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.

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!

Drafted and Bound

 A bound copy of current draft of my thesis

I am in a strange place at the moment. After over a decade of working towards my thesis, I am in the position where I can not do anything for almost three weeks. It feels weird.

Over the last week I have been pulling my thesis together, sorting out small details, such as the bibliography, front papers and a list of figures, plus getting it in the right format for the University of Birmingham for when I submit it.

Of course as with all theses, just as I got to the end of the first print out the printer threw a fit and not one I could sort. A friend, thanks Dave, came and fiddled with it, eventually turning it off and on again and it started working. So on Tuesday afternoon I actually took it to local binders. This was to basically get a binding that enables the two people (my supervisor and a proof reader who has not read any of it before) to work easily with a paper copy of a long document. All the proof reading and correcting effort that has gone in over the last few weeks should pay off and make it a readable document for them.

Today I collected it from the local binders and put one copy in an envelope to send to my supervisor. The only thing was while doing that I went to demonstrate what happened if you changed computers and did not check through when working with Word (Word formats changes with printers that you are printing to, it is why much to my supervisors annoyance I have not numbered pages until now). However in doing so I found the figures were on far more different pages than I would expect. The reason being that I had actually changed the margins slightly and not then gone and checked the figures. Lesson learnt.

I then stopped off at the local Tesco and bought some reasonably priced sparkling wine. Then went along to my Local Post Office. It was shut for the morning. RETHINK.

So I went home and searched the web for alternative Post Offices. I found one in the city centre and so headed down there and put it in on special delivery. It is addressed to my supervisors official address, not to his actual office. So I sent him and email saying where I had sent it. Hopefully by Monday it will have been delivered to a place where he can collect it!

This blog is now going to go silent until my next supervision after which I will let you know what I still need to do.

Collating and Back to the Introduction

Books relating to Foucault

This weekend I have traced and proofed all my appendices.  I ended up with six appendices including a Bibliography. I have drafted and abstract which is 100 words too long (50%), so I am going to have to cut that down quite drastically and the big challenge is not to say succinctly what the study was but to say succinctly what the findings are. Then I have pulled the whole thesis together! This took up most of Friday.

So yesterday(Saturday) I pulled the whole thing together and did a lot of the formatting work. I now have a table of contents and also list of illustrations. I have called them illustrations but basically anything that is not pure text. So there is a table, several diagrams, a couple of photos and at least one drawing. I could find eleven in total.  What this means, is that I can finally do an exact count of the number of words in the text; 76,863 to be precise. This means that I have approximately 3,000 words to play with, maybe slightly more. The question is what are my priorities for these words. There are two, the first is to extend the section on Foucault in my introduction, not hugely but so that it actually makes an argument rather than just states the case. This has set me back to reading Foucault today. The second is to develop my conclusion.

There are however several other tidying-ups that need to  be done. One is highly related with the first, and that is to check through all the references to Foucault in my thesis and make sure they are consistently referencing the appropriate texts. The second is to find all the references to "I" and check they are appropriate and if not to remove them. I have removed some of them as I have been proof editing, but I am quite sure that some have got in. It is fine to write "I did X"; it is not fine to write "I think the second option". The first is a statement of what I did, the second is a hedging of bets. Then there is the Bibliography that needs to be sorted through and making sure it is coherent and correct. Plus putting in all the originally published information. Fortunately I have a six day weekend made up from annual leave next weekend.