Week Two: Discussions
Responses are captured here with link to the key ideas, insights, and conversations presented in the course D2L, in order to push my own thinking and reflective practice.
- Discussions about piloting research questions in both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. FB suggests the quantitative questions are framed more like a coffee conversation without a set agenda, but M shared experiences where the responses were not as expected so either the questions need to change or the research population needs to change. Here’s my response into the discussion:
- Thanks all for this conversation about the need to pilot questions in qualitative research. It may be less like piloting research questions or surveys as required in quantitative research, and more like those ‘coffee conversations’ but with critical friends who know your research focus and understand your research questions. I hope to have those conversations with such critical friends that I’ve developed through a variety of networks (e.g. GOGN, eCampus), but it will still be up to me to ‘test the responses’ with one or two people who may be representative of the population I’ll be researching. Just as M suggests, it’s good to know if there are pitfalls or gaps in the questions, or conversation prompts, before doing the actual research.
- Comments about the curatorial nature of research and how to identify and make explicit those implicit practices in academia let me to this open observation of my own growth in research practices:
- This process, as I’ve discovered, is like a funnel, continually narrowing as I negotiate through the literature. The part that I still struggle with is in writing down and capturing my thinking as I’m going down the rabbit hole. Exclusions and de-limiting are made based on some parameters that shape the funnel yet I rarely outline what those are, as I’m sliding down the chute. :-). I need to make these explicit and openly shared in my writing. This is one of the insights through reflective practice I’ve discovered about myself since DS2 this past summer, thanks to classmates who are right on top of this process piece. Again, something to strive for in my academic practice.
- A comment about red pencils and alternative dissertation options where I provide several comments that shift my own thinking:
- When I first saw your title, I thought of my passionate distaste of using red pencils for marking, so much so that when I became a school principal, I gifted every teacher at the beginning of each school year with a pack of green pencils and pens with which to mark student work. I would passionately ask them the consider each mark, not by the negative connotations attached to the colour red, but in the ‘green is for go’ ideas of improving student learning. That was my first reaction. Then I read on and discovered an alternative dissertation format that echoes my own, although in vastly different fields of endeavour. I was hooked by Rishma Dunlop’s first sentence in her dissertation “In Understanding Media (1964) Marshall McLuhan described the “art of fiction” as an extension of human experience.” I continued reading into the first several paragraphs of her dissertation and will continue delving deeply when time and focus permits. This, for me, models the potential and possibilities that dissertations are intended to push the boundaries, rather than fit into the mold. I agree that there are recognizable constraints to the process and product, just as there is in most areas of endeavour, but that there are times and places, along with people with vision, who can stretch academic writing into new places and areas of research. Your comments, Rishma’s dissertation, and other alternative dissertation models, give me hope. Thanks for sharing this work.
- Your last paragraph caught my attention! Even in quantitative research, it’s evident in the reports and articles that the author has a perspective or bias, as evident in their word choice, topics covered, and style of writing. Writing with alphabetic text informs in a certain way, bound by the structure and nature of the letters, words, and sentences on a page. Communication with media infused textual formats or arts-based creations bring a whole other dimension to what it means to write about our ‘selves’. I’m exploring examples of dissertations that break from the bonds and constraints of font, form and structure into the type of research narrative shared by Nick Sousanis in his alternative dissertation proposal and his final dissertation in comic form. He presents some [Models] in this ‘text bound’ format that is openly available. Might be worth a look at how others ‘write about themselves’ as we are doing in this course.
- Something you said here pushed my thinking a bit. You mention that challenge of matching the writing needs of the student with the curriculum demands, the expectations that need to be met. When it comes to writing a dissertation, there are demands that need to be met, but what are they? How are these articulated and is there a standard set of expectations? I honestly don’t think there are any since, like you say, these documents represent the research/author’s thoughts to others. I think that the dissertation committee can wield immense power and control over the writing of an accepted dissertation (e.g. a good dissertation is a done dissertation). I know that sharing writing as ‘yourself’ is necessary, but I also see how committee members can push the author further than they could go, to find or reveal their ‘better selves’. Do you see what I mean here? Its a bit of a balancing act, from both sides of the writing of a dissertation – the student (me/you) and the curriculum expectations (committee member expectations) shifting from where you are to where you can be stretched to go in your writing and research, not to be hacked apart by a red marker, but to be supported to go beyond the expected and into the possible.
- A conversation about writing, reading and thinking in a second language provided some rich discourse on the challenges found in writing academically in a language not native to your own. This resulted in these insights:
- Your final thoughts reminded me of something I read from Graff (2000) where he talks about being bilingual – not in the sense of having two languages in play but more about the difference between academic language and vernacular language, but maybe for your dissertation you can/could consider it as a bilingual text with fluid transitions and translations between English and Spanish within the same text/ chapter. Just as fluid English/French speakers in Canada do, they seamlessly weave both languages into conversations or even political speeches. Something to think about in your dialogic writing. (See item 1 and 8 on this list of Do’s and Don’ts for academic writers from Gerald Graff).
- Then one of my classmates posted information about a book titled The Lost Words which led to a current project to revitalize lost language within an ecological perspective. This led to a video rendition of a song The Lost Words Blessing and a hunt for the lyrics, which also played on my emotions toward this course and the PhD journey in particular. I even downloaded the free PDF of An Explorer’s Guide: Spell Songs. I am enthralled with this tune and lyrics, finding metaphor for the dissertation as I learn to ‘speak the things you see’ and ‘let new names take and root and thrive and grow’. I am ‘like the little aviator’, even as I ‘stumble through machair sands eroding’. Here’s to the song I’ll yet sing as I become ‘the singer and the speaker’.
References
Dunlop, R. (1999). Boundary Bay: A Novel as Educational Research. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, the University of British Columbia. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Rishma+Dunlop%27s+dissertation&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#
Graff, G. (2001). Scholars and Sound Bites: The Myth of Academic Difficulty – Do’s and don’ts for academic writers. PMLA 115: 5 Retrieved from https://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~lmbishop/research/graff.htm
