Memories made; Milestones crossed

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The comprehensive portfolio defence is event is complete. I have successfully defended my PhD portfolio and crossed the threshold into PhD candidacy. No longer labelled ‘student’, I have morphed into ‘candidate’ as a title of status within the program. Not that this has changed me in any significant way, I now feel a deeper responsibility to my approaching research endeavour, feel a deeper connection to those people who have agreed to be on my committee as guides and critical supporters, and feel a closer connection to my classmates and network within the university and beyond, for all those who attended the defence or sent messages of encouragement. While using Zoom to hold a PhD defence may be a novel approach, newly required due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was exactly the medium I would have chosen for my defence given the choice. For me, this moment – all two hours of it – was exactly as hoped, yet not exactly as planned.

For the defence, I had prepared a video of my presentation, primarily as a means of rehearsal, insurance in case the tech failed in the moment, and as an additional layer of the ‘opening’ of my PhD journey toward an ‘open’ dissertation. While the traditional format for a defence presentation is not a pre-prepared video, I was able to rethink the actual presentation as a result of the preparation process. The morning of the event, I made the decision to use the pre-prepared video for the presentation and quickly crafted a justification statement which I shared before playing the video. In hindsight, this was an added layer of evidence for my skills as a scholar and academic, but also provided a meta-level of consideration. In hindsight, I was able to focus on the questions that followed the presentation with a less cluttered or ‘frazzled’ mind, since the video option helped prevent and avoid overly stressing my brain with the details of the presentation. As I stated in the justification, I was “modelling the fluidity of digital space and place by slipping within/across the binary conceptions of synchronous and asynchronous presentation formats and opportunities“. For my remembering, this became one of the highlights of my defence event

A second highlight is definitely the speed of the event – it flows from beginning to end a one fluid memory. While there were many specific and pointed questions, the actual questions are now forgotten. It is the feeling I am left with – that of being probed and yet supported. Not a negative feeling, but rather of being gently nudged into a deeper level of thought about my research and learning. It is still challenging to talk about open educational practices to others who have no knowledge of the concept. It’s challenging to talk about the notion of literacy vs competency when these conceptions differ for individuals in unique ways. While my committee members are all teacher educators, it’s difficult to explain why I feel strongly about researching from a teacher educators’ perspective. So this challenge will not be realized until I can clearly state my WHY – why OEPr; why MDL; why TEds. This will necessarily include the ‘boundaries’ of the research. One of my committee members picked up on this from the portfolio – which I need to record and remember. There are boundaries, I just need to locate them, illuminate them, and clearly state them for my dissertation readers. This was a second piece of insight from the defence.

A third insight came from questions about ‘theory’ and how I may have a range of possible theoretical stances but need to critically select the ones that matter for this research. As pointed out in the cross-cultural mentoring article, there were many theoretical stances shared, but the one that mattered the most, the one upon which the article was based, was excluded in that section of the paper. I was asked to identify one foundational theory upon which my work would be grounded. I remember thinking that I couldn’t name just one. That there were too many, and yet in that moment, some clarity perhaps prompted my response – it would be grounded on Gee’s work on discourse analysis (d/Discourse) – because it is both cognitively and socially considered. While I’ll need to research and read more, I don’t think I would have considered this without this push for clarity. In hindsight, I could also have mentioned threshold concepts, since this is a new one to my thinking, as a result of writing by Tur et al. (2020).

For now, the event itself is a blur, while the feelings of success continue to resonate. I know that each member on my committee is now deeply engaged in my work, as a result of this event. I will take time with my supervisor to debrief and look at next steps as I now refocus on the actual work necessary for a ‘done’ dissertation. As I’ve also discovered in academic and scholarly work, there’s always a next! But for now, I’m relaxing in this post-defence-reflection moment.

References:

Gee, J. P. (2011). How to do discourse analysis: A toolkit. New York, NY: Routledge.

Tur, G., Havemann, L., Marsh, D., Keefer, J. M., & Nascimbeni, F. (2020). Becoming an open educator: towards an open threshold framework. Research in Learning Technology, 28. https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v28.2338

Image Attribution: Photo by Joakim Honkasalo on Unsplash