22/12/2010 by lizit.

I’m working through my interview data at the moment and a phrase struck me. The participant was talking about parents of children on the autistic spectrum, and she said: “… or you are deemed to be a very vocal parent who’s only got what they’ve got because you’ve been so pushy about it and you’ve fought the legal system.”

That got me thinking about something that occurred to me quite forcibly a few months during a writing course at university. The thought was where was the child and the child’s voice in all this. Sometimes it can be presented as though parents are fighting the education system, the health system, or whatever because they want to. Yet surely the parents only find themselves in this fight scenario because of the needs of their child. To have a child who is unhappy and can’t cope with the ‘normal’ stuff most children are believed to thrive on is heartbreaking for most parents. Is it that surprising that parents find a voice and will “move heaven and earth” (as it said in the brochure for a school my son once attended) to get their child the help they need? The parents are not trying to achieve a victory for themselves, but to get their child’s needs met - or are they?

But what does the child actually want? How much of a voice do they have in the process of securing appropriate educational provision? I’m not going to attempt to answer that here, but what I do want to recognise is how important it is not to lose sight of the child or young person in everything else which may be going on.

Posted in parenting, struggle, Aspergers/HFA, ASD | Print | 2 Comments »

16/12/2010 by lizit.

It’s somewhat of a truism that the doctoral journey is a lonely one, especially for those of us who, for whatever reason, tend to spend more time off campus than on. Even on campus, opportunities for sharing with others can be something of a rarity.

Over the last few weeks, I have begun to join in a weekly chat session on Twitter. On Wednesday evenings between 7.30 and 8.30 a disparate group of research students communicate with each other in 140 character messages on topics like literature review, managing data, writing, etc. The weekly topic is decided in advance via a poll. We share resources, realise we are not alone and hold each other to account. The fact that we are working in different areas - and sometimes different countries - is irrelevant as we are able to offer each other that sense of not being alone.

When the idea of a Twitter chat was mooted to me, my immediate thought was it couldn’t work; 140 characters would be too restrictive to say anything meaningful. How wrong I was!

If there are any research students out there reading this and feeling isolated, do take a look at #phdchat on Twitter and consider joining us next Wednesday - or any Wednesday that you happen to be free!

Posted in community of practice, social learning | Print | 5 Comments »

14/12/2010 by lizit.

I am currently reading Clandinin and Connelly’s book ‘Narrative Inquiry’. A section on the place of theory has caught my eye. I think I can see its relevance to me, but just testing it out.

The scenario Clandinin and Connelly use to introduce the topic, is a book review, where one of the authors worked with another reviewer on the task of writing a review. Clandinin suggested approaching the review from the perspective of stories of school life and linking these to themes from the book to examine how the ideas within the book might be relevant in practice. Her colleague’s approach was to establish an interpretive frame and to examine the book’s ideas in the light of this framework. This inevitably led to tension.

Clandinin and Connelly then discuss more generally the tension over the place of theory in narrative inquiry, using literature review as an example. Traditionally, doctoral theses contain a literature review chapter near the beginning of the work. This chapter is used “to structure the inquiry, identify gaps in the literature, outline principal theoretical lines of thought, and generate potential research possibilities.” In other words, the literature review provides a structure and framework for refining the research question, designing the study and analysing and interpreting the data. Clandinin and Connelly suggest that rather than privileging existing literature in this way, an alternative approach is to “weave the literature throughout the dissertation from beginning to end in an attempt to create a seamless link between the theory and the practice embodied in the enquiry.”

Reflecting on this, I am reminded of some of the discussions taking place under the #phdchat hashtag on Twitter. These discussions have drawn together a number of research students from different disciplines and institutions on different continents. While much of the discussion has been of a very practical nature, there is also discussion around methodologies, managing and analysing data, etc. One such question has been whether or not literature is data. My instinctive response to this is in the affirmative. Reading Clandinin and Connelly is making me think this through a bit - and making me look at my own approach.

Over the past two and a half years, I have read far more academic literature than at any other time in my life. What I have read has varied from some quite dense theoretical tomes to case studies and descriptive pieces. However, my research area is one that I have a familiarity with through my own experiences over several years involvement in the domain. In deciding my general research focus, I am as much, or more influenced, by what I know experientially as by what I can learn from literature, but the literature has raised questions and issues that I would not have been aware of from a purely experiential position.

Having started with a fairly general research focus, exploring the learning journeys of those responsible for supporting and caring for children and young people with a diagnosis of Aspergers or HFA, I am finding there is a theme emerging from interviews, which is also present in the literature, namely that of a metaphor of fight or struggle. From some perspectives, this struggle can be seen as part of the learning journey, and from others, learning in its various guises, can be seen as one of the roots of struggle. So rather than taking a particular framework or theoretical model from the literature and applying it to the context - and this would be a legitimate option - I am identifying an emerging issue and identifying a number of related themes from the narratives. These themes are leading me to return to the literature to examine them in more depth. Although what I am doing is emerging from the narrative, the theoretical concepts are providing a framework to attach those themes to and to explore them further, thus weaving together experience and theory.

Posted in theory, boundaries, narratives, concepts | Print | No Comments »

08/12/2010 by lizit.

At about the same time as posting yesterday’s blog, I put a status update on Facebook which read:

I think I am getting my head around a couple of ‘ologies’ and understanding how they are relevant to my research - eeeek! am I turning into some kind of academic - help!!!

As sometimes happens with status updates, but somewhat to my surprise, this update has opened up an interesting dialogue and has helped me understand something of my resistance to using some forms of language. It has also had the effect of clarifying that there are contexts where it is right and proper to use more complex language if one is to be properly understood.

My starting position is that the language which we speak and write is primarily a communication tool. If what we speak and write cannot be understood by the intended audience, then we might as well not have spoken or written. This could imply that the only form of communication which I find acceptable is using the simplest language possible and avoiding all technical or specialist terms. Just counting up the number of 5-syllable words I use shows this is not the case. However, I do have a tendency to prefer not to use specialist language as far as possible. This is partly because I am not particularly interested in language as such. It is also because I have found myself in situations where I have felt excluded from discussion because of my lack of affinity with the language being used. Even if I understood some of what had been said, I was completely unable to respond in any meaningful way. Rather than making me want to understand and use the language, my response was to accept that I was not bright enough for such exchanges and to make no attempt to engage in them. Fortunately, in another setting, I did learn I was not as dim as I thought and achieved a fulfilling career, but I never really came to terms with the language issue and have at times set myself up as anti-intellectual.

The Facebook discussion has opened up the reality that whereas my tendency is to use plain English whenever possible, there are others who relish acquiring and using more complex language:

I love the way that we can express complex ideas concisely - and then stepping stone from one complex idea to another with relative ease.

When I express the view:

I agree reading academic papers should require some work on the part of the reader, but most of that work should be in understanding and applying the ideas being presented and discussed rather than in understanding the language used to present those ideas.

Others would say:

when we are talking to peers in a research community surely we need to agree that we can throw ologies around and assume that we will be understood, or that people have the nouce to find out what we mean. We are invested in educating ourselves surely, so doesn’t understanding require some effort on the part of the reader here?

There is a sense of agreeing to disagree, but there is also an awareness that when we speak or write, we are not only communicating to others, but we are meeting our own needs in many and varied ways. I will no doubt be taking more risks with language in safe situations, but I would be fascinated to know how comfortable, or otherwise, others feel with academic ‘jargon’.

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07/12/2010 by lizit.

Every so often I read something and suddenly begin to realise that not only do I understand some at least of what I’m reading but I can actually apply it to my own work! Today was one of those days!

Through a message and link in CPsquare - an online community exploring communities of practice - I came across a couple of pieces written by Martin Packer. I hadn’t come across him before, but he had worked with Jean Lave around 1990 and had taught a course ‘Everyday Learning and Life’ with her. The pieces I was looking at were a conference paper presented at an AERA meeting in Montreal in 1999 and an article co-written with Jessie Goicoechea and published in Education Psychologist in 2000. Both explored the ontology of learning, though, as might be anticipated, the journal article had a more in-depth theoretical base.

The first thing I got from this reading was actually beginning to understand what the terms ontology and epistemology mean. I’ve encountered them enough times in various publications and I’ve looked them up in dictionaries, but never really felt confident that I understood what either term actually meant. In the context of these two pieces, both of which were concerned with learning, it became clear that epistemology had to do with knowing and to describe a learning theory as epistemological meant that it had to do with the process of gaining knowledge that could be tested - OK, it’s probably more complex than that, but that will do for me for the moment. Ontology is not about knowing but about being and becoming and learning approaches that can be described as ontological have to do with who a person is becoming through the learning experience. This in turn opens up the notion of learning being about personal change and finding an identity.

As this was dawning, I began to get excited. The initial focus of my research was exploring the learning journeys of those who care for and support children and young people with diagnoses of Aspergers or HFA. From the data I already have, I know that parents undergo a transformation from being a parent to becoming the parent of a child with an ASC to being the parent of a child with an ASC and that part of that transformation is about identity and part of it is about acquiring knowledge about the condition and support infrastructure. Similarly, teachers choosing to specialise in this area move from being a teacher to becoming a specialist teacher. The routes taken may be different, but there is a change. I would expect to see a similar move in other specialists and carers involved with young people on the spectrum. Obviously, not everybody will undergo that identity change. Some may acquire knowledge without any kind of transformative learning or change.

There have been a number of research studies examining the coping strategies of parents of children with Aspergers. Many of these have focused on parents’ perceived needs after receiving a diagnosis and principle amongst these is generally a need for information. Some have also looked at parents’ coping styles and identified different ways in which parents have coped physically, emotionally and spiritually with having a child who is different. One of my interests is the use of the metaphor of struggle within the literature and discourses and I have been tentatively wondering if there is a connection between struggle and coping. I can now see that both are in some ways connected with the process of becoming the parent of a child on the spectrum.

I’ve got a lot more thinking to do, but I have a sense of having got hold of a piece of the jigsaw and found where it fits.

Posted in coping, struggle, concepts, learning | Print | No Comments »

07/12/2010 by lizit.

Wrote this weeks ago and forgot about it - hmm

An almost throwaway comment in a discussion the other day got me thinking about how pervasive labels are - and how we don’t necessarily understand the labels we regularly use.

The that started this train of thought was that few people, if any, change their fundamental position, or worldview, as a result of their doctoral work. As the context was an informal discussion with fellow DPhil students in sociology, the assumption was that we knew what mix of post-modern, feminist, Marxist, etc, etc, we considered ourselves. On reflection, I found myself struggling. I am quite sure it is possible to label and categorise me, but I am unsure what the labels would be. It made me think of the Myers-Brigg questionnaires and it struck me something similar could be useful in this area. By ticking the correct boxes, I would then know if I was a post-structuralist or whatever - and I might even know what it meant.

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