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!

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!

The first thing I did was to think again about what the underlying argument of my thesis is. What is it I am actually addressing. Over the past three years, I have read and gathered a lot of information and learned a lot. Although much of it is interesting, by no means all of it is relevant to my thesis. In order to decide what is and is not relevant, I had to know what it is I am trying to say and what contributes to that argument.

Having sorted out what I am saying, I then looked at the material again and how I had structured the first draft. I had followed a fairly standard model of introduction, lit review, methodology, findings… but I realised that this might not be the best structure to support my methodology and argument. I was using three distinctly different approaches to the problem I was addressing, which meant I was looking at different bodies of theory and different methodologies. I decided to divide the thesis into three sections, which would enable me to address each approach separately, and draw connections between them.

During October, I focused on the first two sections, which were the best developed of the original drafts. By the end of October, I had my revised drafts (currently awaiting supervisor comments), but the original word count had swelled to 110k.

Radical measures were needed. I first focused on the essential content - the literature and methodology - and the word count increased a little more! I needed to do something more drastic. I printed out the remainder of the content, reminded myself again what the focus of my thesis is, and started working through the material with a blue pencil, putting lines through everything not directly relevant to my argument.  I still have a way to go, but over the past fortnight, I have reduced the word count by about 25k and I am beginning to see how I can bring ideas together which were previously hidden in the undergrowth. The material being removed is not uninteresting, in fact some is very interesting and may well form the basis of articles or conference papers, but it is not part of the argument I am making in my thesis and therefore has no place there - much the same as some garden weeds may look quite pretty in meadowland, but in a garden may hide or choke the plants that are meant to be there.

Hopefully, having cleared the weeds, I can begin to construct a more coherent argument, and lose more words in the process. Who knows, I might even reduce the word count enough to include the still missing discussion chapter.

No doubt careful editing can deal with small numbers of excess words, but dense undergrowth needs a chainsaw and flamethrower!

Martin quite rightly raises concerns about the risks of churning out material without the necessary thinking and evaluation that makes our writing meaningful. The debate that has emerged on Twitter also recognises the very real problems of short-termism and the need to produce and be counted. A culture of short term grants and a requirement for outputs, can lead to a multitude of books and articles that say very little and which fail to consider the bigger picture. This is something we all need to be concerned about. Research, whatever the field, is about so much more than inputs and outputs.

At the same time, we can be resistant to put pen to paper. Discussions in #phdchat week after week reveal the anxieties of graduate researchers as we seek to find ways to express our ideas, always questioning whether we have any kind of conceptual or theoretical framework, whether what we are wanting to say has any real meaning, and, in any case, is what we want to say good enough, not only for sharing but to gain the accolade of a doctorate.

It seems to me that incentives to write are positive. Not all will resonate. I have not been able to see the point of 750 words and writing every day - some days, I have nothing to write, apart from a short note to myself about what to think about and read next, or a shopping list. On the other hand, shutupandwrite can work for me, as long as I plan what I will focus on in the writing session. There is something energising about writing when others are too - but then I get the same from knowing that colleagues in the #phdchat network are working alongside me, albeit each in our own space, at times when most sane people are engaged in leisure activities or doing stuff with the family.

So what of AcBoWriMo? My initial response was one of how crazy - why put pressure on myself to deliver a given product in a specific time? Then I looked at it again and realised it resonated with where I currently am with my own thesis writing. I know what I want to write and I know what the structure will look like. The chapters are sketched out, but the writing task needs to be done. I have been working to a fairly loose aim of completing the next draft by the end of term, but actually, with a bit of effort, there is no real reason why it shouldn’t be done by the end of this month, and if adopting the hashtag #AcBoMoWri will keep me focused and remind me I have a commitment not only to myself but to others, well and good. What I write will not be polished or fit for publication, or even submission as thesis, but will be the next step on that journey.

For me AcBoWriMo has come at an opportune time. At a different time, it would be no incentive or value whatsoever. It is not about writing a given number of words in a day, but writing what is already well-digested material and doing so in a timely manner.

But the concerns raised by Martin about the more general nature of academic writing remain.

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!

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.

Med Soc 2011 was not the first conference I have attended. I have attended, and presented at, a number of postgraduate conferences and conferences focusing on learning and technology. In days gone by, I have also attended and presented at professional gatherings and led a fair number of training courses as well as being a OU teacher for over ten years. However, I was very anxious in the lead up to Med Soc. My anxiety had a variety of roots. Firstly, I was concerned about whether my research interests were really a match for the conference - the rational response was that my abstract had been selected for presentation, so it should be OK, but I was unsure how far I identified with medical sociology. Secondly, I was unsure if I would pass muster academically. Although I have a general background in social policy and practice, I do not consider myself a sociologist. Would my cover get blown? Would I understand what people were talking about and would what I had to say be relevant to others? Thirdly, a much more personal concern was about being in a place I didn’t know with people I had not met before. Would I cope with getting about the campus - I have some mobility problems - and would I achieve one of the objectives of attending a conference, networking?

Addressing my third concern first, I need not have worried. The needs I had stated on the conference registration had been noted and catered for making it possible for me to relax. People were friendly and helpful and the organisers had gone the second mile.

Returning to my first two concerns, I over prepared because I was anxious to hit the right note. In the end, I think my presentation was OK, but the earlier versions may well have been equally OK. A major lesson for me was the very wide variety of presentation styles and methodologies evident in the work being presented - everything from very scholarly - and sometimes verging on inaccessible (to me at least) accounts, to story telling with little or no academic references or specialist vocabulary. I also learned that there were people with a wide range of backgrounds present at the conference, presenting on many and various themes. Apart from the presentations in the autism stream, I heard presentations on stem cell research, knee pain and ageing, dyslexia, elder abuse, diabetic teenagers, contraception, midwifery practices, and health care commissioning, to name but a few.

Having attended various training sessions on how to present, I was interested in the different presentation approaches. As might be anticipated, most people used media of some sort - but not all. Most people talked to presentation slides, but some read their papers. Some slides were dense with text while others used images and few words - and I saw one presentation using prezi and cartoon strip dialogues. Among the most impressive were those using mixed media, where the voice of the participants were heard through audio or video clips. But at the end of the day, it was those presentations which told a story and where the presenter gave a personal account of their research that stayed with me.

What have I learned? Firstly, not to worry if my work is going to be acceptable - if it is a reputable conference and my submission has been accepted, then the subject matter is acceptable. Secondly, not to be so worried about meeting expectations in the way I present - it is far more important to communicate something meaningful and memorable than to worry about whether I am being academic enough or whether I have stated my conceptual and theoretical framework - in a 20 minute presentation everything and anything superfluous to the story needs to be filtered out. Thirdly, even if I am hearing a presentation about a subject I know nothing about, I can learn as much from how the subject matter is presented as from what has been said. Fourthly, people are genuinely interested in a wide range of different topics and in different approaches to those topics.

I’ve returned home energised by the experience and on the look out for another conference or two to submit abstracts to and to put into practice what I’ve learned this past week.

Or alternatively, you start off well. Actually write a couple of paragraphs, and then the thought occurs that you need an essential reference, so a happy hour or two is spent in the digital library, by which time you have forgotten both why you needed the reference and what you were writing about in the first place.

“Shut up and write” is an antidote to procrastination. @thesiswhisperer and @researchwhisper have both blogged their experience of the process. Essentially you arrange to meet up with a few colleagues, preferably where there is some decent coffee available, chat briefly and then end conversation and write for a predetermined period of time. It sounds weird, but those who have used it, advocate the approach and continue to do it, so there probably is something in it.

Sarah R-H and I were bemoaning the difficulty of writing during an exchange of tweets, when we wondered whether it would be possible to adapt this to the online world. We agreed that one of us would take responsibility for initiating and timing a 30 minute writing session and that we would both switch off all online contact for that period of time. A text message signalled the end. You can read Sarah’s experience below, but suffice it to say, it worked well enough for us to do it again.

To start with, I wasn’t sure about ‘Shut up and Write’ – I had doubts that I could keep my bum in the chair and my mouth shut for any sensible length of time. And the idea of turning off social networks left me feeling nervous, but I was ready to try anything. I’d had a couple of not-so-good days, was slipping on my deadline, and the anxiety was leading me into bad habits: checking #phdchat on Twitter, tinkering with the TOC, searching for the ‘perfect’ reading app for my phone… procrastination hell. And as all procrastinators know, it’s a self-perpetuating situation: anxiety feeds procrastination, feeds anxiety.

Liz suggested Shut up and Write, and the thought of having to leave the house stirred up a rising panic. So we went digital. It worked. Firstly, it meant I was making a commitment to 30 minutes of purposefully distraction-free work. Secondly, and I think more importantly, I was making a pact with someone else, and a friend at that. Thirty minutes was long enough for me to get focussed on one piece of writing, yet short enough that I felt I could mentally put aside faffing / Twitter / digital library tasks – postpone them whilst I got it done. We did two sessions, and after the second I felt unblocked and a great deal more relaxed. And I have learned that I can live perfectly adequately without having social media minimised and at-the-ready. Who knew? This tactic is definitely a keeper.

So next time you find yourself procrastinating, team up with a colleague or two. If you can meet, all the better, you get the incentive of seeing somebody else working to encourage you, but if you can’t meet, find a willing online friend and support each other in getting past the writer’s block and procrastination hurdle. It worked for us!

Reading an article recommended by a colleague on insider research (Hellawell, 2006) raises the possibility of there being different dimensions to insider research, and that my position might vary in different aspects of my research and in relation to different participants.

My research focuses on the Special Educational Needs (SEN) system and uses the lens of the experiences of parents and practitioners involved with children and young people with diagnoses of Aspergers or high functioning autism (HFA).

I am an insider in that I have a son with Aspergers and I have had involvement  with the SEN system in negotiating to get his needs met. I am also an insider as I have an ongoing relationship with other parents who have children on the autism spectrum, or who are going through the diagnostic process. I share a lot in common with other parents both in terms of understanding and navigating the SEN system and in terms of coping with the effect of having a child with Aspergers on daily living and dealing with the many and varied effects on family life and on me personally as a mother.

However, I am also interested in the perspectives of practitioners in the domain. In a sense, I am a practitioner as I facilitate a support group, but my experience in that role is very different from those practitioners who are responsible for diagnosing the condition, recommending interventions or providing support. At the same time, I have nearly 20 years experience of working in social care organisations, so I have experience of making decisions and recommendations that affect the lives of other. Although I may be seen as an ‘outsider’ by the practitioners I interview in professional terms, I do have some understanding of the pressures and influences they work under, and that does influence my approach.

There is also the question of the extent to which both practitioners and parents form a community of practice within the domain. Although this is not the focus of my research, it is clear that there is much shared knowledge and language between people coming from different places in the domain.

A useful article in enabling me to see that doing insider researcher is more complex than simply questions of making assumptions about common understanding or giving access that might not otherwise be so readily available.

Hellawell, D. 2006. Inside–Out: Analysis of the Insider–Outsider Concept as a Heuristic Device to Develop Reflexivity in Students Doing Qualitative Research. Teaching in Higher Education, 11, 483-494.

It must be a couple of years now since my supervisor suggested I draft an abstract for my thesis, written as though it was done and dusted and I had achieved what I wanted to achieve. Having a tendency to do as I’m told, I followed the advice and I found it a useful exercise, not only in enabling me to sort out my focus, but also as a document which I could review and revise as my ideas developed. While reviewing my thesis outline over the past couple of days, I realised that I needed to revise the abstract yet again. Having done so, I then looked back over the last year and realised that ideas which were central to the abstract a few months ago, are no longer there, but other ideas which either were not present, or were peripheral are taking centre stage. I am seriously beginning to wonder if rather than me owning my thesis, whether it actually has somehow acquired a life of its own.

In some ways, this follows on from my previous blog where I responded to Jeffrey Keefer’s question about there being no space for communities of practice in my research. It can only be 3 months ago that I was arguing that communities of practice were central to my research and my thesis. Where has all that thinking and work gone? It is clear my thesis is rejecting it as part of itself - I’m sure it wasn’t my decision to put that whole chunk on one side.

Not only does my thesis seem to have decided that things that are meaningful to me have no place in it, but it also seems to have replaced them with things which are more theoretically complex, though possibly ultimately more interesting. And I’m sure it has done this without any assistance on my part!

What I have realised is that the areas that getting chopped are not being chopped because they are not of interest, or are not important, but because they are not central to my research question. They are currently in suspended animation, waiting to be revived and acquire their own lives. The areas that remain and are taking over, are not triffids, but are emerging as I allow myself to look into some of the deeper reaches of the iceberg. They are challenging because they are forcing me to think in ways that don’t come naturally to me. I’m a pragmatist and problem-solver - what am I doing getting caught up in theoretical concepts and philosophy? Come to think of it, why on earth am I doing a DPhil - no let’s not go there today!

I think perhaps it is time for me to take thesis in hand and threaten it with the pruning sheers if it doesn’t stop growing and developing interesting side shoots. Hang it all surely I should be in charge of my thesis and not vice versa!