Culture or individual style?

 

I've had an extended break from my academic work, spending three weeks in Cape Town. I returned to the Open University on Monday. Besides relaxing in the summer sun, soaking up my family and enjoying the company of friends, I also had the chance to connect, chat and share my research ideas with some colleagues and friends. I was stuck by the generosity of ideas, encouragements, constructive feedback and firm direction offered. But more importantly the sheer interest in my work – genuine interest. Coming back to England I am questioning whether the difference I have experienced in the academic domain here at the OU is a cultural one, or down to the individual style, even personality of academics? I had this very discussion today with a colleague and surprisingly we were pondering the same question. I thought that my experience was unique, but we were both grappling with whether to ascribe the disconnection, sometimes indifference and general unease we are experiencing with the whole supervision process to culture or personal style. Of course there is the issue of gender that we cannot exclude – again an issue that I shared in common with my friend, although with a slight role reversal in his case. It's not that our supervisors don't care or aren't interested – there is just this unknown 'something' that's affecting the learning/development process. For me this was brought into sharp focus in Cape Town. Maybe I'm used to firm, but encouraging direction and guidance administered at the right time. Maybe it's comforting and a relief not to search for words and feel tongue tie each time you are trying to explain or articulate your opinion and ideas within the supervision context. Maybe it's the knowledge that you are 'accepted', rather than constantly feeling you need to prove yourself and demonstrate your intelligence to be taken seriously. Maybe it's this strange, muddled, ambiguous stage I'm currently in – one where I think I should be more in touch with the theoretical and conceptual boundaries of my research and have a direction I wish to follow – but in reality I feel more like I've just jumped out of a plane, hundreds of miles from the ground and waiting for the parachute to open, ever conscious that I'm hurdling down to earth to my certain death, completely reliant on some tiny mechanism that will allow the chute to open and save me from being spattered like a bug on a windscreen. I want to have perspective and see the bigger picture; I want to know the general direction I need to head in – even if I am aware that the details, the specifics might change in the long run. Instead I have to rely on that 'little mechanism' that will save me.

 

I spoke to one of my supervisors today – I wanted to tell her that I was thinking of shifting my research focus. Based on my discussions in Cape Town I realised that I needed to reassign the Bernsteinian focus in my project for many reasons – that it might redirect my focus away from the academic literacies field into the scholarship of knowledge, that it has methodological implications forcing me to shift my unit of analysis away from student practices to that of staff, and rather fundamentally that if I really wanted to understand Bernstein and his project, making it a fundamental element in my work, I would need expert guidance to help me unpack and make sense of his theories. All I had been doing until now was skirting the periphery of his work and possibly getting it wrong too. While I have come to this realisation I still haven't been able to say – 'Well I'm not doing that, but I am doing this'. Today in my meeting I was trying to point this out, trying to make a case that I didn't know what my ultimate goal was and that it was important for me to unpack exactly what it is I wanted to uncover and possibly how I wanted to uncover the questions I felt needed answering. My supervisor in her wisdom (and I mean this with great respect because it is her wisdom that I acknowledge, appreciate and trust), was trying to reassure me that, the road is uncertain until you have data (that little mechanism???), and that attempts to pin down frameworks, directions, positions until you have data is near impossible. While I accept this in 'theory', in practice it is the most uncomfortable and frustrating conversation to have. Again making me wonder – is this culture or personal style? Why do I think that in SA I would have been helped to work out possible routes that would help in a very broad and general way to get to my proposed destination? Or am I being biased???

 

I've come away thinking – I don't care, I want to know where I'm heading, I want to have a 'workable, flexible' research question and general research area, with possible conceptual fields I might want to draw on, consider and explore. I need to have a rough map, that I can amend, colour in, adding textures and contours as I go along; but hell I need the freaking map – and anyone who knows me, will know that I really don't know my left from my right – so the map is essential. I believe, trust in 'the process' – my supervisor is basically highlighting the process – so why am I seemingly resisting, scared of, circumventing 'the process' – is it cultural or individual style?