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'.

life on campus

For the last three days I've been cocooned within the leafy surroundings of one of England's 'plate-glass' campus universities, a product of the Robbins era and very much a major player in the contemporary higher education scene.  The campus was devoid of undergraduate students but teeming with the people that make the university business model work...conference delegates.

Conferences are changing...these days at least 50% of delegates have their heads in their iPads during keynotes and presentations, another 25% are checking their phones as if their sanity depended on it.  Are we bored, lonely, curious, or simply unable to leave the office? This conference had live tweets beamed onto the big screen during the introductory speeches.  It provided a distraction when the speeches flagged or disappointed, but really, is this polite?  

The best thing about the last three days has been reconnecting with the other students on my scholarship scheme.  We're based at institutions around the UK and last met in November at an induction event. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then and it was good to catch up, eat together, drink together (some more than others!), compare notes, share woes, welcome new members.  We're all on the same track, deadlines biting at our heels, juggling study, work, personal lives.  There's something to be said for a bit of group solidarity now and then. Keep it up guys!

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Temporary remedies for worker-ants

Earlier this week, Nick Hopwood posted 10 things you should know about a PhD but may not have been told.  On reading the post I located myself somewhere between 1. (you and your work are crucial to the future of humanity and the world); 2. (you're in an astonishing position of privilege); 5. (yes it is hard) and 6. (you will continue to feel like a fraud).  It hasn't been a comfortable position to be in!  So in the spirit of Nick's '10 things' here are a paltry three I've come up with as a remedy for my current discomfort:

1. Scale down.  Getting limited satisfaction from small stuff can gradually ease the sense of disappointment and impending panic (what's the point?  I've wasted six months reading the wrong things? etc).  A week of small stuff means my desk's tidier, I've got my references up to date AND I've managed to work on small tasks which will, at some point, contribute towards the whole: drafting small sections in timed sessions; checking out bang up to date journal articles on my topic....If I haven't done what I'd ideally like to have done this week, I have, at least done something.

2. Let some air in. The atmosphere between you and your supervisor(s) can become very rarified.  Allow yourself and your ideas to breathe.  Get fresh air circulating.   Talk to others in your field whose opinion you respect, absorb the implications of different perspectives, rehearse your ideas in different circles.  Freshen your thinking and your conviction about your research and your right to do it may well strengthen.  And there's nothing better than literally taking some air.  Get outside and walk.  

3. Get off the beaten track.  If your confusion and sense of inadequacy are becoming entrenched, try a detour.  Cross discipline, read someone/something new, go and hear someone speak/sing/play and enjoy their competence in what they do.  Sometimes detours give us unexpected views of the roads we were travelling on or remind us why we chose that route in the first place.  

I'll let you know how it goes....

seventy steps of shame

My PhD supervisor's office is on the third floor of an old building without a lift.  I counted the other day - there are 70 steps up, with a particularly steep flight of stairs between the second and third floors.  I've developed a habit of pausing, twice, on my way up so as not to arrive breathless and sweaty in their office - I'm sure they're heartily sick of visitors' complaints!  I suspect however, that my stair-climbing routine is not only for their comfort, but also something to do with the complex, tacit and occasionally uncomfortable powerplay at work in the supervisory relationship.  After all, if I arrive literally unable to speak, my voice can't be heard.  

Developing my own voice within my writing has been something I've been working on this year - and the work continues!  Ensuring my voice is heard in the shaping of my empirical research is a whole new - and quite honestly - unexpected - project and I have a feeling I'm just at the start of it!  As with many things 'PhD', these territorial scuffles are a part of the journey for which the directions are imprecise, everyone will have their version of the 'right' way to get from A-B. 

Back to that staircase....I may have a strategy for going up those stairs, but going down them can be a different matter.  Last week, they became the 70 steps of shame after a bruising supervisory session.  Bruising you understand, only to a fledgling academic intellect and a fragile ego.  Ten days later and I'm still assessing and working through the impact.  I'm assailed by all those feelings doctoral students experience - I'm not good enough, I can't do it....I recognise that the downer has come as such a shock because only a month earlier I'd finally felt I was making some real progress, getting a grasp of the literature, developing my own voice in my writing.  No doubt you'll tell me this is all part of the journey too, detours and dead ends are essential!

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.  

imposter syndrome

I'm at the HEA Social Sciences Cluster Conference (#HEASocSci13) which has as its theme: Teaching Research Methods.  I experienced a painful case of imposter syndrome this afternoon when I attended the opening keynote by John MacInnes (University of Edinburgh) who also happens to be the ESRC Advisor on Quantitative Methods Training.  I'm drawn to qualitative rather than quantitative research.  I'm the girl who ran, weeping with relief, from the room at the end of my O'Level Maths exam (yes, that long ago) and wept with relief again when I was informed I'd scraped a C.  In my mind I never had to think about Maths again.  I'm also the kind of person whose eyes lit up on reading a news article last week on how mild electric shocks to the brain have been shown to improve mental arithmetic skills.  Forget research, life in general would improve measurably (but by what % I hear you cry) without having to constantly revert to a) fingers and thumbs b) pen and paper to work out the minutiae of my personal finances.  No doubt I fall into the 'statistically illiterate' category whose skills are barely basic and certainly don't reach the heady heights of being 'confident at manipulating fractions and decimals to express proportions', attributes John MacInnes listed as as essential for social scientists learning quantitative methods.

I'm not proud of any of this by the way.  But I am content with making the most of the strengths I do have.  I'm a poet and I write fiction (when I'm not writing research papers).  So the speaker's reference to 'the statistical imagination' caught my own.  We must, he said, help students to appreciate the 'excitement of data', to 'learn to see the world in terms of variation and distribution'.  I think I probably already do, in my own way, I just instinctively express my understanding of it in words, rather than numbers.  

part-time matters

Yesterday saw the launch of Part-Time Matters, a campaign highlighting the benefits of part-time study to the UK economy, society and the individual.  Backed by a range of stakeholders in part-time higher education including universities, their mission groups and the NUS, the campaign has launched in response to the dramatic 40% decline in part-time applications to higher education following the 2012 reforms to higher education.  Universities UK has already started to conduct a review into the reasons behind the drop.  

The publicity around part-time higher education is not simply timely, it is overdue.  My doctoral research into retention and part-time, mature students, has revealed the dominance of full-time as the 'authentic' model in institutional, policy and media representations of higher education,  despite one third of all higher education students studying part-time.  There is a tendency to lump part-time students in with 'disadvantaged' groups despite their varied profile. 

Why does part-time matter?  As the campaign argues, part-time higher education brings economic and employment benefits to students/employees and employers; it widens access to higher education and it has a positive impact on personal development. I think it matters too, to our higher education institutions and all their students.  Part-time students bring life experience, employment skills and knowledge, alternative perspectives and astonishing motivation and commitment to their study.  This matters, diversity matters, part-time matters.

Are you studying part-time or know someone who is?  Do you teach part-time students?  What do you think are the particular challenges and benefits of this mode of study?