Category: Academia

Discussing the A-Ha! in CPsquare

Our conversation has started in the CPsquare community, where I am sharing my current doctoral studies and approaching thesis. One of the community facilitators mentioned the a-ha moment, and this reminded me how increasingly central this is to my work. Don’t you wish we could bottle and share it?

I came to my current academic program with an interest in exploring transformative learning experiences in distance learning, and while I have studied these experiences from a number of perspectives, including from the perspective of doctoral learners, it is this a-ha experience, sometimes called a conceptual threshold, threshold concept, or light bulb moment, that most interests me.

  • What factors lead some people to have this a-ha, and not others?
  • Is there any content or ideas that tend to have this effect on people?
  • What does this experience feel like?
  • What support helps sustain people through this?
  • What ethical issues arise, especially when this experience may be encouraged by a faculty member or researcher?

These are some of those questions that inspire me, as they all lead to the pinnacle, IMHO, of the central questions in education — What did you learn and what will you do with it?

CPsquare Research and Dissertations Series

I was pleasantly surprised to be invited by John Smith at CPsquare (The Community of Practice on Communities of Practice) to discuss my work in the Research and Dissertations Series next week. The title of my session is “Jeffrey Keefer: work in progress – Educational Research + (Virtual) Identity in Postmodernity.”  The subtitle for this sessions states:

We have a time-honored tradition of sharing mid-trajectory work, and Jeffrey Keefer’s Doctoral research to date follows it. He has said, “If we all waited for the ideal time, nothing would ever happen.” The synchronous session will be on Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 20:00 GMT (4 pm New York time). Jeffrey will post some bits here before that.

While this session is intended for members of CPsquare, I will share some bits and pieces of what I share there here as well, especially what I hope to discuss and what questions about it I have. For anybody planning or able to attend, here is the internal CPsquare url.

Questions to Help Clarify Research

I just finished reviewing a number of abstracts I volunteered to review for an upcoming academic conference, and I noticed a pattern in some of my feedback that I want to share and, perhaps, get some feedback of my own. I have received harsh feedback over the years, as undoubtedly others have as well, and am very sensitive to providing constructive academic feedback while trying not to be severe. I may think the work is of low quality, but we all have to start someplace, and just telling the person that it makes no sense or doesn’t have a research design does not really help the person improve his or her work. As most people I have met are in various levels of learning, it seems productive to help others along, especially when involving issues of research.

My epistemological stance holds that there is not only one way to know some phenomenon, but rather the questions we ask about it guide the steps we take and affect the ways that others read and assess our work. With this said, there is not only one way to approach research, and I find it useful to be sensitive to others who want to study something in a different way. The questions I ask are almost always meant to explore and better understand meaning, namely how this or that person answers those why and how sort of questions.

The pattern I noticed that I use to help guide the feedback includes, after a statement about a lack of clarity, questions that are intended to help move the research, or often the (working) abstract, along. These include:

  • What problem has the researcher has identified?
  • Why is this question important to answer?
  • What question does the researcher have about this phenomenon?
  • What literature has the researcher used to try to answer it?
  • Why is the researcher going to study this phenomenon in this way?
  • How is the researcher related to this phenomenon?
  • What is the researcher doing with this phenomenon to try to answer the question?
  • What are we learning about this phenomenon because of this research?
  • What can we do next with this phenomenon as a result of this research?

I tried to highlight some of the elements in a research design that are often more accessible when seen as questions, rather than topic headings. Have you ever been asked general, though highly helpful, questions to help you better express your work? Have they helped? What questions are missing?

Overview of Identity

As I continue to research in the area of identity formation, specifically amongst doctoral learners, I want to share a text I recently read that provides a helpful overview of this interdisciplinary area of study.

Interested in issues of identity though need a place to start? Can’t distinguish between Goffman and Giddens or Foucault and Freud? Wonder how Judith Butler, queer theory, Marcuse, Baumann, and symbolic interactionism fit into this mix? Well, without focusing on any one theory as the be all and end all, this is as helpful a place to start as any. Elliott’s style is friendly and instructive, without being condescending or overly-complex.

I recommend this for those who want a swift overview, perhaps even before adding one’s own voice to the literature.

Academic “Stuckness”

I recently started to read a most interesting blog, The Thesis Wisperer. While this blog is about doing a doctoral thesis, and my research is about researchers and the research process, it seems a natural fit.

This became even more apparent when I read their newest post, Why you might be ‘stuck.’ This post is about threshold concepts, a topic I have been studying especially intensely recently, that comes from the work of Meyer and Land. Not much to really add to this right now, as I am saving all that for my own research findings. On an even larger note, as I am narrowing down my doctoral research questions, let’s just leave stuckness alone, at least for the time being!

Let’s just say that I envision this being a most important framework for my thesis proposal, whose idea is due to be submitted for review within 2 weeks at Lancaster University. Back to my research . . .