May-hem, in a good way

Ooops - too long since I did this. Too long. There are excuses (or reasons, depending on your benevolence): I had post-holiday blues for a week or so, for, having spent Easter in beautiful places, I learnt afresh how little Manchester, though it has much to offer in many departments, casts in the way of aesthetic balm. I've also been mired in marking, which I hate, and am crap at - feedback, fine, but numerically categorising and boundarising is not my forte. But it's over now. Just finished. I'm sure there'll be something I've omitted to attach/tick/upload somwhere, but I've a few days before deadline to remember it...

In PhD news, I've started recruiting participants, and found my advert on the University's Research Volunteering page to be quite effective - after two Masters dissertations and various MSc assignments trying desperately to get ANYONE to take part, I've been comparatively inundated with responses. Many asked about reimbursement and didn't get back to me after I told them they'd be paid only in tea and cake and self-exploration, but those who expressed interest nonetheless have been very enthusiastic. And I too have been cranking up the enthusiasm (not that there's not tanks of it already, mind) on account of an insight from the first potential participant I met, who, after yet another ethically-conscious reminder that they were free to withdraw at any time, said to me: 'You keep telling me I can withdraw, but you never tell me I can stay'. I felt slightly ashamed of myself for sacrificing human warmth and welcome to become an ethics-form monkey. Or parrot. Or ass, perhaps. Anyway - twas a good insight.

In other news, I've had a book chapter proposal accepted, which is most exciting. The working title is Social identities and multiple selves in foreign language education, edited by Damian J. Rivers and Stephanie Houghton. The chapter is based on my MA dissertation, and the blurb is as follows:


Lou Harvey (UK)

The social and pragmatic parameters of L2 motivation: Investigating the motivation of three UK ESL learners

An investigation of 3 UK ESL learners motivation in relation to globalizing world, identity, future selves and selective participation in social development. Very much rooted in Gardner and Lambert, and Dornyei.


This is also the subject of the paper I'll be presenting at the 14th Warwick International Postgraduate Conference in Applied Linguistics (28th - 29th June), for which my abstract has just been accepted. So I've got this paper to write, plus my paper for the New Dynamics conference in Jyvaskyla at the beginning of June. I'll also be presenting at two conferences here at the School of Education in Manchester: From Here to There and Back Again: Conference papers by the Language Teacher Education community on 3rd June, at which I'll be presenting my Jyvaskyla paper; and I'm about to start work on an abstract for a paper for the Student Research Conference on 5th July, which will be based on my methodological work on Bakhtin, voice and agency (I'll post a link to the abstract when it's written). So there's plenty to keep me busy in June: four conferences, initial interviews, transcription, two hen weekends (both of them mine, so no escape), and moving house.

Think I'll miss out on July but come up smiling in August.

Ups and downs and merry-go-rounds

A Good Thing happened this week, and also a Less-Good-In-An-Immediate-Sense-But-Ultimately-Good Thing, both as a result of all this public profiling on blogs and websites and such things as wot da kidz like to get down wiv. I've reached out to the world and the world has reached out to me in response - and it's good to be reminded of that reciprocity, of the connectedness of all things.

Having posted on the Language Teacher Education blog that I was submitting an article to Gender and Education, I got an email from a colleague suggesting, in very friendly and collegial terms, that I seek help and advice from my colleagues when involved in such an undertaking, as it is something of a big deal. He deduced that I hadn't done so from my supervisor's response to my announcement (something along the lines of 'What are you publishing, and where?'), and told me that this particular supervisor had been invaluable in helping him shape his own work. No big thing, on the surface - very supportive, and a pleasing reminder that people want to engage with me and my work. But it was painful to read, and tapped into a raw feeling: it was a reminder of the extent to which I'm still blocking full participation in the academic community. I've been struggling with the loneliness of academic life and the endless examining of the inside of my own head, and as a result of this ambivalence I've been resisting the very thing that might have made me feel better - reaching out to people. I felt a little ashamed of myself at this recognition, and at the fact that not only did I not ask for help but that it never occurred to me to do so. And I've made something of an identity shift in response: whereas before I thought my self-starter, getting-on-with-it mentality was ideal for PhD study, now I'm seeing it as just another trait to be held in balance - sometimes it will serve me well, and sometimes it will need challenged. (Oh - I do enjoy it when Scottish English creeps into my idiom...)

And the Good Thing... A few days ago I got a phonecall from a student in Denmark, also studying motivation for learning English, who had been guided to my website by one of my collegues here in Manchester and was interested in sharing ideas. It was very exciting, as I don't really know anyone else working in the L2 motivation field, and testament to the power of networking. We've been exchanging emails and he has inspired me to contact some of the people whose work I've been reading, to introduce myself and ask if they can put me/us in touch with any students they know with similar research interests. So I'm starting to feel like a participant in a community, with some control and (of course) agency in terms of shaping my role within that community. And it feels good.

And that's me for now, with nothing to report except that I have a sore throat in the midst of all the spring loveliness, which is just wrong. And that I saw a particularly depressing piece of graffiti in a pub loo over the weekend, saying GIRLS, MAN THE FUCK UP AND GET SOME SELF-ESTEEM. Thanks for that, genius. If ever there were an indication of why girls' self-esteem may be at risk...

First article submission

Ahhh - a beautiful sunny weekend we've just had, more June than April, and I got myself nicely sunburned on the beach at Porth Dafarch and atop Barclodiad y Gawres, Anglesey, North Wales. Sadly I hadn't brought my swimming togs, though the sea was bone-achingly cold even for a paddle; certainly my compadres thought so, as they sat on the beach clad in grey-and-black trainers and hoodies, watching me wade in my sundress. Ah well. With a nod to the Derridean proclivities of one of my co-Cymrics: Vive la differance.

Just submitted my first article to a peer-reviewed journal - in this case, Gender and Education. Am quite delighted at having something of which I'm proud enough to submit (whether its quality is commensurate with my pride is another matter); but, more immediately, at having hauled myself through the online submission process.

For.It.Is.Tedious. And no-one tells you this stuff. I had to:


a) download a Word template to tell me what headings went where and in what font/style;

b) excise my table from the body of the text, indicating only [Table 1 near here], and put it in a separate document;

c) rewrite my references in Chicago style, with initial line-overhang;

d) rewrite my abstract in 200 words, according to the publisher's direction; then saw the journal's stipulation of a max. 150-word abstract and rewrote it again;

e) write a cover letter with a 'statement of relevance' - why my article is of interest to the journal and what is novel about it;

f) choose preferred reviewers - well, I didn't have to do this, but I did. I just assumed the journal itself would send to appropriate reviewers, but it seems there is the option to give the names of two or three people you think might read your work from a sympathetic standpoint. Again - no-one tells you this stuff. After mildly panicked consultation with my vastly more experienced Dr and PhD housemates, Aggie Hirst and Chris Rossdale, I suggested two academics who have been particularly influential for me - but still feel uncomfortably presumptuous about doing so;

g) tick lots of boxes confirming all sorts of legal requirements - that you have not submitted this manuscript anywhere else, that you have read the copyright terms, that you understand the ethical dimensions;

h) excise all identifying markers from one of the manuscripts in preparation for blind peer review.


And more, for the whole business has taken me a good two full days. In fairness, when I created my account and actually started the submission process, it was quite straightforward - the system was reasonably user-friendly and took me through everything step by step. What was frustrating, though, was the absence of one definitive checklist for the journal - there were author guidelines on the journal page that said one thing (e.g. 'submit author details on a separate page'), then links to guidelines on the publisher's page that said something else ('submit author details on a separate document'). That slowed the process down considerably. However, it is done - and I know what to expect for next time.

Speaking of which, am thinking of putting something together from my qualitative MSc assignments, in particular the Qualitative Data Analysis module, in which I explored interview data from both an inductive and a deductive perspective in order to understand how learners perceive and experience agency. It was interesting, it was. I'll poke around some of the qualitative inquiry journals, I reckon, and let you know.

Photosynthesise well, my friends!

It's brown...

...but it has a map. And an astounding array of exotic fonts. Welcome to my PhD blog.

I begin this today as my brain is jagged from thinking and my face all a-spasm from prolonged screen-staring. What better to do now, I thinks to myself, than open yet another writing outlet? On a beautiful day? A Friday, no less? Well, this is the life of a PhD student, so I may as well embrace it, eh? Come join me. Group hug.

And besides, I've made an exciting discovery. Mikhail Bakhtin is his name. 'Re-discovery' would be more apt, actually, as he featured in my undergraduate work too, but I wasn't quite ready to absorb him then - I didn't have the 'in' I have now. Namely, the question I was asked by my progression panel in January, something along the lines of:


'You make a lot of grand theoretical claims, using concepts like identity, voice, and agency. What do you mean by these terms?'


I stumbled; I fumbled, I bumbled. And went home and thought: What is it that I mean? Why do I believe in agency? It's an emotionally appealing concept, right? What more basis than that? But 'because it is' is no justification for anything, and I had to find some way to articulate my use of the term. Enter Bakhtin, who had reared his imposing forehead several times during my reading, and whose proffered thread I decided to take up in earnest. His work on dialogism offers a useful foundation for narrative methodology, and for the concepts of agency and voice I'm trying to formulate; not least in my reflexive work, and my attempts to find my own voice as an academic writer among the voices of so many others. Aha. Is this why I've started blogging..?

There's something else at work here too: Bakhtin provides a connection to my literature-student days, which I’ve only recently linked to my interest in narrative research. As an undergraduate I was fascinated by what stories do, how they negotiate the space between the words used to tell them and the worlds which create them, and are reflected and transformed by them. Since I’ve been an education postgraduate I’ve felt distant at times from my first academic interest, but now I’m reconnecting. So I can identify the emotional appeal of Bakhtin – now to explore the intellectual appeal, and to consider how they intersect. And I'll post more on Himself on my website when I've done some more thinking.

I'm going outside now.