Well I have managed to re-draft the introduction

The photo was taken a couple of weeks back but it is late already and I still need to tidy before I go to bed so it seemed appropriate.

Most of the weekend I have spent getting the introduction up to scratch. I struggled at a couple of points. The first was that Laurie Green says he uses the work of Freire and Segundo when he talks about the pastoral cycle. Now I can not say that he does not but the connection between the pastoral cycle and "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" is tenuous to say the least. I am hoping that Segundo's classic has more in it. The thing is that I suspect that there is much more radical behind their thought than Laurie Green expects. That is a theology that is based on the way people who do not have specialised theological training do theology. To get at that you must first of all listen to people who do it. When people do this, they are often shocked at the things people come out with. I know I was. However when you listen harder you realise they do not work in the same theological framework that theologians do and the answers theologians give therefore are nonsense to them. If these people are to be able to talk with theologians then theologians need to learn their language, not the other way around.

I also spent a considerable time on Foucault and am pretty sure I am getting more and more familiar with his late thought although I do not stick with it. The penalty is that there is now quite a big section on my bookshelf with his work on it. I am still looking for a really neat quote when Foucault explains what technology is. I have it quoted as from him but with no reference. This is very frustrating. I have to use a reference by Rose to cover it. This is despite Foucault having a paper out called "Technology of the Self"

To add to the difficulties last night I discovered that getting a Word version out of Scrivener is not as simple as just compiling it! I have to do quite a bit of reformatting work on top of re-entering the references. I need to investigate further as some parts of Scrivener are just opaque to me. I will get there but it will take time.

Today the frustrations have been technological. My router decided to misbehave badly and as I was using Grammarly at the time this was not good news. So I installed the replacement one I have had for when this happened. It gives me faster connection but tends to disconnect more frequently. I am considering switching it off when I am not using it. I do know the installation did not work particularly well as I had to reset one variable so as to get the wireless working.

Anyway I have sent the chapter off to my supervisor with a request for a date for the next supervision. Hopefully he will spot that my diary is busy and realise that his is probably also filling up.

I have sent my reverse outline to my Supervisor

Thesis Outline

Well today was the deadline for getting a plan together for my thesis rewrite. That meant that I needed to get the reverse outlining. Reverse outlining is depressing as it shows you all the glitches in your thesis. It is also very time consuming. That outline is so tall and thin because I have gone down to the concept level. That has meant writing one and two line descriptions for every couple of paragraphs. A thesis contains a lot of paragraphs.

The big problem is that I have done quite a lot of thinking around the belonging chapter, and I am finding that I am intrigued by the whole process. Oddly enough there are ideas out there which seem worth looking at. I am wondering if Lefebvre approach to Space might be worth generalising to other concepts. If that is the case then we have a complex process to consider. Most thinkers seem to approach it either with a top down or a bottom up process and see it single direction. Some of the better thinkers seem to see it as involving both. What Lefebvre does is then to say but there is also a process of negotiation, a process by which the two technologies tie themselves together. The problem is that he deals solely with Space, and his conceptualisation is related to Space. I am also less tied to the central organisation as supporting an ideological dominant discourse.

I am finding Scrivener interesting. The re-organisation with it is not something I would have liked to try with Word. I would have either been moving paragraphs around between multiple documents or trying to do it with a single large document that was my full thesis. Even on my quite powerful computers at home and work Word only grudgingly would do it for me.

However there is a big snag, it has dropped all my links to my citation database. This means every single one of them will have to be recreated by hand before I can create the bibliography properly. I only did it because Mendeley was saying I could cite anyway even though there was no plug in. I have tried, and it does work well at all. However,I am finding ways around bits I did not think it was going to handle. The result is I am working out a new workflow that will get me to a final version that is good enough for submission. It involves working first in Scrivener, exporting chapters to Word, going through with Grammarly and putting in references. Then send to proof readers, so my readers are dealing with more structural issues.

Oh submission date looks like it is February or March now. It depends on what state my thesis is in, in January. The idea being to get the first three chapters into form by the end of November and then over Christmas and New Year to blitz the remaining six (this is not as daft as it seems, three of the chapters now just need reshaping in quite specific ways).

Oh I need a new title and I seem to be unable to get my head around that.

Back to the Draft:

A Piece of Wild plant Garden all tidied up 

for Autumn outside a local School

The first thing is to tackle how I have got on with the settling back into re-writing and re-drafting mode.

The first thing to say is I said I could not let my supervisor know until next weekend. This was because I knew I was busy this weekend. Indeed I was working for about half of Friday and had some other bits a pieces to deal with. However,this does not mean I have been inactive.


I have fought off using Scrivener for a while. Some of this caution is due to the difficulty of using Scrivener with references from Mendeley. However I was faced with a challenge I really did not want to tackle in Word and that was trying to reorganize an entire thesis. the other thing is that Scrivener has story boarding facilities.Now of course ideally you would do that at the start of your thesis but mine, like Topsy, just grew. Actually that is not fair, I had a plan but it has been changed so many times since I started writing that really I have lost control.

Thus I took the plunge and got hold of Scrivener and started to use it to Reverse Outline so as to get some idea of what is where in the thesis. The fact that Scrivener has a story board facility means I can reverse outline with the text right alongside.  Actually that is not quite right as I am also working through the pages as I go and trying to reorganise things so they are in the right place.

Having now sat down, I must admit that the thesis last Wednesday was not at a level I would have liked to defend. The process of reverse outlining is taking me back into the thesis and seeing where it is weak. I am also aware that the reordering and a couple of insertions as suggested by my supervisor starts to make the thesis tell a story.

The aim at present is to have got through the reverse outlining by next weekend, which will basically give me a set of edits to make to my thesis. Then to write to my supervisor and tell he what the process is and how I want to organise it.

Perhaps what I am most happy with about this incident is that it showed my research instincts were right. What I was producing was not good enough. Now having been through this I have things slotting in much better and I think I am starting to know the story I am telling. The storyboarding should allow me by next weekend to actually be a lot clearer on where I am going and to stick to it rather than get diverted by new interesting ideas. My instinct is a lot happier at present and is beginning to run with the situation.

However due to Scriveners weaknesses I am expecting to have to do quite a bit of work at the end of the thesis to tidy it up in Word and to sort out the references.

The State of  Higher Education: This was formerly the
University Branch of Waterstones!

Today was the day when I had the supervision after sending a full draft to my supervisor just over two weeks ago.  Today was also the day bins are collected locally. As I set out one of the bin men was sheltering from the rain in the bin shed while the van came round and took the bins which were neatly lined up by the pavement. It had been raining over night and although it was already easing it was still pretty wet. This is unusual for a supervision but by the time I had arrived in Birmingham the weather was dull but dry.

The journey was largely uneventful but the University had a council meeting this afternoon and my supervisor being now a deputy pro vice chancellor was expected to attend. This meant that the supervision had been brought forward and hour to 1:00 pm. The choice was to have lunch before or afterwards, afterwards being approaching 4:00 pm because the supervision was for 2.5 hours. Tricky but decided that a coffee and flapjack before I went would get me through while eating before hand would be tricky indeed.

At 1:00 pm I was knocking on my supervisors door. The plan was that this should be a thorough review and then a month to go to finalise. Unfortunately as I knew when I sent it although I could not quite put my finger on it, that there was something that was not quite there.  The metaphor was that I used was that it was like jam that was not jelling. It was good enough to go over ice-cream or such but not really set. The problem is that it is not simply a matter of finessing what is there but requires some substantial reworking in order to sort.

My supervisor agreed with this assessment. His suggestion was that I brought the final chapter to immediately after my methodology. That sounds the work of minutes, in actual fact it means quite a large re-write of six chapters. This makes sense. Indeed in my questioning of why it was not gelling, it had been part of what I considered doing, but rejected it due to time restraints to get the thesis to my supervisor by mid September.

My supervisor was quite wary of suggesting of it, I think I would have been floored if I had not already half thought of it. As it is, I am aware that I can call up the energy to do it this time, however I just have to hope that it works as I think it is highly unlikely I can get it up to do another re-organise after this. That said already I can feel bits and pieces dropping into place, but I think I am not going to be able to do this in Word, so may have to learn Scrivener.

There are a number of small bits of writing I need to do as well. Among them is an odd piece. My supervisor asked me to describe the method that I used to produce my results. One problem is that my method neither falls into classic inductive or deductive approach. Surprisingly I was able to explain my method of being very similar to the process by which I write poetry. I now have to write a short section, but oddly enough it gets me out of a lot of the problems with my referencing and debating which I was getting into. Well I did not expect to create a new approach to reasoning for the Social Sciences when I started this process. Actually I do not think I did; there is the performance of deductive or inductive reasoning within a thesis that is established but my experience suggest most use a combination. What I do think is that my experience of working in a vast range of research projects through my day job has put me in a position where I have the confidence to say “Actually it worked like this…”. It is quite something for a young researcher to do, but I am not new, it is just about being honest about the approach.

So the story is that I will not be submitting at the end on this Month. It is going to take two to three months to work through this supervision. I need to rearrange and ask for extension leave from one group in an attempt to get this. I will also need to give up a course I was planning to start in January but doing the course and finalising a thesis is a non-starter. However,I actually think after this summer and the effort it has taken I will need to take my holiday in November and just take the time out. The good thing is that I have a bit more space to do things around the end of the month which was looking very crowded.

Before anyone thinks I have a down on Costa, they supplied me with a soya latte and flapjack to keep me going during supervision and a peppermint tea with space to write on the way home, so no I am not, I am just missing having a handy bookshop to drop into!