03/04/2012 by lizit.

Occasionally on this journey towards a doctorate there have been moments when I have suddenly understood something or a penny has dropped. They haven’t necessarily been big things, but nevertheless meaningful. Today I had one of those moments when reading a post on the PhD2Published blog. At the bottom of the post, there were five simple - and in some ways obvious - points about writing at this level, both for the thesis and for any other publication. It was the last one that caught my attention and imagination. Effectively it asked, what was the problem I was claiming to solve.

For months I have been struggling with the whole notion of what is it that I am doing that I can claim to be adding to knowledge. I have heard the metaphors of a grain of sand and seen the images of a tiny pimple on the sphere of knowledge, but I have found it difficult to identify, let alone articulate what I am doing. I have been so conscious of so much of my work just saying what is already known, I have not been able to see what I am doing, even though it is implicit in my methodology and in so much of what I have done over the past three and a half years.

This morning it dawned on me. It doesn’t actually matter that others have explored some of the problems of the special needs system - they have tended to work from specific perspectives. It doesn’t matter that there is a fair bit of work written on inter-agency working and partnership. In fact, it’s great that work is out there, together with studies of the experiences of parents of children with special needs and the various analyses of policy in this area. They are all parts of the jigsaw which helps to explain why the special needs system is dysfunctional.

What I am doing, in taking a systems perspective, is trying to look at the whole picture. Sure, some pieces will still be missing, but rather than looking at the jigsaw pieces in isolation, I am trying to look at how they connect. Rather than trying to solve a problem, I am trying to offer a perspective on the multi-causality of the problem. Essentially, I am taking a problem area, which has been dissected and carefully examined in bits, and looking at it holistically and recognising the multi-dimensional nature of the problem and the interconnectivity of the parts.

So, instead of being concerned about the fact that I don’t seem to be saying anything new, I can now recognise I am saying something different and fresh simply because I am looking at the whole system rather than one little bit of it. Recognising that is making me think both about what I have already written and what I am currently writing. I have a sense of knowing what I am trying to do now!

Remind me how positive I am this morning next time you catch me about to throw my rattle out of my pram in despair that I’ll never get to the endpoint of this journey!

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07/03/2012 by lizit.

The past three months have been the most difficult of my doctoral journey so far. I did start to write a blog post a few weeks back, but was not really able to express what I wanted or needed to say. I am now in a better place and able to reflect on the experience and look ahead.

In the draft post written at the end of January/beginning of February, I said:

I’ve been pondering whether or not to blog the ups and downs of the last few weeks and have decided that now is as good a time as any to do so. If I had been writing just before Christmas, what I would have written would have been very different. I was at a very low point and seriously questioning whether it was worth continuing with my DPhil. I have turned a corner, but am still feeling very fragile and doubting whether I can actually complete the journey, but I am able to look at things more rationally.

Anybody following this blog would know that up until the end of November, I was in a good place with my work. I felt that I knew what I was trying to do and I was doing it. I had set myself some fairly demanding writing targets and was achieving them. I had restructured the way I was presenting my work in a way that made sense to me and I was generally pretty happy with the way things were progressing. So what went wrong? And why is it coming together now?

What went wrong?

Around the end of November, beginning of December, three things happened, each of which contributed to me becoming very depressed about my work - and very angry that I might not be able to do what I had set out to do.

Firstly, my supervisors cast doubts on the way I had re-organised my work. I was not following a conventional thesis format and this was likely to cause problems when it came to the thesis being examined. I considered I had strong reasons for wanting to structure my work in the way I was doing and that my theoretical stance was not understood. I had a sense of being required to write something that was not going to be ‘my thesis’ in order to comply with convention, whether or not convention made sense in the context of what I wanted to say.

Secondly, I got ill. OK, it was only flu-like cold, but as I am asthmatic, it went to my chest and I spent a couple of weeks feeling really grotty and took about a month to begin to feel well again. Truth is, I was probably mildly depressed as a result of being definitely under the weather and feeling totally stressed out about my thesis.

Thirdly, I got comments on the writing I had been doing during the previous weeks. Although I could see the rationale behind some of the comments, others I felt much less happy about as they were encouraging me to put more weight on some parts of my work than others in a way that made no sense to me.

What happened to resolve the dilemma and put me back on track?

Firstly, I realised that I was not powerless but had choices. I could choose to walk away completely, or to present my work other than in a thesis. I have learned a great deal over the past three and a half years and I could choose whether to complete my planned journey or head off in a different direction.

Secondly, I had supportive friends. Not friends that tried to comfort me, but friends who listened to my tale of woe, accepted my account and gave me space to be angry, frustrated and depressed, only offering advice once I was in a place to hear. Those folk know who they are, but they are found in #phdchat on Twitter and amongst colleagues at University of Sussex.

Thirdly, although my supervisors were not happy with what I wanted to do, they had confidence that I could complete my DPhil and one in particular took the time to explore why things had gone so radically wrong. This gave me a sense of being understood and provided a platform for negotiation and agreement on a way forward based on an honest appraisal of the potential risks.

What are the outcomes of this process?

Perhaps the most important thing to come out of the past three months is a very real sense that I own my work. I owned it back in November, but now I simultaneously have both more invested in it and less. That may seem odd, but I have accepted that what I am doing does not follow conventions and that may not meet the approval of examiners. That is OK and my decision and if it means I do not get to wear a floppy hat at the end of the process, that is fine. At the same time, I do believe in what I am doing, and do regard not only the content but the approach I have taken as valuable. If it is not valued by formal academic measures, that does not make it less worthwhile, but it places more responsibility on me to find ways of disseminating my work.

Secondly, there is a change in my relationship with my supervisors. From my perspective, there is a new honesty in our exchanges, perhaps because we have locked horns, and found a way forward. When I get to the end of the journey, I will be interested on getting their thoughts on this perception.

Thirdly, I think my writing is improving. I am more self-critical, in a positive sense, and more aware of the need to ensure the rationale for my approach and argument is transparent, even if it sometimes means labouring the point. Because my approach has been challenged, I have read more, understood more and am more confident.

Where now?

Get the thesis written!

Posted in personal rant, peer support, thesis, writing, experience, ownership, reflections, empowerment, learning | Print | 4 Comments »

23/10/2011 by lizit.

A fortnight ago I wrote of a new sense of direction with my thesis writing. That has continued.

On a practical level, the buckets have been moved around, some have had their contents split into smaller buckets and some buckets have had their contents mixed in the same container. That represents more than just moving jigsaw pieces. It has led me into thinking more deeply about what it is I am saying and, perhaps more importantly, how I am saying it. I am also a lot happier about my theoretical positioning. For months now I have been trying to get my head around the various theoretical standpoints open to me, half the time not understanding them and the the rest of the time not seeing how they applied to me either. Through thinking about how to organise the various material in my thesis, I have recognised that I am not coming from a single theoretical standpoint - or if I am, I don’t know what it is and at the moment it is fairly irrelevant. What I am doing is embracing a systems approach. It always was there in the small print of one of the chapters, but I’ve now realised it is what is holding the whole together.

A systems approach does not only permit, but insists on looking at things from many different viewpoints or perspectives. It may involve soaring high over the system and taking an overview - looking at the pieces and how they connect - or it may involve getting into the nitty gritty of bits of the system and how they work in the day-to-day. It may involve looking at the roles of the different stakeholders in the system and how they function together and separately. It may involve acknowledging the differences between formal and informal power structures - the importance of the person with the key to the stationery cupboard…

Bit by bit I am making sense of the story I am telling and seeing more and more connections. I am having to be far more organised than I have ever been about noting the insights as they occur - some will find their way into my thesis and others will no doubt be useful in other contexts. I am beginning to write and edit and review and understand and write some more. There is a subtle shift which means I’m engaging with my work in a new way.

So far so good! But why oh why is the technology, which should operating transparently in the background, so difficult to tame? Three times in the last fortnight, I have spent time sorting out broken references. The first time happened when splitting the whole into its constituent parts. Everything seemed to be OK, and then I noticed some of my references were simply not right - they had somehow moved down the document, all still in the correct order but in the wrong places. Then, last weekend, editing a shorter document and noticing again references were not where they belonged. An hour spent cutting and pasting unformatted references sorted that! Then yesterday, a carefully crafted paragraph half-way through the document, and moved on to make further edits, forgetting to hit the save button first. As I made the next edits, a sudden awareness that the reference I was editing had disappeared to be replaced by the page number I was inserting - and then adding insult to injury, it replaced the following reference and all the subsequent references shifted too. This is specialist software provided by large companies and supposedly designed for the kind of task I am engaged in. Why on earth doesn’t it do what it says on the tin? There is more than enough to think about without having to worry about whether my document has edited itself!

So we win some, we lose some. If only the technology worked as it should, I would be a very happy bunny at the moment!

Posted in thesis, personal rant, systems, bibliography | Print | 2 Comments »

09/10/2011 by lizit.

I’ve woken up this morning feeling quite excited about my thesis and wanting to get on with writing it!

During the summer, I did a lot of work on pulling together the content of my thesis and putting ideas into what I have thought of as buckets or containers. These buckets have had fairly standard titles like lit review, methodology, findings, discussion, etc, but I have been aware that in most cases the contents were ill-formed and often disconnected. While knowing what my thesis was about, I was very unclear what I was actually saying, and more importantly how I was going to say it. It was like having a jigsaw where I had sorted out the pieces into piles, the sky, some of the bigger objects, the corner pieces and some of the side pieces, but I had no idea what the final picture might be, or how I might join the pieces together to create that picture.

The picture is still not created - doing that is almost certainly some months away. What has changed is I have a clear sense in my own mind of how that picture might look and I can begin to take action to move some of the jigsaw pieces around and begin the task of creating the picture. Instead of wondering how to present my argument without really being clear what the argument was, I now have a sense of both what my argument is and how it can be presented.

Today’s task is to make a rough sketch of the outline of the picture and begin moving some of the pieces into place. Over the coming weeks, the task will be to join the pieces together, first in sections and then in a whole, in order to create a thesis which says what I want to say clearly and cogently and which links together the various different perspectives contained within it.

This morning I am feeling excited, and a little scared, because I sense I actually do know what I need to do, and I do know how to begin to do it. I am standing on a viewpoint, looking at the landscape laid out before me. No doubt as I move into that landscape and get caught up in some of the detail, I will find myself confused and wondering in what direction to go, but for the moment at least, I am feeling excited and have a road map in my hands.

Posted in thesis, voice, writing, ownership | Print | 2 Comments »