PhD as self-discovery

I decided to do a PhD because I had a question about law I wanted to answer. So the goal of the PhD has been to make that “original contribution to knowledge”. But as I progressed, I have found that my research has been plastic, in the Hegelian sense. On the one hand, I have shaped my research not only in deciding what to do but also in how my background has shaped my paradigm. In realising the latter, I started to learn things about myself. Doing the PhD became a process of self-discovery. In a sense, at some point, the boundary between my research topic and myself became porous.

As PhD student Kirsty Warren said in the video below, I didn’t start to discover myself by attempting to discover myself; I did it by getting on with life and focusing on something beyond myself. In a sense, as Hegel said, only by recognising that there was something outside me worth recognising did I recognise myself. I became a posthuman researcher.

Emily Warren, discovering herself

In the beginning was the word…

This might sound egotistical but I have realised recently that the title of this blog, ‘From Tweet to Thesis’, points to the PhD as an image of divine creation (in the same way than humans are made in the image,of God). As I have probably said so many times before, a PhD thesis starts with a tweet in the imagination – a phrase that could be written in a limited number, say 140, of characters. In my case, that tweet would have been ‘How does law change behaviour, if nagging doesn’t work?’ The answer is physically embodied in my thesis, which is also a collection of words. One is words in my mind, the other is words on a page. But the whole point of this blog is that the tweet of the imagination is not the real beginning of the thesis, because it itself is the result of a process. The tweet can be broken down into smaller collections of words, and words themselves, and each word is themselves the result. As Hegel argues in his preface to The Phenomenology of Mind, my tweet of the imagination is merely a proposition. Trafford argues from his research into the nature of doctorateness that my submitted thesis will be a proposition too.

There had to therefore be a first word, from which all words came. And if there was a first word, there had to be a first speaker and thinker. According to the Gospel according to John, in the beginning was the Word. He used the Greek word, logos, which translates as ‘word’ in English but was used by Ancient Greeks to describe an underlying rationality. But John continued: the Word was with God and the Word was God. The first word was God and it was also with, that is, in the mind of, God. In other words, God is the first word and the underlying rationality of that word. In autopoietic fashion, God beget God. As alpha, he is at the beginning of the first word and, as omega, he is at the end of the word; that is, God will last for as long as God exists.  And when God spoke, as per Genesis, the word became embodied. For Christians, the word is Jesus Christ and the thesis or embodiment of him is The Bible. Therefore, there is a dialectic or conversation between God and everything he speaks into being; he speaks, it exists, and he then sits back and sees that it is good, before speaking again. Given the experiential beginnings of PhD theses, it could be argued that they – like everything else – are part of the continuing creative work of God. However, he does create things to have a mind of its own and they can choose how to act, so even though as he is writing his thesis, as any PhD student knows, the thesis often resists being shaped. In many ways, though, writing a PhD is like creating one’s own world, where one’s thesis is the prevailing value. (Just to be clear though, the PhD student is most definitely not God.)

When did you start your doctorate?

By Professor Emeritus Vernon Trafford

Vernon’s PhD grew out of his professional work on an interdisciplinary, collaborative project

How often have you been asked that question?  What do you say?  Is your answer always the same?  If it varies why is that?  For some people the answer is easy; it is the date when they were accepted by or enrolled at a University.   For others, the answer is more complex.  I am in the latter category. What follows explains how I now view the question as well as how it links to my choice of my doctoral topic.

After leaving school I had various private and public sector jobs before studying for a BA at Liverpool University.  Then, lectureships in three polytechnics exposed me to the practicalities of my primary disciplines – political science and organization theory.   An invitation to be part of a British Council educational development project in Bhopal, India, was an opportunity to apply my learning in a new context.

Based at one of the four Indian Technical Teacher Training Institutions, the project comprised five sub-projects including education management. For eighteen months I contributed to the education management sub-project, working with counterparts to design, undertake and report on various small-scale research projects.   This involved travelling throughout the three states in the Western Region of India, presenting at regional or national conferences, providing management development workshops for polytechnics and writing detailed reports for the British Council.

Then I became the director of a new sub-project looking at institutional evaluation.  The purpose of this project was to improve the practice of evaluating polytechnic performance.  For years this function had been undertaken externally by ‘inspectors’ who checked regulatory compliance and seldom acknowledged positive achievement. Discussions at the State level in technician education resulted in twelve Polytechnic Principals being seconded to develop an appropriate evaluative instrument. They were the group from whom Polytechnic Evaluation Teams would be chosen.

In this project I was responsible for planning and delivering each stage of the developmental/training workshops, selecting and involving specialists in key aspects of the project plus editing drafts of working papers and operational manuals.  My filing cabinets in Bhopal and UK quickly filled with working papers and British Council reports.

As a result, it became apparent to me that the project was:

• interdisciplinary at a time when this was rare in international development projects;
• designed and operated as an evaluative process which replaced one that had been imposed by the prevailing technical bureaucracy on the polytechnics and so had been judged to be ‘not-fit-for-purpose’;
• exemplifying successful international collaboration between the twelve seconded Polytechnic Principals and the small team of expert advisers;
• converting an untried theory of institutional evaluation into a practical instrument and training professional education managers to use it.

Since my academic work in a business school also involved educational management developmental projects in Europe, I knew that the Indian project was quite unique. I concluded that it was suitable for doctoral level study and could make a contribution to knowledge.  Thus, my choice of the topic for my doctorate evolved naturally out of my professional practice with me as the insider researcher.

Foolishly, I believed that having a potentially worthy topic for doctoral research would instantly appeal to a university.  I put forward my case in a two-page synopsis outlining the international, cultural, technical, micro-political, behavioural and educational aspects of the project.  Appropriate sources were included to locate these components within their respective theoretical perspectives. Also, an agreed five-year time line illustrated the resources and schedules that would sustain the project.  My part-time research would be inductive, insider-based and use multiple methods to collect and interpret the data. This document was approved by the British Council, my counterparts in India and academic colleagues in UK.

My first application was to my Alma Mater. A beautifully phrased letter from them regretted that my proposal erred too much on ‘the practical aspects of your very interesting project’ and they wished me well.

My second application went to a business school that had international links in Europe.  They rejected it because ‘we have no educationalists on our staff.’

My unaltered proposal was then sent to two other universities.  It was rejected by a centre of development studies because it was ‘too educational’ and was also rejected by a school of education because it was ‘far too international for us to handle’.

My first interview was in a faculty whose Department of Education had institutional links with other countries.   I arrived with high hopes and was armed with my two-page outline, examples of the evaluative materials and some photographs too!  The staff member who saw me instantly launched into explaining why I should drop my ‘little project’ and join his team of econometricians who were studying longitudinal educational development in other Indian States.  I listened in silence until he finished and then refused his ‘kind offer’. . . .

Two weeks later I saw an advertisement in the education press to study for Ph.Ds at the University of Southampton.   Applicants were invited to provide a three-page outline of their intended research and a short CV.  My project outline was extended and submitted.  I was invited to the University for a sequence of meetings that commenced with the Faculty Doctoral Admissions Officer – a retired academic.  He obviously understood my ideas and for an hour asked searching questions about why I wanted to study for a doctorate, the origins and future of the institutional evaluation project, my conceptual understanding of multidisciplinary research and the difficulties of undertaking research in another culture and country.  By the close of that meeting my choice of a topic for my doctorate had been justified to his satisfaction.

The next meeting was with a possible supervisor whom, I was told, ‘normally has twelve doctoral candidates and last week one completed successfully so he could take you on.’  His questions then, and during the following years of our relationship, were Socratic in style and intention.  He helped me to understand the depth and complexity of my topic.  Although he was neither an expert in educational evaluation nor institutional management he was highly skilled in helping people, including me, to think.

Looking back, I realise that my undergraduate and graduate studies had each enabled me to start thinking like a researcher through the lens of disciplines and theories. Then, directing the institutional evaluation project had sharpened my research skills and appreciation of the interconnectedness of parts in a system.  Perhaps, sometime before the University of Southampton registered me for a Ph.D. I had already ‘chosen and started on my doctorate’.

Hopefully my experience of rejection letters and that first interview(!) are atypical of current recruitment practices.  Having now admitted numerous candidates to their doctoral studies and supervised over fifty to completion, it is fascinating to hear applicants’ answers to my question ‘When did you start your doctorate?’

Vernon Trafford is Professor Emeritus at Anglia Ruskin University. After working in the private and public sectors, he gained degrees in public administration and political science.  In 1978, he registered at the University of Southampton for his PhD in “Developing a critical success factor system of evaluation for polytechnics in India”. But, catching hepatitis and a substantial research grant in UK, plus writing a book, delayed his thesis being submitted until 1987 (Editor – that’s 9 years).   He has undertaken education-related consultancy assignments for QAA, OECD, the British Council, the World Bank and various governmental agencies. Since 2001, his research and publications are into the nature of doctorateness. His book with Shosh Leshem, “Stepping stones to achieving your doctorate”, was published by Open University Press in 2008 and has been reprinted three times.  Visit his website at www.vernontrafford.com.

Birth of a Campaign against Page 3

Lucy Ann Holmes aka @NoMorePage3 was finally motivated to campaign to ask the editor of The Sun to remove topless women from its pages during a train ride. However, the roots of it go back to when she was 11 years old and discovered that she did not have perfect or nice-looking breasts, like the women who appeared on Page 3 of the Sun.

Martine Wright – Destiny calling

As I watched the Paralympics opening ceremony and the run-up on Channel 4, I couldn’t help but be moved by the story of Martine Wright, the GB sitting volleyball player. 

She strongly believed that losing her legs in the London 7/7 bombings, the day after we won the bid for 2012, was a part of her destiny, and not a freak accident. Her achievement at London 2012 is not only a consequence of her training, but also down to her overall experience, including sitting next to one of the suicide bombers.

Many of the contributors to this blog have written of how their PhD is not just about their research but is also the result of experiences. Elsewhere, I have blogged how an Olympic medal is like a PhD? Was your PhD part of your destiny?

Judith Butler and familial influence

I stumbled across this 6-part interview with Judith Butler, gender theorist, in French and English with subtitles and a smattering of German. in the first video, Butler posits the possibility that the thesis of her key text, Gender Trouble, was influenced by her experience living with Jewish parents going through assimilation. This idea of childhood experience affecting research development is certainly something I can understand.

Understanding the Dialectic

When I was at school, my favourite subject was Latin. I liked learning languages in general, but Latin stood out. Maybe it was the teacher, Mr Shaw, who was unforgettably unique. Maybe it was because I had a thing for the Romans. Or maybe it was the relationship between Latin and English. Or all of those things. Anyway, after GCSEs, I knew I wanted stick with the classical subjects for A-level. However, I was advised to do more useful subjects so that could get a job.

I ended up studying mathematics and computing. Don’t get me wrong, I liked these subjects too and was just as good at them as languages. They were technical skills. But I didn’t see them as technical skills but as forms of expression, creation and communication. They were languages. Ever since I was 6 years old, I loved messing around with programming languages and writing programs; what fascinates me most about maths is its role as a universal language. Any problem could be expressed mathematically. There was a creativity in both that depended on the terms or constructs used. So I then went and did a degree in mathematics and computing science. But that is as far as it went. Indeed, all I remember now is the basics and I do so with regret.

Why did I stop? After all, when I look at my transcripts, I can see that I was good at it and was on course to get 2:1 after two years. I think I was attracted by the glamour of journalism. I thought that I had got bored with my degree subject, but on hindsight I don’t think I had. Again, I was good at it and I even had my fair share of exclusives, which was always an ego boost. But what I did really like about journalism was the combination of creativity and communication. Then, I went into law, for various reasons, but what I liked most was the interpretation and analysis of law and understanding what was meant.

All of which brings me to my PhD. Ostensibly, it is about how law is used by the government to encourage recycling and the relationship between the state and the individual. But what I have discovered is that I have been drawn to a Hegelian theoretical framework because I am interested in law as the dialectic between the State and the individual. Law – and I take quite a broad view – is how the state and individual communicate or converse, with their own respective dialects.

This blog started because I believed that a PhD student’s research topic was influenced by a person’s life. Whilst the PhD is a distinct task, it grew out of what went before. But now it seems that at least my PhD is just the latest manifestation of a lifelong project to understand how people and entities communicate and, in particular, how people communicate with their environment. And so, this blog is an attempt to understand how PhD students communicate with their environment. Indeed, studying Hegel has helped me to evaluate my own political views and understand many of the paradoxes within my faith.

The post was inspired a the TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson below but not in the way I expected. Robinson says that, as a result of industrialisation, a hierarchy of subjects has been established, with subjects more closely related to jobs being valued more highly. As a result, children are pushed towards a particular direction – not out of malice but out of a desire to prepare them for survival -  without thinking that the child may not be suited to that subject and hence stifling their creativity. At first, my post was going to be how this has happened to me and why this was relevant to doing a PhD. But as I started to write and really think about why I liked Latin and languages and what it was I did like about mathematics and computing that I realised that there might be another possibility. Whatever the reason I have done what I have done, they all seem to have been ways of answering a deeper question. Perhaps this is the problem with our education system at the moment, not that it kills creativity but that its fragmentation silences those deeper questions that we have. Maybe.

But maybe I am completely wrong on this. But, until today, I have always held onto a bit of resentment towards those who advised me regarding my A-levels for not understanding my needs at the time. At least, after writing this post, I am able to forgive them.