on pencil sharpening and swimming

Along with the definite whiff of autumn in the air comes that 'back to school' feeling as September approaches.  I'm tidying my desk and sharpening my pencils in readiness for my second year as a PhD student.  In fact, pencils really have become an important part of my toolkit - during my first year of doctoral study I rediscovered my love of stationery: pens, pencils, notebooks.  By the end of these three years there will be a stack of once beautiful but dogeared notebooks full of lists, ideas and scribbled references, tracing the halting and haphazard journey through my PhD.  

During my first year, those physical tools of writing offered a welcome alternative to the sea of virtual wordage which seeped onto my screen on a daily basis, threatening sometimes, to overwhelm me. Earlier this summer Charlie Booker wrote a Guardian article entitled 'Too much talk for one planet' http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/28/too-much-talk-charlie-brooker. in which he bemoaned the 'vast cloud of blah ... events and noise, events and noise' to which he had been contributing and from which he had decided to take a break. I was ready for a break myself  - from the 'events and noise' associated with PhD study (journals, papers, books, updates, alerts, blogs, twitter...).  I spent two weeks living in minimalist fashion in a tent in the South of France.  It took twenty minutes to make a cup of tea (I'm British, of course I make tea in the South of France!) and I developed a new appreciation for the minor miracle that is a chair.  

Since my return, it's taken almost two weeks to reluctantly dip a toe back into that sea of words.  But the new year is upon me and I need to get swimming again. On that note, enough of this reflective blah, time to dive in..!   

damn good all over

I've just emerged from a six week writing bubble, working on drafts of my first two thesis chapters. They were submitted to deadline and I've re-entered regular life - temporarily at least.  Drafting each chapter was challenging in different ways. I find writing about themes and ideas comes more naturally than writing about numbers and facts so at times, the context chapter felt dry as dust.  But while writing the theory chapter flowed more easily, I was continuously assailed by the fear I was only scratching the theoretical surface.  

The day after submitting the drafts, I was rewarded with two stimulating posts on different blogs: Pat Thomson on emotional research and Arlene Stein on intellectual craftsmanship.  Both spoke to different aspects of my recent writing experience.

Pat Thomson's post considers the place of emotion, including anger, in research and how this can motivate the researcher to produce engaging, compelling work.  I feel fortunate, a year into my PhD to be more not less interested in my topic (part-time, mature undergraduate retention).  I'm researching it at a time when part-time enrolments in HE have dropped 40% thanks to the funding reforms.  What's happened has made me pretty angry and especially when I read the words of those writing after Dearing in 1997, who felt hopeful about the potential for the HE system to encompass lifelong and flexible learning.  The sometimes dull, sometimes fascinating work of uncovering the context of my research - and my own industry - has fed my motivation further.

Arlene Stein's post addresses the instrumentalising of intellectual activity, the pressure to 'produce', leading to 'the production of routine work that fails to inspire oneself or others'.  She advocates a return to craftsmanship - an engagement with our work, seeing writing as craft requiring technique and playfulness.  My struggles with sense, flow and even elegance have been part of the crafting process, an engagement with my research, my topic so that others might engage with it too.  

Both posts addressed motivation and engagement - key ingredients in this doctoral process - in different ways. What both made me realise is that whether I'm writing about numbers, facts, themes or ideas, compelling, well crafted writing is absolutely necessary because both chapters are doing the same thing: telling the story of my research for a purpose.  Arlene Stein quotes C. Wright Mills' from The Sociological Imagination  - and perhaps I'll put this up on my wall:  'I am trying to make it damm good all over'.

a different light

I've been staring rather hard at the view from my window recently.  I'm moving from rural Gloucestershire to urban Yorkshire at the end of the summer. So I'm trying to imprint on my memory the sight of spring in the garden and across the valley.

One thing which always beguiles and sometimes startles me is the sudden transformation worked by the sun emerging from cloud or the simple and temporary brilliance of the evening sun on the fields and the trees.  It's like a light being switched on - an illumination.

My experience of my doctoral research can be like that (ok, not that often!).  Suddenly, through reading, or writing, my perspective shifts, opens up and ideas, concepts, metaphors connect.  I realise the connections have been there all along, but invisible to me, just waiting for the clouds to clear or the sun to move, imperceptibly, to another spot.  

I want to capture these moments of insight, just as I'm trying to hold the sight of the fields, trees and shadows in my memory.  If I don't get them down on paper/on screen, then like the way the sunlight travels across the fields and the leaves, they can be all too transitory.  

campus? what campus?

Someone has commented, though not publicly, that for a blog entitled Campus Chronicler, I don't seem to spend much time on campus (see below)!  This is an excellent point.  I am a full-time, doctoral student but enrolled at a university 120 miles away. I visit about twice a month for supervisions and library raids. I spend the bulk of my PhD life in a small room overlooking my neighbours' gardens on the outskirts of a (quite funky) small town in the West Country.  My 'campus' (study space, cafes, bars, sports facilities, social life), is either downstairs, on my doorstep or within a 5 mile radius.  But my 'campus' is also the extensive virtual library facilities I enjoy and the whole network of people I connect with via email, blogging, facebook and twitter and, less often, conferences and seminars.  Some are new to me since I started my PhD studies, others have been built up over a long and pro-active working life in higher education and associated fields.  My 'campus' is also the organisations I play an active part in, notably UALL - The Universities Association of Lifelong Learning and UALL's national women's network Women in Lifelong Learning, which I convene, not to mention the news, issues and debates about higher education I try to keep track of.  
The relevance of all this (and therefore the reason I'm blogging about it) is that one element of my research is what 'belonging' means for part-time, mature students in higher education.  Because belonging has been highlighted as critical to retention, I am trying to uncover how the multi-faceted lives of part-time, mature students impact on way they negotiate, indeed need to 'belong' to their higher education institutions.  
I'm definitely mature, but I'm not part-time, nor undergraduate, but there are similarities with my research question and my own circumstances.  Even though I'm here and my university is there, I feel I belong enough to keep me going.  Admittedly, I've been well-trained through several years of Open University distance study but I also have a rich life and a rich history that I am weaving into my developing identity as a doctoral researcher.  I feel as though my campus - any campus, experienced by any student, is, as Doreen Massey (1997) would define it 'a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus...articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings'. This implies that belonging can be something 'inbetween' rather than a finite state.  
So, I maintain I am a campus chronicler, despite appearances and the odd city break to the contrary!  In any case, I'm grateful for the comment which unwittingly, has connected me more closely to my research!