Oh. I’ve done it.

Discussion chapter draft 1 is done. Wow. In the end not as painful as I had imagined. Of course, it’s the getting ideas DOWN draft I’m referring to, not the fixing UP phase.

6162 words down of my discussion chapter, 1500 words off my total word target of 80000.

Now for the real work. Supervisor has suggested doing the lit simultaneously with the discussion chapter. Good idea. In theory. So now that I have my 5 meta themes and my cultural psychology and my apprenticeship concepts, it should be easy, right?

Bahdaow. Ugh. Here we go again.

The discussion chapter thus far is ridiculously clear – there is a brief introduction of how I shaped the chapter, then each theme is discussed in order. Simple. Oops. I’ve not finished. Hang on, there’s no ending to this chapter. Bugger.

Getting to the heart of it

This blog post reports on my research and getting to the heart of my narratives through a discussion chapter. The last three days have been, if not quite epiphanic or revelatory, at least somewhat of a relief. Because I think I’ve worked out my five main themes from my data and the narratives.

Why so long, you ask? What HAVE you been doing all this time, you ask? Well, when anything by Gary McPherson and Jerome Bruner is click-bait, it’s been hard to nut out exactly what I am trying to illuminate in my thesis without it seeming like I’m just writing stories about singing teachers and their students, without much actual analysis or understanding of my field through the usual quantitative approach.

Now, I know this isn’t really true. I DO know my field and I have carefully analysed my data through narrative inquiry methods. The problem is, the field of my investigation is large and rather unwieldy. Most sensible folk would write either about teachers OR students, not both. And so I’ve been researching motivational theories, pedagogical theories (in singing AND in general), relational theories, theories of community, theories of mind, and theories about singers and musicians. It’s easy to get stumped. And it’s easy to get confused about what I’m actually trying to illuminate.

But over the last few days, with much rewriting of my narratives, I think I’ve done it. I think I have found a way through the minefield. I’ve whittled down all my ideas to one main one – development of artistry through apprenticeship – and there are 5 main themes to emerge from my data that just about covers all the things I’ve revealed in the narratives and found in my survey. Now, I’m not going to tell you what they are, because this thesis is mine – all mine – mwha hahahaha –  and you can’t nick my stuff – but suffice to say, the 5 themes are good. I hope.

I have one week to try and write my discussion chapter to a good first draft. Thereafter I need to look at my literature review again and work out what needs to stay and what needs to go. Because it’s a bit scattergun at the moment. Most of it is relevant but it’s still all over the shop. I think the discussion chapter will help cement my literature and provide an important framework for the lit chapter. I want to say all I need to say in the discussion chapter in 5500 words – that, with my conclusion, will reach 10,000 words, which is enough.

I finally have a deadline – it’s April for my talk (20 minutes – 20 minutes?! This is NOTHING.) and thereafter 3 months to prepare my thesis for submission. Which will kill me because I’m teaching full time during semester. But at least now I can see the finish-line!

So where am I? 74,000-odd words down, that’s where.

Ignore this bit below if you hate lists.

Introduction: 3,800 words (not finished)

Literature review: 14,000 words (not finished)

Methodology: 10,000 words (to revise)

Narratives: 41,500 words (final drafts)

Discussion: 1,000 words down (not finished)

Conclusion: 3,100 words down (first draft)

Getting into the swing of it. Again. And again. Aaaand… again.

Holidays, or PhD? PhD, or holidays? That is the conundrum pendulum for today. It’s a Saturday, after all, and Thursday I actually did 5 solid hours of work, but the rest of my family are on their summer break and the siren wail of long walks by the ocean, chippies and glasses of vino beckon, and it’s hard to get motivated when everyone else is lounging about!

Friday I couldn’t work as I was packing the car, driving the children of step to the beach house, shopping, and cleaning the house. So I have a deficit of 5 hours to make up next week. I am determined to make the time up, because it’s marching on and I’m getting antsy again. And as usual, getting started is ALWAYS the hardest part of the PhD work. Once I’m in, it’s much easier to stay there.

I’m aiming for 5 solid hours of study/ reading / writing per day, during the week, and time off for good behaviour on the weekend. I realistically won’t get any more time than this, because even if I start at 8, there’s lunch and walks to be had, dinner to make and time to be spent with my kids. But next week will be 6 hours a day – nearly full time! Gosh! But this makes up for the hopeless November studying, when I only did the equivalent of one week’s study for the whole month.

On the plus side, no more Facebook means much less procrastination. It’s been super hard to do, and I was trembling as I deactivated it, but already I feel less jumpy and disconnected and I’ve managed to stay on task much longer. If people want to get in contact with me, they can call me. If they don’t have my phone number, it’s readily available on the www. If it’s that important.

I am writing this blog from the relative difficulty of my internet dongle – it only has 2gig per month available to me, so I have to be a little circumspect about how much I use. But this is the moment – when I am away – when it comes most in handy. Most of the time I’m connected through work or home, so the dongle just gathers dust in its case. Just as well I’ve paid for it anyway. Sort of.

So, December will be the month to finish draft one of the literature review, which is currently about 14,000 words along. Then January will be writing my discussion chapter and finishing the introduction. February will be to look through the whole draft once again and put it into one single document – something I’ve not yet attempted. I have yet to make sense of my methods chapter because I’m so far removed from this that I’ve forgotten what I did and how I did it! But it’s getting there, slowly.

One thing I have yet to do is try and find the gaps in my work – what have I missed? One of the areas not really investigated is the current opera and concert stage world – the business of opera and how we perceive it when developing our students for a career in this industry. There is little actual research available – mostly the current work is about transitions OUT of the profession, so I have to glean information from anecdotal information including news articles, opinion pieces, interviews with professional singers and the like. Luckily, some clever folk have published books on the subject (purely journalistic) but I can extrapolate some of the better information which should help me build a case.

So, even though I’ve not done any study today or yesterday, my brain is percolating along. Again.

Erm, let’s try that again: Hello, November and PhD land!

I’m now in the throes of finishing my teaching for the year, marking, and working on my PhD. The teaching thing has become a bete noir, as it always does at this time of year, but I’ve carved out several hours per day for PhD land.

Planning study time for me is truly difficult. Not sure why. It’s not like I don’t like studying, but I DO procrastinate. So my latest trick to try and get around this is to plan my study in 2-hour increments. That way I will stay off social media and email for those 2 hours, then take a walking break for between 30 minutes and 1 hour when I get up, eat, do some housework, then settle back to work again. If I can plan 3 lots of these per day then that’s an amazing work day for me. Even 2 lots is extremely productive. Last Friday was a very productive day and I found I stuck to my 2 hourly limits, even as the boundaries of the time line slipped a little.

Of course, I’m re-reading all my literature and finding great gaps, as I thought, so the frustration levels may be high as I reacquaint myself with knowledge I never knew I was missing.

On the plus side, I’ve been reading a lot about Cultural Psychology, and I’m loving this approach to how we think about being in the world, how we live and learn, adapt and thrive in a dynamic and changing environment. Favourite authors this week include Heine, Bruner, Rogoff, Bronfenbrenner (at least, his ecological model) and Cole. That’s enough for now though. Back to the grind!

A favourite quote today comes from Bruner: “learning and thinking are always situated in a cultural setting and always dependent on the utilization of cultural resources” (Bruner, 1996, p.4). Yes, yes they are. So now, as I have built my cultural resources on a rather unstable foundation of sandy procrastination, bye bye again!

 

This is my diary – no wonder I don’t study.

Thought this would be a good way to see just precisely what I do to waste time when I should be working on the PhD. Here’s a picture of my week:

So, there’s a lovely swathe of free time on Friday, right? Yes! I can do PhD work then. All my other time is literally 1-2-1 time with singing clients until quite late at night. My breaks are infrequent and my timetable is like this more than 28 weeks of the year, and this one doesn’t include my tutoring work. Plus I take audition workshops and panels in the holiday weeks.

Normally, too, I teach from 8.30am – 2.30pm on Tuesdays as well. So, time to do housework anyone? Nup. Time to take the dog for a walk? You see I’ve squeezed in a moment or two for that. Dinner? Stopped cooking. Breakfast? Yes, yes I can do that. And I was wondering why I have no time for PhD land. Or food shopping.

Now, you would think I have plenty of time during school holidays and summer to write, and so I do, but only during summer break. Winter is too busy with other work now. So let’s see where summer break gets me. November my uni teaching ceases. There may be marking to do – say, about 1 week’s worth. There are several catch-up lessons to plan – let’s say about 1 week’s worth. My private practice is still going until December. That means I have about 2 weeks in November where my teaching only reaches around 15 hours per week. So I legitimately have 50+ hours to study in November.

Then December hits. All bets are off. It’s holiday time and Xmas, and December is a wasted month – I’ve written about his before. So, January, right? Yay! January! One whole lovely month for study, yay! Let’s see if that happens this year – it should because I want to get the blasted thing finished, but time – well, it gets away from me.

Many kind people have suggested I get up super early and write for 2 hours in the morning. While I like this idea I am simply not a morning person. Although I reckon I could fit in an hour of reading then. So I might try this next week and see where it gets me. Because mapping out my day sure isn’t working. Giving myself small step goals isn’t working. I’m not sure what IS working. Perhaps looking at my ‘to-do’ scroll above my desk is helping. Well, yes it is. So off I go now, to try and do “Topic 1: Cultural Psychology”.

Organising literature in one’s PhD

There was an interesting email conversation instigated by one of my colleagues today about organization of one’s PhD material, including the literature review and all the substantive theory underpinning the research. Developing clear understanding about one’s reading is, I believe, one of the most difficult aspects of the PhD. I’m putting off reading my literature at the moment, because analysis tends to preclude reading and I always feel these two activities engage different parts of the brain.

The organization of the literature is so tricky, but as other email respondents said: it all relates to the research question. If the research question is not clear, then the literature – no matter how fascinating – may well be unfocused and inappropriate to the study. This is an element of my research I will be re-delving into shortly, once I have finished the first drafts of my narrative chapters. I’ve already been there, but one has to keep revisiting it. An interesting dilemma I am finding is that I am resisting the return – not because I don’t like reading the fascinating material, but because I feel like I would be returning to an old mental paradigm, which I’m not prepared to do right now.

Nevertheless, reading in my field and in psychology has been enormously important to my meta-cognition and I am thrilled that my capacity to understand aspects of my research has broadened considerably. My intelligence has surely not improved, as my ongoing incapacity to understand maths will attest, but I sense that I have the awareness to make better judgements about any number of situations.

I wish I had the intelligence to create a brand new and original way of organising my research, but I think it has already been done, therefore, I don’t see the need to reinvent the wheel. Nor do I see the need to improve on the wheel, unless it’s to make my study fit better. My original idea of using Shulman’s Signature Pedagogy has changed somewhat, because my application of cultural psychology does not really fit this structure. I am still trying to find another structure that may be just as applicable, but I feel a little lost about how to achieve this at present. One of my colleagues is using four pillars for his substantive theory: the construct, the culture, the environment and the voice, which looks very attractive. I think the structure of my literature review will be following a Bronfenbrenner approach, which is a nested system, perhaps a Venn diagram of overlapping areas of research. Cultural psychology offers its own system anyway, because of its focus on culture, interactions with and within the culture, and human psychology. However, I must be very careful that my readings in psychology don’t become overwhelming – there is so much out there that is fascinating but ultimately of no relevance to my study.

Whatever the organisational path I follow, it is a fascinating area I have neglected while I concentrate on the analysis and narrative drafts.