New Year: brief reflection of the past few months!

It’s a New Year, and it’s a special year for movie buffs as they shall be no doubt scrutinising everything to do with Back to the Future two and working out if anything predicted in that movie has actually come true. As much as I enjoy the Back to the Future movie, I shall let the experts care about that whilst I get back to what I care about! Writing about Education, Research, Technology, and writing in general! I realise that I’ve neglected this blog a little but I’m sure many of you will understand that you get moments where you become so focussed on a task that you don’t really want to put it aside until you are at a position where you are happy with directions enough to get on with other things that are pulling at your attention. I’ve been able to reflect back on the first few months of the Ph.D and I’m pretty pleased with what has happened so far.

The key task of the past few months has been the literature review. It is too early for the formal writing process, but this shall take place later this year. This period of the literature review between the first day of the Ph.D, in fact even before that, and till later this year is composed of extensive reading around and within the now identified research areas and write fairly comprehensive notes on relevant research papers and other academic work. It is difficult early on to predict what exactly will be read or the extent of the material that there is to read, but there are strategies that can assist and I'll be discussing these at a later time. Start planning and coming up with ideas of the literature review from the very beginning. This is what I've focussed on the most during the past few months and I do believe it has been a success. Obviously the structure and the finer details shall be further explained, but the main elements and the order of these elements are beginning to be decided upon.

Thankfully also I've built an awareness of the importance of the literature review. The literature review is extremely important because this sets the context of your research, and this context involves using existing and previous research in a way that it provides a basis to argue for the need of the research. It gets more complicated than this because the context includes not only the argumentative but also the theoretical, epistemological, methodological and ontological. The importance and the challenge of producing this chapter cannot be underestimated and it cannot be taken lightly and I advise all Ph.D researchers who have not yet started on their literature review to start reading and writing extensive notes straight away.

Also the past few months have been taken up reading a fair bit on Educational research itself and again this is an important activity to do, and just like the literature review this shall be continuous during the year. I’m becoming more fascinated with Educational research and the political structures that influence research, the need for Educational research and the way it has been developed over the decades.

I could write a thesis about writing a thesis! Basically, the literature review is extremely important, as is doing as much background reading to Educational research as you can. Do this early, and make it continuous and often. Plan well, be continuous and consistent at what you do, work hard, and have an excellent year!

Alex Darracott : 12 Jan 2015 23:16 |  Tags: Reflections |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem