The slow down before a break

Rainbow from earlier this week

The last couple of weeks I have had more writing time than I expected. I have needed this as I have also been struggling with minor illness. Last weekend a cold cut my writing right down as I did not feel up to concentrating on anything. Actually it was a time when I was run down and tired already. This was shown by the number of migraines I was getting. The drop in temperature just added to the woes. I suspect if I had been physically fit last weekend I would have got my methodology chapter off to my supervisor.

However,circumstances came to the rescue. I had a day off I needed to take before the end of the month, Then my union called a strike for Thursday which meant a rethink. I was originally going to go in to teach a class as it was necessary, and re-timetabling would not have been easy.  However the lead tutor on the course suggested other ways of delivering the content. This meant I needed to swap around my day off so I could do the necessary work on Monday rather than Wednesday. That meant that I actually stopped work on Wednesday lunch time for this weekend. As is quite often the case when I am run down I threw a migraine on Wednesday afternoon and was fragile from it well into Thursday. So the extra time might just have buffered my writing time.

Last weekend I tackled quite a bit of the creative stuff and just started on the bit about Appreciative Inquiry. I made a comment that it had a very similar cycle to that of the pastoral cycle developed by Laurie Green. Now I have already said about my problems with his Pastoral Cycle and something was pulling at my brain. So I did some research and found I had opened a can of worms. Firstly the thing that was pulling at my brain was the Kolb Learning Cycle and I realise though I have not explored that it has a wealth of tradition on which it draws. Secondly Segundo does actually have a cycle in it, but he calls it a "hermeneutic cycle" which is actually a philosophical problem which looks at the relations between a statement and the whole of language. I eventually trace down a version of it that is reminiscent of the pastoral cycle by Gadamer. My reading is Gadamer did not get as far as the diagram, but I have read enough to say that that diagram is a fair summary of his text. So two new sources but hermeneutic circle is a particularly Protestant concern why is this suddenly turning up in South American Roman Catholicism. That is when I turn up the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm which though only written down in the twentieth century predates all the others by about four hundred years. This is one very complex twisted rope that has created a plethora of signification.

Anyway having sorted that I now have to think whether I change the writing in my methodology about my analytic method to make it sound like a learning circle. I could do, it would not be hard, but it might be pretending to more than it is. My analytic method is simply that that I have used and worked with in a variety of settings which seems to work. I use it when dealing with statistics, writing poems and I have used it when analysing my thesis. I also struck something else, I have a language problem when dealing with the literature. I use the literature, lots of it, but I do not talk about it in the way classical sociology does. There are good reasons and there are bad reasons for this. Firstly there is the fact that there are few theorists who address directly what I am looking at. I have had to borrow from adjoining fields. This actually means that there is not a real discourse between them. Thus using a discursive metaphor which is what sociology uses is difficult. There is also that the fields I usually work in do not do this, they prefer to use the discovery metaphor. The debate metaphor creates disagreement and emphasises discrepancy, the second discovery metaphor tends to favour concordance and emphasises agreement. Words are not neutral.

Anyway I got through the draft of the methodology chapter yesterday and sent it to my supervisor and proof readers. So today I had to decide what to do. If I was not going on holiday then quite simply I would be opening up the next chapter and working on it. However, I will have a fortnight break largely from thesis. I am not away for a fortnight but with one thing and another going on locally I have a fortnights break. So doing major edits was not going to be easy. So today I worked my way through the chapter. I did make some edits but not many but more importantly I was trying to get some idea of the structure of the chapter and how it needed to change. There were some definite cuts, but there was also an inclusion. I spotted one duplication of text and I also think I spotted some points when a tidy up was called for.  So now I have worked through it I will let it sit on the back burner while I am on holiday.