to make the point that the often proclaimed notion  in academic writing not to use the personal 'I' in ones writing acts to deny the writer of all that they are. While I agree with her, as a novice writer or someone new to the world of academia doing that, takes a serious amount of confidence; to challenge let alone defy such an entrenched academic convention, especially if you are unsure how such defiance might be received by the very people you are desperate to please - your lecturer or supervisor. Again I was wondering; so do my current problems and apprehensions around writing revolve around my lack of confidence within the specifics of the current context? I'm being careful here not to default to  assigning the problem to a personal characteristic that I either have to don't have - an all too common approach used in pedagogic interactions. I suspect that the 'problems' are a combination of subtle and complex interplays between a number of factors, especially that of context, audience and the identity I want to project to my supervisors. And as a good, conscientious, PhD student I will turn to the literature and theory to get all my answers...I'm trying to be sarcastically cynical.

Writing...or not writing

I'm sitting at my desk at the OU with a cup of tea, having just 'submitted' a very rough draft for, discussion at, my next supervision meeting on Thursday. Its a piece on the characteristics of the academic literacies perspective and on assumptions about writing in HE. All through the writing process of this piece I kept thinking 'I should do a little meta-narrative of how the hell I'm feeling as I write this piece' - it would capture all the complexity associated with issues of power, identity, authority and language that the academic literacy theorists so elequently discuss in their papers. Thats irony for you, I think - I AM the academic literacies idealized student, while being a scholar of the work. One of the first papers one of my supervisors wrote was "I thought I could write until I came here" - sums me up exactly. I cant remember being so 'scared' of writing before! Anyway writing is important to me - I really do think I process my thoughts and ideas through the act of writing - but psychologically its such a difficult and increasingly messy process. I want everything to be perfect, I want to use fancy, elequent words, I want my grammar to be perfect, I want to sound like the experts, I want to sound intelligent and like I actually understand what I'm saying and of course have an opinion about it.
I dont really understand the full complexity of the academic literacies view on writing in higher education - the piece I've written is like a little gateway or window into the area - a start that I need to build on. I've decided I need to review the whole area prior to my meeting on Thursday, in the hope that if I didnt sound intelligent in the piece maybe I can make up, by sounding mildly intelligent during the supervision meeting.

The African teacher and other such discourses of deficit

I went to an interesting presentation today – organised by TESSA (Teacher Education in Sub-Sahara Africa) a unit at the OU (http://www.tessafrica.net/) – five teachers representing Kenya, Sudan, South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria told the mainly white British and European audience (save for myself and three other PhD students from Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria respectively) about their lives as African teachers. I couldn’t help by wonder - especially when the South African teacher spoke of the decline of student discipline as one of the problems he encountered as a teacher, especially in the teaching environment today where children have too many rights and teachers are no longer allowed to enforce discipline via the good old fashion method of the cane, while the audience nervously chuckled along - if there was a different way to represent these teachers so that the ubiquitous discourse of deficit, problems and endless neediness and reliance on the West by Africa could be challenged. Maybe this wasn’t the place for such an engagement – it was about promoting the ‘good work’ of the TESSA project (they are going to get an award by the Queen - nogals), showing how it had ‘transformed’ the lives of the teachers and the pupils and communities they served (and in all fairness it probably did!).  

But I still couldn’t help by wonder – if the format, content and representation of these teachers through this presentation wasn’t helping to reinforce and perpetuate implicitly held prejudices and stereotypes, rather than foster real, deep and nuanced understandings of not only the challenges of being a teacher in Africa, but how it is fundamentally and importantly different from teaching in Europe in all its positive and negative glory. Maybe I’m being overly critical and disparaging, but I just can’t help but wonder. Interestingly my thoughts tie up with previous insights about ideologies implicit in notions of academic writing and literacy that result in the assignment of privilege, status and power to certain kinds of writing and literacy and not to others.

Discourse of transparency

I’m fully immersed in the academic literacies research perspective. Interestingly, I’ve always professed to take an academic literacies perspective, but in recent weeks when confronted by other academic literacies researchers or when in context where the issue of writing in HE was discussed, I didn’t really feel as if I understood or even represented this research perspective. I’ve been reading around the area of writing or academic writing in HE. Mainly because this is the area in which most academic literacies work is located. I’m wanting to see if concepts relevant to writing in HE can be used to understand academic literacy practices in vocational contexts where the written text isn’t the main assessment outcome. So I’ve been looking at notions of learning, meaning making and of course how writing is a means whereby learning and meaning making is mediated or expressed within the university. I’m starting to understand the academic literacies field and I think the diagram I uploaded last week helps to visually illustrate my understanding.

I was struck of course by how ideologically located academic writing is – the many assumptions which underpin particular notions of academic writing – what many researcher in the field refer to as the ‘discourse of transparency’ – the idea that there is a common sense understanding about what constitutes good academic writing, and that typical markers of good academic writing like, structure, clarity, logic of the argument, acknowledgement of sources, correct grammar, are implicit and something which anyone who can read and write English should be able to understand and master. In fact there is nothing implicit about academic writing – for most part these ‘universal’ academic writing conventions are actually located in another socio-historical period where rationalist and empiricist epistemologies reinforced a particular rhetorical ordering. There is also an expectation that students, even though entering university for the first time, should have a grasp of these rhetorical features, which more often than not, are subjected to further stylistic ordering at the hands of individual lecturers (or disciplines) who impose idiosyncratic norms and standard to create their own version of what constitutes ‘appropriate academic language’. So someone new to higher education might be rather overwhelmed when trying to understand and apply these apparent transparent and neutral academic writing conventions, which for many lecturers has probably taken them years to learn anyway.

And this is the point of academic literacies research – the critique of these very taken for granted, seemingly transparent and value free academic conventions – problematising them, questioning the ideological, socio-cultural and historical base of practices that of valued and unpacking the very real power dynamics at play when one convention is held to be more valued than another.

I was reminded, almost ashamedly, of my role in the practice of berating my poor students as being pathetic writers and dishing out, often in rather pejorative ways, this discourse of transparency. I remember doing class after class on how to write an introduction or how to reference – saying how simple it is “all you need to remember is AUTHOR, YEAR:PAGE NUMBER” as if this was a normal, internalised something all students had been told since primary school and everyone in their household was doing. If I was honest now – I adopted this strategy because it was easier to assign the problem to the disempowered student, than acknowledge that the system isn’t really there to accept everyone into its fold. And not only does the problem reside with this big, bad, faceless system – but I was part and parcel of validating that system – and therefore not welcoming anyone not already familiar with norms and conventions valued. Now that I am confronted as a student with this same discourse of transparency, while feeling the outsider, the complexity and almost complete subjectivity associated with the act of writing within the academic context (and of course different academic contexts, demand different norms and values) has become all the more tangible. 

Work is love made visible?

I’ve started to move into the academic literacies literature and in many ways I’m feeling a lot more at ease. It feels like familiar territory and the terminology makes sense and I don’t have to question my whole being while reading what others have found in their research about student writing in higher education. I’ve tried to chart the field, highlighting the areas where I need to develop a strong theoretical understanding (see the graphic on the left). Because of the familiar territory I feel more enthusiastic about my research although not as passionate as my colleague and friend who noted to me yesterday – that his idea of the best job in the world, is coming to work and thinking and writing about voice and metaphor – we both came to the conclusion that you have to love your PhD topic and want to do it. It’s the only thing that will get you through the process. At the moment I still feel that sitting down to read and think about my work is exactly that…WORK, a chore you want to finish as quickly as possible. Again I hear the voices of reason and wisdom coming from my supervisors, telling me that the data collection and the actual data will bring everything together. The exciting part of the whole process where the somewhat disconnected points start to cohere will really be crystallised through the act of data collection and analysis. So what do I do until then???? Realise that I have this wonderful opportunity to think, posture, contemplate and theorise about one particular thing – it a rare opportunity and maybe I should learn from my friends excitement and passion.

Identity and audience

I've been wondering about how my perception of who I am writing this blog for is structuring, regulating and changing what I write. I haven’t really looked ‘objectively’ at the changes in my writing – but I know it is happening as a result of my awareness of 'audience'. At supervision on Thursday I mentioned to my supervisors that I had a blog and they both asked for the link. I was reluctant to pass it on, because I felt if they were reading my thoughts, confusions and possibly even comments about them – how open and honest would I be with those very feelings and thoughts? I’ve raised this point about audience previously and I’m looking forward to exploring some theoretical positioning about voice, identity and audience when I return to the conceptual work within the academic literacies field. For now I think my supervisors (and anyone else out there in cyberspace) need to ‘search’ for my blog and if they find it – well, hell I can’t stop them from reading it, and I might not even know that they are reading it. The fact that I have chosen to write this using an open platform like the internet means that there is a possibility anyone and everyone with access to the internet can read my blog (unless I block their e-mail address of course...*evil grin*!). But for me to explicitly tell them where to find it would place way too much pressure on my shoulders to ‘write for them’ and I already feel enough of that ‘invisible’ pressure to construct a particular identity of myself through what I write. As Bahktin says, if I understand his work correctly, very act of 'speech' is dialogically, there is therefore always an audience, even if that audience is yourself.

I want to scream: Pleasures, problems and pitfalls of writing

No, this isn’t me trying to be creative and coming up with a ‘sexy’ title for my blog entry – this was the title of a seminar I attended today hosted by the Social Science Postgraduate Students Forum. It was interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, the facilitator (yes it was facilitated – lots of introspective, reflective, participation required) insisted that in order to complete a PhD one of the most important things you need are friends. He raised the very privatized nature of writing and the importance of understanding the ‘social relations of production’ i.e. writing production – that demanded, for your sanity, good interpersonal and social relations with friends who could bring you out of this very private experience. Secondly, it was interesting to me as an ‘academic literacies expert’ (so named by the facilitator, after my little reflective blurb about what writing means to me and what my problems with writing might be) someone who wears two hats – one where I have ‘studied’ academic writing from a perspective that is really critical of the power and ideological dynamics that perpetuate the status quo through the recognition and legitimisation of particular kinds of writing in higher education – the other where I am the ‘student’, the ‘novice’ writer, trying to get in to the academic world and my discipline and be acknowledged through my own writing. And I have realised that understanding that there are power dynamics and structural aspects at play in the game of academic writing, does not make it any easier to write, as many of my blog entry have attested to.



So from the point of view of the academic literacies expert me, I found the whole seminar fascinating on many levels, even though some of them I didn’t really understand. At a meta-analytical level – the seminar seems like what I might have imagined a writers’ circle could be like. People talking about their problems with writing and wiser, ‘older’, more experienced writers offering supportive advice; acknowledging the difficulty that EVERYONE experiences with writing. But also very much a tips and tricks kind-of-approach, what my supervisor Mary Lea might say was a combination of a academic literacy skills and socialisation approach to writing in higher education. Such approaches aren’t necessarily bad – it’s a useful exercise to know what the structure of a PhD should looks like, to be aware of your audience, to understand the disciplinary requirements and stylistic requirements and the value of good structure and coherence in your thesis. But, and I guess there the “literacy as social practice” me kept thinking so what? Someone in their final year of the PhD, in what everyone here likes to call the ‘write-up stage’, when commenting about the audience of her PhD said that she wanted the examiner to find her work (aka writing) interesting and well written. My response was – but what’s interesting to you, might not be interesting to someone else, how you define good writing, might not be someone else’s definition – how do you know that your examine will share your views? I also kept thinking…as this academic literacies ‘expert’ was I really able to view the whole event using an academic literacies framework? So was I able to pick up the subtleties and dislocations of different frameworks of writing operating in the room? Was I being true to my conceptual home and would I make my fellow academic literacies comrades proud by asking particular questions or raising particular points?

What I do realise from the whole experience, identity positioning excluded, is that nobody challenged the way things are in academic writing in higher education. Nobody was challenging the status quo and saying but surely 'they' should accommodate the way I write. The session was more about; tell me what they want and how I can make sure I give it to them in exactly the way they want it– while providing a supportive platform for expressing the pain, agony and total despair the writing process invokes. It was about the process, without challenging the validity of that process, assuming that the process itself was value free and all that was required to make it through the other side was the necessary cognitive ability to grasp some core skills (oh and of course friends). Maybe I did do my comrades proud!

It’s been a hard week's night

I can’t believe a week has passed by. It’s been a productive week although in retrospect I wish I had done more. I still feel as if I’m continually trying to play catch up with all the readings on my floor and scores of others that I have yet to discover, but which are undoubtedly, even though they are unseen, absolutely crucial to my understanding of my research topic. Speaking of research topic; I can happily say I am moving forward in this respect and today wrote up a somewhat skeletal attempt to articulate what I think my research is about. 

The most important insight has been how I want to use the sociology of education work of Basil Bernstein in my research. At the most simplistic sense I will be using a layered approach to frame my analytical framework. While the academic literacies perspective is my primary conceptual and analytical lens, I will subject my data to a second reading using what I have called ‘theories of context’ to undercover the structural aspects that inform the pedagogic encounter. In this way while the academic literacies perspective will allow me to ask the important what and how questions; e.g. What are the student academic literacies practices used to gain access to the x disciplinary/professional contexts? and How do students negotiated meaning in the x disciplinary contexts using the academic literacies practices? The theories of context and in particular Bernstein’s concepts will allow me to ask a crucial why question; Why are certain academic literacy practices privileged in the pedagogic encounter? 

These questions focus specifically on the knowledge constructs that inform the curricula structures that in turn inform the pedagogic and overall academic experience of students. Hopefully this provides a more holistic view of how students in the selected vocational higher education courses negotiate access to the disciplinary and professional domains, evidenced most crucially through the assessment text they produce. And through this progress start to unpack the power and control dimensions inherent in our educational systems that regulate the differential access accorded to students. 

Grand ideals hey! Well, we all have to chip away slowly, but surely, at that huge wall of discrimination and injustice is our own ways.

The graphic I’ve included is meant to illustrate this layered approach to my conceptual and analytical frameworks, how it relates to my focus of analysis and the outcomes of the secondary reading of data collected. Of course my proposal for combining these two theoretical approaches requires critical scrutiny of its validity (especially epistemologically) along with the construction of a plausible argument, complete with the necessary supporting evidence, before I can be completely confident about its research viability and sleep easy at night, she says cheekily!