the future has arrived

Since I devised my last work plan about 4-5 months ago, the end of August/ beginning of September was a milestone I've been looking forward to. It marked my proposed final deadline for the last bit of serious work I would do in the UK before returning to Cape Town permanently. 24 August was the supposed submission date, initially for the first draft of my thesis, but then it was scaled back to merely be the first draft of my literature review. Well the date came and went and I rescheduled. August was a low month - my motivation and connection to my PhD reached an all time low and it seem inevitable that I would not, could not, meet my deadline. Last week I was in Sweden attending the Improving Student Learning conference and still had the unfinished literature review hanging over my head.  On Sunday night at about 11pm after a four hour trip from Heathrow to Milton Keynes I decided to send the draft piece to my supervisors. Here are the 'reading notes' I sent along with the submission...

Finally - my literature review (but also unfortunately under-baked and incomplete). Apologies for the delay - I tried to make the most of the ISL conference and didn't want to spend all my time, while there, working on the chapter. Hopefully I'll remember to give you some of my impressions of the conference too and the lessons learned.

Here are some of my 'reading notes' for the attached piece

1) I think it captures the main areas of theory that are useful for my thesis (and research in general)
2) I don't think I've done a very good job of integrating the different theoretical strands - to me each area currently seems to stand alone, independently (think it might be because I'm still in the mode where I'm writing for myself and not writing a thesis for an audience)
3) I'm most unhappy with the section on literacy practices - I don't think it's robust enough - maybe this will come once the Discussion and Interpretation chapter is written and I feel more confidence with my analysis. I'm also not happy with Section 1.4 - I think this is purely because I haven't read widely enough or haven't found a way to bring what I have read about this issue into the argument I am crafting
4) I feel there are sections that could do with more recent readings especially the 2012 Lea and Street and Robinson-Pant chapters. I've read your chapter M but haven't been able to bring it into my writing here. The section on graphic design education must still be done.
5) Given my own uncertainties about the status of this draft I think what might be productive for me at this point (and also conscious that I don't want to waste your time) is if you can highlight/identify areas of inaccuracy, areas that need more clarification and areas that are important but that I haven't signalled sufficiently or that I haven't mentioned at all. Your input in guiding me forward for the next draft would be very helpful.

Green/underlined text - stylistic, sentence structure issues
Orange/ italic text - concern about accuracy and validity of the points/claims being made

So this is how it is, it's the best I can manage at the moment, which really should be ok. I hope I can truly accept that it is ok. Last week amidst the looming deadline and anxiety about the quality of the work I got to visit the city of Lund and made a very brief but memorable trip to Copenhagen - think I'd like to go back. But for now the future has become the present and I am going home soon.

Walking in Uppsala...the road ahead perhaps?

The cobbled streets of Lund, southern Sweden

With the little mermaid in Copenhagen