Final Research Journal for DS1
For this first course in the Joint PhD program, I hoped to get a feel of academia and scholarly writing, and possibly test my credentials as a new and peripheral member in the field. As I look back over my daily entries in the research journal, I’m not aware of any explicit patterns in my writing, but I can sense a shift in the confidence I express as I’m seeing myself in the image of a PhD persona. Since it’s only 4 weeks into a four to six-year journey, my place in this educational, scholarly space rests within the sphere of “legitimate peripheral participation” (Wenger, 2000), and that’s an OK place to be at this time.
My expectations have not shifted in terms of the renovations I need to do in my academic reading and writing, in order to be successful at the end of this journey. What has changed is an opening up of what is possible in this research work, and my sense that this PhD doesn’t need to be earth shifting. I’m guessing I’m not the only one of the many students who come into this program thinking their work will somehow alter the course of the academic area of their research. I’m also shifting in terms of my willingness to show people what I’ve written, not just in terms of blogs or social media postings, but scholarly and academic work. Comments and feedback on the reading responses and workshopped paper have given me confidence, and helped reframe the ‘imposter syndrome’. I recognize that we are all here, my classmates and I, with a wealth of skills and passion for our topics of interest. I’m starting to believe that I CAN do this thing called a PhD.
In terms of my academic reading, I’m well positioned, having read and annotated articles by many who have written recently in my area of interest. What has changed is the expanding field of interest, and the experience I’ve gained in new directions for topical readings relative to my dissertation objectives. For example, I’ll dig into the phenomenological theory of technology presented by Ihde (1979) that I came across while researching for my paper.
For this course, I printed out articles and documents that were required and optional readings. What has changed at the end of this four weeks is that I will revert back to the format I used at the end of my Masters program. I’ll store PDF files in nested locations, keep a collection on my tablet, which I can access in a PDF annotation/reader, and continue to apply the four sentence summary strategy acquired in this course. While I don’t think I’ll read as deeply through each article as I did for this course, since I’m getting better at doing a quick scan, and examining the paper’s overall structure, I’ll certainly keep adding to the annotated bibliographies I’ve started for all the references that may be helpful for my comprehensive portfolio and literature review. This course taught me the value of having an accurate record and multiple means of accessing information, since valuable time was lost in reading, reviewing, and annotating articles that I had gathered and read, but not included in my bibliographies.
My academic writing evolved in this four weeks. I reflected on this in June, well before this course had started, since I was deep into the readings. At that time, I considered that writing for academic publication is more challenging than writing a blog post. This was due, in my mind, to the peer review process. Here’s what I wrote on Exposing myself to Critique:
“I’ll conclude that this is, as Pratt (2008) indicates for qualitative research writing, that the key is finding a balance “between story and study” not as an issue of “either or” but the potential inherent in “both and” (p. 505). My dependence on blogging and social media as a means to communicate thinking, ideas, comparisons, investigations or just plain meandering thoughts needs to be balanced with some honest, academic contributions through journals and publication.”
What has changed is my “both and” attitude, and for the possibility of publication in a Canadian, peer reviewed journal in the not too distant future. After going through the peer review process in class with the workshopping of our papers, I now feel, with some confidence, that I can and will be published. I know this is an expectation, but I never truly believed it was for me, until this past week. I’m writing now, knowing that my academic voice is getting toned and shaped by the writing I’m doing. By writing this research journal entry, I’ll “word the world” (Richardson, 2001, p. 35) as I learn about myself, just as Foucault suggests with his description of “hupomnemata” (Mewburn & Thomson, 2018, p. 22).
Despite the fact that on the first day of this course this cohort did not know each other, we’ve certainly found some interconnectedness and common ways of knowing, ways of doing, and directions we’ll take toward our dissertations. I’ve discovered some academically overlapping threads with some classmates, and willingly shared sources as I was researching. I’ve enjoyed the camaraderie we’ve achieved over weekly dinners together, which wouldn’t necessarily have happened in other settings (e.g. St. Catherine’s or Windsor), even when we pulled out Creswell’s book at the end of dinner just to hear more about his scholarly body of work. I’m hoping that some classmates will engage in digital collaborations that can benefit our collective work as a cohort, and as a way to maintain some connections over time.
Given more time and space to write in this research journal response, I could complete all the suggested questions. Knowing that I’ve already surpassed the recommended length of writing, I’ll end by showing, not telling, what I have gained from this course. Here’s a short multimodal presentation with a collection of media and images I’ve collected from this course.
References
Richardson, L. (2001). Getting Personal: Writing stories. Qualitative Studies in Education, 14 (1), 33–38.
Mewburn, I. & Thomson, P. (2018). Towards an academic self: Blogging during the doctorate. In D. Lupton, I. Mewburn, and P. Thomson (Eds.), The digital academic: Critical perspectives on digital technologies in higher education. pp. 20-35.
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