I'm glad to say that I have now finished all my marking am able to concentrate on PhD work.I have a trial copy of NVIVO and I'm starting to code my data. This is time-consuming but reasonably straightforward. I haven't yet decided whether or not to spend the £400 and actually buy NVIVO; I'd like to see how useful it is going to be first.

Work on Foucault has also gone reasonably well. I think he and I are beginning to come to an understanding! I'm getting to the point where I can start to contemplate putting all of this together. I'd like to be able to apply some of the ideas from both Foucault and Bahktin to the data that I have collected from my interviews. I can already see, for example, that some of the ideas about dialogue and how this develops from a master/slave relationship through a platonic type dialogue could be seen as too linear, too structured from a Foucauldian perspective. What I am seeing in the 1st year interviews is a lot of confusion about whyand how they should be reading.

I have tutorials tomorrow.

NVIVO - Wow!

The highlight of the week was an NVIVO training course, which shows what a sad bastard I am becoming! It is seriously exciting software. I know that it does not actually analyse the data for me, nor write a dissertation. Although I must admit there were times when it seemed that even this might be possible! But with over 60 interview scripts to analyse and a very poor memory, I think this software is going to be an absolute necessity. The big problem, of course, is that it costs nearly £400. Luckily, I am truly appalling with money! I do have the capacity to convince myself that something is essential, even if I can't actually afford it. Still, I think I'm at the age where deferred gratification is becoming seriously untenable philosophy. Buy now, worry later!

I have also done some writing this week. I have continued to work mostly on stuff that will become a literature review. I have looked at study skills approaches to teaching reading, particularly some of the American literature. I have decided to call this a strategic approach, partly because this is what the Americans call it and partly because it does seem to much better describe the ways in which particular strategies are taught in order to, supposedly, improve reading skills. Underlining, highlighting, notetaking - certainly all really useful skills, but I am questioning the the universality of them and how transferable they are across different sorts of reading.

I am on a union training course on Monday and Tuesday next week, but I'm hoping to do some more writing later in the week. I might even have won more interview lined up!

This has been a reasonably successful week. On Thursday I went to University Z and recorded two more interviews. Unfortunately, one person was unable to attend and has now dropped out of the research project. This means I now have 14 students from three different universities. The week before I also received an e-mail from a student in University Y telling me that she has had to withdraw from the course. I am slightly concerned that having 14 students at the end of year one might mean that I do not have enough by the end of year three. However, I think that given that I am also interviewing lecturers, I am going to have more material than I can reasonably manage.

I am attending an NVIVO training course next week and after this I'm hoping to make a start with data analysis. I have still got five interviews to get transcribed, but I've now got a grant from the DSA to cover the costs of this.

I'm reading lots of Foucault at the moment. I've looked at some of The Order of Things, some of The Archaeology of Knowledge and are now working their way through the whole of The Will to Knowledge. I am trying to take notes on this material as I read it. I know from experience that if I just read stuff and don't write anything that a) I forget what I've read; b) I lose the opportunity to capture my own thoughts as they arise from the reading. I don't very often used the notes that I've made in any verbatim way, but they do feed into reflective and analytical pieces of writing.

I'm also experimenting stylistically with what I'm writing. Given that my project is looking at academic reading, and that I am myself doing a great deal of academic reading, it seems daft to not include my own experiences of reading and writing within the research. I am, after all, the one subject to whom I have (sort of) unlimited access. I don't think I would want to use myself as a central research tool, but to ignore the fact that I am engaged in intensive academic reading would seem to miss very important source of data. I would not want this to become an autoethnographic project and I also realise that there are dangers of subjectivity, but I quite like placing myself into the work. I guess one of the tests of this will be what my two supervisors think when they read it!

A Long Gap

The long gap between the last entry on this blog and this one is more to do with a technical problem than any lack of progress on my PhD. I had somehow managed to block cookies from blogger.com. This meant that I couldn't open the blog site. Now the problem is solved, I have no excuse.

In fact I have made some progress, even though it is much less than I would have liked. I have recorded 13 interviews with students from three different universities. I have three more to do next week which takes me up to my target of 16. Unfortunately, one student has now dropped out of university which leaves me with 15 for the next year. I am also making some progress in getting my participants to send me their essays. My most interesting interview was with a student who had done no reading whatsoever during her first semester. Sod's law was operating that day and I failed to tape record what was said. I have tried asking her to come for another interview, but she's not replying to my e-mails.

I have been reading lots of Foucault in the last weeks. In particular, I am slowly working my way through The Archaeology of Knowledge and (even more slowly) The Order of Things. Foucault is not a man who can be rushed! The more I read, the more convinced I am that he and Bakhtin will be my two central theorists. I have also got a lot written. I was surprised when I re-read what I had written last summer: it was better than I thought it would be. I'm also now managing to write new material. The aim is to get to the MPhil stage by the end of the summer. I certainly like to be in the position where I had enough materials ready to be able to start talking and presenting my research.

Arranging interviews

I am beginning to realise that trying to recruit participants is really very difficult. I have managed to get quite a lot of interest at Y University and have also began now to arrange first appointments. At X University, however, things are much more difficult. I have now e-mailed twice the students who originally expressed some interest in my research project at that university, and only had one reply. Unfortunately, I only collected e-mail addresses and realise that I should have collected telephone numbers as well.

I was a bit more savvy of the time I got to Y. University and have collected a contact phone number as well as e-mails. Having e-mailed the students at Y University suggesting appointment times, I have now been able to telephone those who have not replied and fix the time for the initial interview. This does take quite a lot of organising. I can see that my main work over this next few months will be to organise the participant groups and get the first set of interviews done. It's going to be very difficult to get any reading done as well as keeping the appointment diary going. I should point out, in case anyone ever does read this, but I also work part-time as a lecturer and part-time as a counsellor, both of which also take up quite a lot of my time.

More frustration

This part of the PHD journey seems to be marred by a lot of frustration. I had some success on Tuesday when I went over to X University to recruit participants for my study. I was able to talk to English students at the end of a joint lecture. Following my appeal, I got 15 students signing up to say they were interested in participating. I came home feeling very satisfied that at last some progress was being made. I have since then e-mailed all 15 students, sending them more details, but so far had nothing back. If I don't hear by the end of the weekend I will e-mail them again.

Tomorrow I am going to talk to two groups students at Y University. I think I will take some forms with me to allow students to give me their contact details, rather than just asking them to put their e-mail address on a list. I have already made appeals, via my gatekeepers, to both these groups of students and have had a small amount of interest. I have made appointments to see two students from these groups but both, unfortunately, have failed to keep the appointment. One sent me a text after I had waited 10 minutes for him and another just failed to turn up. It is a bit dispiriting, but I am hoping that once I get people on board the project, then it will go a little more smoothly.

I have been reflecting on the issue of why students on this project might be advantaged, as Charlotte asked why this might be. I suppose one reason is that it will help students to have more insights into the way in which they read and such metacognition is seen as one of the processes which helps to make more effective readers. Another reason might be that talking about what you have read is a useful piece of reflection, prior to writing about it. I suppose there is also a sense that simply having someone else interested in how you go about your reading is likely to make you approach it in a different way.

I had my Thesis Outline Approval meeting today which seemed to go really well. The committee work incredibly enthusiastic about my ideas and very encouraging about what I had written so far. They did, of course, find some areas where their thoughts and improvements could be made. They suggested that it might be more useful to get my student participants together in focus groups rather than relying solely on 1:1 interviews. This will allow me to open a discussion on the process of reading and allow for people to make comparisons between the ways they do things. It might also be a much more efficient way of collecting insights into how my participants go about their reading.

My main issue at the moment is how to get enough (but not too many) participants. Recruitment into the project has been very slow. It was not helped by the fact that my Brighton University e-mail address got cut off the day after I had sent out my first recruitment literature, and using this e-mail address as a contact point. Unfortunately, I had not had my Annual Progression Review. A fairly severe period of depression in the late spring/early summer meant that I asked for it to be postponed, and then we all seems to forget that it needed doing. My fault, really. I should have picked up on it earlier. Anyway, but has now been resolved and I am reregistered as a part-time PhD student at Brighton.

Recruitment at both the institutions I am studying has been very slow. I am hoping to go into some lectures this week to meet students and make a personal appeal. One of the areas which the TOA committee picked up on was whether or not the students who are engaged in this study will be unfairly advantaged. As the fact that talking to me might help them with their studies is one of the few advantages which I can present to potential participants, I was not really able to get a satisfactory reply.

The other issue for me at this stage is lack of time. It's been a really busy teaching term for me at Chichester. I'm hoping that there will now be some space which will allow me to get back to doing my own reading. I think I'd like to look at some methodological material.