staff or student

On Friday I had to do this big'ish formal presentation to the staff in my department about my portfolio of responsibility in the department - i.e. my academic staff development function. This is the primary role I 'sort of' play in my department. I also have a big'ish administrative function associated with quality assurance activities linked to an institutionally driven curriculum development project. Then in between these two big'ish tasks I'm also expected to teach, and I want to do research (by no means a core requisite for academic staff in our institution). In this academic staff development role my energies are focused on helping staff to find ways of improving their teaching practices and to nurture an awareness and interest in the general scholarship of teaching and learning.

Later that afternoon in conversation with a colleague about a possible research project to explore engineering students' experiences and perceptions of learning mathematics, I realised that I'm still too interested in students and their experiences to shift my research agenda. I may work in academic staff development, but I don't want to research that aspect of my work. I'm still not ready to let go of the student as my central focus. This same ideal ensured that my PhD research was firmly grounded in the academic literacies tradition - to allow me to place the student in core position of my research design and to ensure that their perceptions and experiences directed everything else I did in my research and analysis. This strong leaning towards the student is a very common feeling shared by many of the academics I know and respect. We are constantly pulled towards all sorts of other enticing or not so enticing activities associated with our work in higher education, but the student is always king/queen - the alpha and the omega - the core element that defines our identities and usually gives us a reason to get up in the morning. I might have suggested that staff and their concerns somehow can share the same platform as students. But that's misleading because for now my interest, and especially my research interest, are firmly locked-in on the student.

writing again

I'm trying to pull together a rough draft of a chapter I'm co-authoring with one of my supervisors. Once again I'm thrust into that strange happy-depressed placed. I'm excited about the opportunity to talk about my research, put forward my ideas and find ways of telling my story. But in equal measures the anxiety and frustration of not getting the 'right' words on paper and realising that I don't really have such a significant story to tell anyway sends me straight to the depths of despair. Sitting in my calm space this afternoon, having craved aside two hours to work on my writing away from my day-job I constantly had to tell myself, not to pour meticulously over each word, to focus on getting the argument down and leave the specifics associated with writing style until the next draft. Paying attention to this self-talk was exhausting, leaving little time to focus on the actual nuts-and-bolts of the paper I was trying to construct.

Earlier in the week I came across this http://thesiswhisperer.com/2013/09/25/how-to-write-faster/. In my mind this is just the thing to send  an eager would-be academic writer in search of the comfort of  a bottle or two of good South African red wine. Isn't it great to have a few little 'verbs' or topic sentence structures to set you on your merry way to write 'publishable' paragraph after 'publishable' paragraph. The energy I now need to counter this, well intentioned, but misdirected and dispiriting advice makes me want to just forget any delusional ambitions I might have had about publishing and find those bottles of red wine. A more  productive and, dare I say, empowering course of action is that I simply take the crib notes on offer and see the blog post for what it is - a narrow, one dimensional and decontextualised account of the very high stakes activity of academic writing, that instead of problematising the reasons for the difficulties writers' encounter, helps to perpetuate a deficit view of certain writers, who even after taking the advice on offer still struggle and even fail to produce those reams of 'publishable' words and sentences.

summer in the city

It's a line from a Regina Spektor song - I just thought of it now and the tune is playing in my head. I used to listen to her all the time, when I still could, on Spotify - the song is filled with melancholy, rather ironic when singing about summer I think! But I'm in a rather ironic kind of mood.

I've taken encouragement from a fellow blogger's advice about academic writing, but of course the moment I wrote about it and posted the entry a thought struck me...hey, what she is presenting here is a formulaic, decontextualised 'script' - do these ten things and if you do you'll publish in a year, you'll get a PhD and a life and if you do these things and still don't get the the  suggested outcomes...then hell there must be something wrong with you! My Academic Literacies warning lights flashing like crazy, but I'm also feeling a bit guilty because I found the advice so good, practical, I admit I was taken in by it, I still feel taken in by it - so what does that say about my Academic Literacies credentials?

I think it's important to manage this kind of 'skills/socialisation' type message with the more fundamental and critical 'writing as social practice' message. And to see this kind of message for what it is! Writing, academic writing is freaking hard work, it's a confusing and difficult process to pin down, underscored by issues of power and inequality (all writing and all writers aren't equal) and there certain isn't one textbook method that can be applied to everyone. Having said all of this, and declaring that my critical Ac Lits antenna are clearly working - I've been making sure that I write for at least two hours each day (most days its more - come on I'm getting paid to write 6-8 hours a day at the moment) even on the weekend and not feeling so despondent and super critical about my seemingly lack of progress. So there is some method in the madness, some method that at a particular level makes sense to me. Maybe one day I'll become like the blogger in question, offering advice about writing from an Ac Lits perspective...on second thought, a quick second thought, no! I don't think so because it would just reify whatever I was saying into something that it isn't. The irony continues...

Data workshop

'Images are everywhere' (Sarah Pink, 2007)

This was the title of a presentation I did today. Well it wasn't really a presentation as such - rather an opportunity to share and explore analytical frames for data. So I took along some 'imagined' visual and multimodal data for comment and exploration. I think I'm the only person really working with such visual data in the group, so people didn't really have much to say about the images and artefacts I presented. There comments were around issues I wasn't that worried about anyway - like pointing out how I could pick up literacy practice constructs in assessment briefs or suggesting how I might want to order the different types of data I collected into some sort of hierarchical structure (typical of Linguists and Linguistic Ethnographers) - interactional data takes precedence and then other data like fieldnotes, curriculum documents , photographs have a secondary role in helping to provide background or contextual information about the spoken data. Hmm, No I say - I'm interested in practices, texts produced as part of practice cannot be seen as separate or subordinated to practice - I don't see a distinction between the two. Well why not try 'talk-around-text' they said - but that's still suggesting that texts are foregrounded above the context within which it was created and that the practice to produce it is separate from the textual product. Nobody said much about the actually images, I would have liked to hear them comment about that. 

I've been coming to these workshops for the past year and its meant to be a space where you can bring data in any stage of analytical processing and hear what other people have to say about it. I prepared some slides and didn't really put much effort into it because I thought - hell I really just want to hear what other people to have say about this data. However when I stepped into the room and realised that it was filled with roughly more academics than students - I was a bit thrown. The feedback was 'Great! that was really interesting' but that's what everybody says about presentation here anyway so how the hell do you know whether they actually think its a good one or not. Listening to myself speak or rather mumble/fumble my way through the slides and then deal with the questions thrown at me - I wasn't really impressed. Not very polished to say the least. I wish I could be more articulate, use the right words and in the right order and sound as intelligent as I know I am.

Reflecting on these past two days - the seminar yesterday and the workshop today - there is a clear way of doing academic presentations and engaging in academic conversations here. Its a certain kind of literacy practice, that relies very heavily on vocabulary, logic in the construction of your argument, succinct analytical descriptions, all mixed in a with particular kind of English humour that borders on self deprecation. I struggle with the vocabulary and the succinct analytical description - the two feed off each other anyway - and lack cultural familiarity to pull it off anyway. This of course is my interpretation of my academic presence, which might not be how others view me - but how they view me isn't half as important as how I view myself. I don't know whether this 'microscopic' inspection of myself is helpful, it more likely has had the opposite effect - making me more self conscious and more reliant on various crutches, like full presentation scripts, rather than intuitively expressing myself as best I can. I did a little recording of the presentation so when I have a listen to it again, I'll have to consider whether any perspective on my own performance can be gained or not.

Aluta continua mense!