April's Supervision: Location chapter put to one side

Coffee van at the Entrance to the University of Birmingham

I am on New Street Station awaiting the 5:00 pm train back to Sheffield after this month’s supervision. This time it was short and sweet, two reasons, firstly that the draft of the location chapter was at the stage where it needed putting to one side in both mine and my supervisors opinion. This means I have a complete enough draft to not have to worry too much about it at present. There are more important tasks to be tackled and I need a break so I can see clearly what the faults are in the chapter.

The other reason was my supervisor is inundated at present with people finishing their doctorates. I am long term compared with the rest that have deadlines. Myra has to get her thesis in tomorrow, Christopher has passed subject to minor corrections and Derry has submitted and now awaiting viva date with trepidation as it means arranging flights from the US. If all these pass then Martin my supervisor will be down to two students, me and Mikie, I am due next year and Mikie the year after. A bit of a change from when I started and there were over a dozen of us. Even more startling when you think Mikie and I both have a tendency to do our work on time (most at the start were on long term extensions).

Link to Wordle for Location Chapter

Work wise I now have a data chapter on location ready for final edit, and need to get my next chapter on community collated for a first draft this coming month, that is quite a bit of work on it, not least because I need to get quite a bit of reading into it. It is getting interesting as I take further and further the argument, I suspect that it will develop into an interesting thesis by the time I am finished but I am only getting to know it as I write.

One comment by my supervisor I need reminding of, mine is a literary thesis, that is the writing style is in itself a contribution to the thesis. It is one of the elements of raising the bar some time back, but it is also part of my methodology. The other thing I must do is remember to tell people where I am! This means that if I am talking of St Andrews I need to say I am, if I am talking about a minister I need to indicate that. It feels repetitive and stilted to a writer but to the reader it is almost essential for orientation.

I have two more descriptive sections to write, one on aging congregations  and children and the other one on  being a welcoming community, The thing is that the congregations meant specifically different things by being welcoming or friendly. However in both they have methods of limiting the welcome but those methods are different. Then there is a section on theory and the problem is not that there is very little nor that it is not something I know little about, there are lots and I need to do a pretty strong limiting on what I put in. I think I am going to have to sometimes gloss over some of the input, such as the idea of congregations as communities of learning much as I am interested in those ideas.

So I have plenty of work to do before 18^th May (submission date for my next supervision which is 24^th May). Hopefully by then my supervisor will be less stressed by other people’s theses deadlines.