Last weekend I spent a lot of time finishing grading my students' first assignment as well as giving them feedback on their online discussions. And I was working on my proposal. But I managed to watch a couple of movies and sleep in, and go to the gym. So it was a very productive weekend, which is usually not the case as I really like my super lazy weekends.
This week I have been working on my methodology. Well, I've been starting to work on my methodology. Need to do a lot of reading around it as you might expect. I feel like I've been working so hard all week, but I don't yet have a lot to show for it as of yet! Tuesday was 'ShutUpAndWrite' Tuesday on Twitter, and I participated as usual. I love these sessions. It's only an hour and it is just nice to share with others what you are doing and see what others are doing. Today (Friday), we have our Doctoral Writing Conversations workshop and we will have a SUaW session as well. That will be fun, I'm sure. If you don't know what this is, you can check it out here. I like these kind of things. Writing you PhD can be a very lonely project so being able to share something, even just a sentence or to about what you are doing with other people, even strangers, is great. I like it. And Twitter is great for networking and following people you find interesting.
I guess my weeks are quite boring these days. I am getting closer to serious deadlines, like the one for my ethical approval. So there is very little going on with me other than PhD and running. The only social thing that happens is at lunch, basically. I'm hoping things will calm down after Easter, when I've finished this tutoring job, and then I can hopefully do something more fun in the weekends and evenings. Now, I'm just so exhausted when I go home in the afternoons, and I spend at least 1 hour every evening working as a tutor, so by 10pm, I'm comatosed.
My proposal is going well. I got very positive feedback from one of my supervisors and feel like I am really in 'da zone' when it comes to my literature review. It still need a lot of fine tuning and editing and some clarifications here and there, but the core of it is good. Now I just look forward to getting feedback from my other supervisor. But meanwhile I am working on my methodology. What joy! Yes, that is sarcasm. Well, not completely. I am a very structured person. I like to plan things, write things down, make lists and tables and have a visible cue to what I need to do. My planner looks like this:
So as you can see, I am a teenage girl ;) Seriously, though, just making things look nice and fun and not so serious all the time, makes all the difference to me. Obviously, this is not how my methodology will look like!
I do like that I am progressing well enough to be able to start working on the methodology, but it is the process of getting my head around epistemology and ontology and all that good stuff that is a little bit tricky. My research is a qualitative one. If I am understanding it correctly, my epistemological stance is social constructionism, the belief that knowledge is constructed through interactions with others. I'm not sure yet how to define my ontology! Foucault is my lens and through that lens I am using an ethnomethodological approach, finding out how people (in my case toddlers) make sense of the world. My research design is a case study. I will be examining certain phenomena in a certain early childhood setting. My research methods will be participant observations and document analysis. My analytical tools will be conversation analysis and discourse analysis, possibly critical discourse analysis. This is the skeleton of my research. Now I just have to work to understand exactly what all of those terms mean! Lovely.
Have a great weekend and see you next week :)
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