Crystallizing an academic

One more facet to the long process of crystallizing my academic self. Since it’s been a while since I have taken time to write, I will take this moment to reflect some thoughts about where I am in my PhD process. Since achieving status as a candidate, I have immersed myself in reading and reflecting on what I hope to accomplish in the coming years. This is not an easy task since there are many possible paths to explore. The old adage of a good PhD is a done PhD rings true, more today than at any previous moment in my quest to accomplish this milestone. So, it is with excitement that I recognize a minor first step back into the labyrinth that started over two years ago.

Today I wrote a proposal to present at the OERxDomains 21 Conference. This post will capture my excitement in putting academic and scholarly thoughts together in this solo session where I hope to share my ‘crystallizing self’ as an academic. I have woven together the cyrstallization approach presented by Ellingson (2009), the critical open pathway proposed by Cronin (2020), the quest for a solidified framework as explored by Farrow et al. (2020), and the making of a digital academic suggested by Lupton et al. (2018). Here is my conference proposal:

Open access platforms, such as those provided through Reclaim Hosting’s domain-of-one’s-own (Groom et al., 2019), hold potential to change the nature of academic work, expand audiences for academic writing, and shift the impact of academic thought (Lupton et al., 2018). Open scholarship in a PhD program is specifically challenging as novice academics fluidly navigate new domains of thought as they solidify not only theoretical frameworks (ontologies, epistemologies) and conceptual frameworks (methodology, methods) (Farrow et al., 2020), but acquire critical digital literacies (Cronin, 2020) essential to navigate current open scholarly contexts.

Crystallization, a process occurring when a liquid cools and hardens to create a stable material, also describes a creative research continuum that resists binaries and boundaries by viewing and reflecting knowledge through multiple forms of representation, organization, and analysis (Ellingson, 2009). As a novice scholar and PhD candidate, the presenter will showcase a crystallization approach as they openly share their reflexive self through their ‘domain-of-one’s-own’ blog site, Scalar portfolio site, and Hypothes.is annotations used for academic feedback as peer review.

This reflective practice presentation will offer contributions as a descriptive account of open learning through scholarship practice under Theme 3: Open in Action. The conference session will be shared using the presenter’s own Domains blog site and integrate opportunities to openly and collaboratively annotate, using Hypothesis, the presenter’s Scalar portfolio site and the presentation site. Through active participation by participants throughout this presentation, the presenter’s academic self will continue to crystallize in both integrative and dendritic ways – layering, patching, juxtaposing, dispersing and celebrating knowledge that is “inevitably situated, partial, constructed, multiple, and embodied” (Ellingson, 2009, p. 13). Despite the challenges in higher education, where complexity and ambivalence abound (Lupton et al., 2018, p. 16), and issues of public visibility and bias toward self-promotion are real and felt, this presenter will share crystallizations that continue to “reflect externalities and refract within” as they navigate toward the dissertation. As Cronin (2020) suggests, “all should have the capacity and agency with which to manage their own personal interplay of openness and closedness” (p. 18), which holds true for all scholars, but especially new scholars who are open to being open in scholarship.

References

Cronin, C. (2020). Open education: Walking a critical path. In D. Conrad & P. Prinsloo (Eds.), Open(ing) education theory and practice (pp. 9–25). Leiden, NL: Brill Sense.

Ellingson, L. L. (2009). Engaging crystallization in qualitative research: An introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc.

Farrow, R., Iniesto, F., Weller, M., & Pitt, R. (2020). The GO-GN Research Methods Handbook. Open Education Research Hub. The Open University, UK. Available at: http://go-gn.net/gogn_outputs/research-methods-handbook/

Groom, J., Taub-Pervizpour, L., Richard, S., Long-Wheeler, K., & Burtis, M. (2019, October 18). 7 Things You Should Know About a Domain of One’s Own. Educause Learning Initiative (ELI). Available at: https://library.educause.edu/resources/2019/10/7-things-you-should-know-about-a-domain-of-ones-own

Lupton, D., Mewburn, I., & Thomson, P. (2018). The Digital Academic: identities, contexts and politics. In D. Lupton, I. Mewburn, & P. Thomson (Eds.), The digital academic: Critical perspectives on digital technologies in higher education (pp. 1–19). New York: Routledge.