New Year’s resolutions

Happy New Year! I wonder what I can achieve in 2011. 2010 was a pretty good year for me, what with starting lecturing, gaining a research project award and starting my PhD, as well as fun and games in my generally very calm and settled personal life. Let’s hope it’s as good.

I’ve spent the last couple of days mainly focused on project management software. For my PhD plan (required by my sup for our next meeting), I was just going to do a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet Gantt chart thing, as previously discussed. But then I got to thinking about project management software and whether that might be better, if only because it then becomes a useful transferable skill (not a fan of buzzwords, really, but…). So, after mulling over a few options and trying to stay on the free side of things, I’ve ended up with the demo version of Merlin (native to Mac) for now.

And so today I’ve made two project plans – one for the British Council project and the other for the PhD. The British Council project stays well within the 40 activities allowed on the fully-functional demo version, but I’ve already hit exactly 40 on the PhD plan, so it’s possible I’ll need to split it at some point. I don’t think that’ll be a major deal, though, as I could just do one plan for up to my PhD confirmation (upgrade or whatever people are calling it these days, now you can’t start on an MPhil) and one for after that, or up to the pilot study or whatever… We shall see!

Then I thought I should step away from the planning and actually DO something. So I’ve read a chapter and a half further through The Book on Bilingualism – getting there!

And back tomorrow when I’m aiming for three chapters!

Listening to your mother backwards…

… is never preferred by children at birth. Certainly it’s a fair way to establish that children recognise language patterns, especially intonation, by birth, but it does sound a bit satanic as experiments go, doesn’t it?

A gentle day today – it’s extremely quiet in the HRC; there’s been no more than five people here at any one time. However, I grabbed the information on the marking I need to do in January (19 scripts on Social and Educational Inequalities) and had a read of that, thinking how good it will be to work with someone so organised (even though she has informed me that it’ll probably be a one-off and she surprised herself!). I also confirmed to Chris that I will speak at the Educational Research Group session in early February, so I need to give that some more thought soon. Pretty slides won’t do it all!

Apart from that, I’ve made some progress through THE textbook on bilingualism (Baker, 2006), which I guess I really should have read cover to cover already, really. But haven’t. So rectifying that – I’m onto chapter 5 and things are picking up now as we’re getting more developmental.

However, I shall be returning to it after the New Year, I think, as I don’t think I’ll be back at my desk til then. Off to meet people for drinks and curry now so I’ll take some days off for Christmas from now, I think. Hurrah!

Bookmarking

I spent the morning grabbing my bookmarks from the wonderful del.icio.us site that is now under threat and moving them to Google Bookmarks, just to make sure that I don’t lose anything if they suddenly got rid or sold the site. It wasn’t as difficult as anticipated in the end as a friend had a great link to the MetaFilter thread where someone had posted a bookmarklet to make the process fairly straightforward.

Then I worked my way through town slowly, armed with a camera to catch lots of frosty pictures and eventually arrived at my desk on campus to last a whole two hours. However, I have started a ppt slideshow for my Educational Research group debut which will be in early February. I’ll have very little to actually say so I guess it had better look pretty!

Off home to cook for friends this evening but back for a pre-Christmas PhD push tomorrow.

A pretty PhD

I’m feeling a few hours out of kilter. It’s half six and I’m doing what I normally do at 4/ 4.30pm – i.e. writing up my day on this blog. That’s because I’ve been at YSJ for three hours over lunchtime, sorting out marks for the first year undergrads and then attending the Languages and Identity research group meeting, where we heard from someone in my department here, but who works at YSJ (they are really two a penny!) about her PhD research. It was interesting and we all had a good chat about it.

I was planning to get the bus over but there was a stupid gap in the bus schedule so I walked – all this walking with a laptop and a couple of books should, in theory, be keeping me fit, but it doesn’t feel that way, I have to say…

Dropped off Thought and Language at the library, since I have now had my 8 renewals on it!! It just hasn’t felt a priority read. Perhaps I’ll try again next term and try and get the one that’s not a one-week loan this time!

And since then, I’ve been mainly making an extraordinarily beautiful Gantt chart (sorry for spelling him wrong yesterday…) to plan the process. Except I don’t know what to put in it. I have the absolute basics, but they seem too far away to really plan in properly, I have the stuff that’s coming up imminently, like the research project stuff (which maybe shouldn’t be on the plan at all…) and then there’s a massive gap. I can’t find a kind-of template of what’s normal. Obviously, every PhD is different, but there are many common points so I’m surprised I haven’t. So, whatever. I’m making it up! So it’s pretty but sketchy! And that’s me for the week, really. We’re away for the weekend too, so I’m hoping to get in for a spot of reading next Tuesday in the run up to Christmas. We’ll see!

 

All systems go…!

So my research proposal got the OK. My supervisor is happy with it being a fairly flexible thing for now and said she was excited. Probably can’t ask for much more than that. We had a nice chat about all sorts of things too – it took 1 1/2 hours! So I was sent away to put together a timescale plan – I’m trying but it feels utterly random, I’m just sticking in a load of things I know need doing into random weeks sometime next term and the term after…! Maybe I need to work this out a wee bit better. I also can’t work out how to plan the plan, in that I can’t decide which format to use. I quite like Gant charts (ie. horizontal) for planning – used to use those in my travel industry operations days – good for multiple things going on at once. However, because my sup has just done a kind of linear columns mock-up I’ve ended up with that for now. I guess I’m not committed – I just don’t want to waste time on that kind of thing. I’m good at that – it’s a kind of but-I’m-being-useful-whilst-actually-procrastinating-hugely sort of thing…!

So, it’s the HRC Christmas party now. We’re promised wine and mince pies and interdisciplinary conversation – can’t work out whether it’ll be hideous or fun, but I have to leave after an hour anyway for the final Research Methods session so it’ll only be showing my face. It won’t kill me.

…and moving on to the next thing…

The research proposal is completed, proof-read, checked, edited and sent. Well, it is now – my first effort was to send the unedited version, which isn’t impressive, is it?

Fortunately, I needed to refer back to a particular reference later in the day and had to reopen the file, realising at that point what I’d done. ‘Nana… It’s not been a top day in terms of being efficient; had to walk onto campus this morning, without doing any of my planned shopping, as I’d left my purse and keys in hubbie’s bag last night which he obviously took to work with him this morning (reasonably enough)!

Oh well, academically I’m doing fine – since the proposal went in, I turned my attention to the British Council research project and began planning and writing for that, so that was pleasing. If slightly bizarre, and probably totally flawed to write a methodology in the past tense for a project you’ve not even started yet… I think I can’t do much more on that report for now, though, until I’ve read a lot more about international bilingual research, as that’s a key element that will inform the actual research. And that, I need to get started on organising as soon as possible after Christmas. Ooh, no rest for the wicked, huh?

First drafts

I have completed the first draft of my research proposal and I think it’s reads pretty well, actually. The lit review isn’t exactly deep, but then I don’t really see how it can be with only a couple of thousand words to go at it. So, I’ve introduced some of the key players and concentrated on presenting a little bit of research that uses the ethnographic approach. I’ve dismissed and explained why I’m not going to use any of the formal models of identity development and hope that my reasons are sound enough.

So all OK I think. I’ve asked my ‘critical friend’ (husband!) to read through it and to help me identify where anything can be chopped, as I am currently about 200 words over the 3,000 suggested limit. The plan is to come back to it next Monday, tighten it up, check it and email it on Monday before my supervision meeting on Tuesday. Slick? I hope so…

Now I need to contemplate getting the bus over to YSJ for the colloquium lecture. It’s just all go…

Telling other people’s stories

I have now finished the very inspiring book that has set me off on this ethnographic approach. Such an intimate viewpoint from three really good writers – I feel quite emotional about their PhD journeys now!

In terms of where it leaves me, I feel that there’s someway to go before I can be confident in my methodology section of either the proposal or the thesis. Kearney and Conteh, especially, talk of the need to combine ethnography with another approach. In Conteh’s case that was Critical Discourse Analysis, which would certainly go down well with my supervisor, that being very much her thing. It seems likely that it will be that or Conversational Analysis but given that ethnography is such a grounded theory approach, maybe I should just say that I know it will need to be supported with other methods but that, until I have data for a pilot study, I probably won’t know exactly which. I’m assuming there’s space for this level of fluffiness at this stage – I hope so, anyway!

I shall return to the actual proposal tomorrow I think and let the message of the book sink in a bit overnight. I must crack on with reading for the rest of the lit review section tomorrow so back onto identity and bilingualism tomorrow and away from educational ethnography. However, I did find a very interesting conference next September in Oxford – call for papers due in March – maybe that’s an idea…

Now, I shall take the bus home to fill my new wardrobe. Hope the forecast heavy snow doesn’t start before I get back. I’ve also realised I’ve failed to have lunch today – I grabbed a bag of crisps and a twix after my GTA interview but that appears to have been insufficient, judging by the pangs I now have…!

Becoming an ethnographer

Today has been a mighty productive day.

I have a draft of my research proposal, bar the literature review, which is rather sketchily in note form of the key players at the moment. I appear to be on target in terms of words, with around 1,200 to play with for the review of literature.

In trying to focus in on a do-able, and yet still interesting, research question I’ve mainly got rid of the link between development of identity and academic attainment, and will rely on others’ thoughts on the issues, such as this from Cummins:

“when students’ developing sense of self is affirmed and extended through their interactions with teachers, they are more likely to apply themselves to academic effort and participate actively in instruction… By contrast, when students’ language, culture and experience are ignored or excluded in classroom interactions, students are immediately starting from a disadvantage. Everything they have learned about life and the world up to this point is being dismissed as irrelevant to school learning” (Cummins, 1996, p. 2).

So the link is now clearly between the opportunity to use the L1 in the classroom and the development of social and ethnic identity. The way I seem to be heading is towards educational ethnography, since this topic should never be about statistics or experiments, so I was chuffed to find Conteh et al’s very personable book “On writing educational ethnographies: the art of collusion” today. Part of the ‘collusion’ is between researchers, as all the contributors to the book have rather laid their souls bare in describing how they came to using an ethnographic approach. Chris Kearney tells me that the next thing I should be doing after the proposal is written is an autobiography of what brought me to this point. However, this is the bit where I feel a fraud. All of these researchers have decades of working in communities as teachers and pillars of the community. I do not. They all talk about how certain events have led them to angry responses requiring research to get answers. I do not have this experience. However, in my defence, Eve Gregory does point out how much easier ethnography is if you are not a teacher and so not so embroiled in the situation, as part of the task of an ethnographer is to keep a distance. Perhaps this is my saving grace. We shall see.

So, feeling rooted in a research community, I shall nip off now for a spot of Pilates and reconvene later. Au revoir.

Hibernating

Well, I almost had a meeting with a headteacher in Leeds about my research. Almost because the seasonal weather rather scuppered it. After making it to the opticians with all my clobber for the day, including my new voice recorder and my laptop, I decided to go to Starbucks for the free wi-fi and a coffee before getting the train. At this point, it had been snowing solidly for an hour on top of what was already there from yesterday. After it had been snowing solidly for almost three hours, I decided to cancel the trip, later finding out the meeting was cancelled anyway. It was good to make contact with the head, though, and we’ve agreed that I’ll contact her again soon to try again!

So then I had to decide whether to go onto campus in the snow, thereby facing a long walk home later, or just to come straight home. I went for the latter, although stopped for many photo ops en route. Predictably, I was very distracted at home and got little useful done, although I did do a bit of a lit search, finding an array of papers well outside my area (aspects of multicultural identities of gay men in Puerto Rico, and various things about sexual development in girls of particular ethnic origins) as well as a couple that may be useful. Perhaps I didn’t quite hit the ideal terms today but I did think of a good idea for recording the lit searches I do in a day. I’m going to use the Grab program to just snap them at the time and then I can collate into a table later. Might be a time saver. Or might not in the long run. Worth an experiment, though.

Anyway, so a bit disappointing in terms of progress today but fun! And I might try and do some PhD stuff on Saturday this week, it being a free day for me. Off for Gluhwein and games at our friends now, though. Good times!