Taking up my identity as PhD student again...

There's so many things going on nowadays that I just might forget that I am doing my PhD. I am someone with a great sense of responsibility, so I don't often neglect my commitments for long and when I have relegated one to the side, there's always a nagging voice within to pick it back up again.

So I think today is the day that I resume full responsibility for my PhD studies, including facing fears of the unknown, meeting people, and reading up on things, and being a true-thinker-scholar. I am no longer going to give excuses that I'm not that kind of scholar (not keen on politics etc) or that kind of person (not extroverted etc).

I will be whoever I need to be for the next 3-4 years to get my PhD completed. (And watch my life expand.)

I think it is my responsibility as a training scholar to take scholarship and knowledge seriously. And that for me would include world events and news and history. I hope to be well read in terms of context and all.

Yesterday I was watching some YouTube videos about Catalonia and yes, I think that kind of direction is what I need to take. To give myself a broad base of learning and knowledge so I can build my scholarship upon a solid foundation.

So last week I closed a writing chapter. This week I will open a reading one. I am going to be a reader. Read widely, think deeply.

And I will plan when I want to do my confirmation. I will plan some deadlines into my schedule. And I will meet them. This way, I will be moving forward.

Watch this space!

Performance anxiety

We often hear about graduate students becoming depressed and all. I myself am very prone to anxiety. Just typing that A word made my palms sweaty. I think one of my biggest fears (probably silliest on hindsight) is attending conferences and meeting all these very established scholars and having to shake their hands. This is/was very difficult for me because I am also socially very shy and public situations trigger this sweaty palm condition, which makes me even more embarrassed than I already am.

Maybe I need to challenge this. So what if a big shot frowns at my palms, wipes them off his pants, looks at me with disgust and walks away?

Nothing. That's fine with me if someone chooses to conclude who I am based on a first impression.

Wait, but I am here not to talk about graduate school mental health issues, though I feel I have sufficient experiences to talk about it.

I wanted to write how I am mysteriously not very nervous about a workshop I am going to give soon and to a big crowd next Friday. This is in contrast to my big bout of nervousness needing to teach intermediate English to non-native speakers in June. And also giving presentations in classes. Maybe I feel less watched, I don't know. I get tense when I feel I am being watched.

Maybe I am thinking that I really have an important message to share. I may not share it very well, but I still want to share it, because it resonates with my heart. M may think this is not right, the teacher must give the students what they want, not only what she wants to give... I don't know... It's so hard for me, maybe I need to learn to balance this, but that burning message in my heart distracts me from caring how people would think of me.

It's almost like, you can think the worst of me, but still, please listen to this message.

Maybe for us, graduate students, we can develop such a relationship to our PhD work and believe in it so strongly, we can be so confident even before people in authority who put us down.

I also care less how big a shot you are. I don't know how this happened. Maybe after visiting a very rude doctor. Or maybe after aging a few more years and gaining authority over younger ones by simple virtue of age. But I realized what I value in a person is not his intelligence, not his wealth, not his power; but his kindness, gentleness, thoughtfulness, and lovingness. To me, I will respect people who have the latter set of characteristics. I just value them more, I don't know why. Maybe you do too. :)

So don't try to impress me with your intelligence if you don't have the heart to care that your intelligence is not harming other people and making them feel stupid.

the thrill of seeing oneself in print

“I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist. Who knows what this urge is all about, to appear somewhere outside yourself, instead of feeling stuck inside your muddled but stroboscopic mind, peering out like a little undersea animal – a spiny blenny, for instance – from inside your tiny cave? Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere. While other who have something to say or want to be effectual, like musicians or baseball players or politicians, have to get out in front of people, writers, who tend to be shy, get to stay home and still be public. There are many obvious advantages to this. You don’t have to dress up, for instance, and you can’t hear them boo you right away.” – Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Re-reading old articles

I used to hear this a lot in church and often experience it myself, where you read the same bible passage at different times and hear it speaking different things to you (in other words, you are interpreting it in different ways). They say that is the power of the Word.

Something similar happens in academia. I am re-reading articles I had to read in the past to write my Masters work. But I am reading them in new ways because of my new research questions and directions. So I am looking at different sections of the old papers as relevant to me and I am re-interpreting old passages that once had a certain meaning to me, but today mean something else.

Gosh and we were once afraid it was possible for two people to write a similar thesis?

It is hard for the same person at different stage of his research to even look at the same thing in the same way. I would go so far as to say it's possible for the same person to read the same materials and write two different theses from different lens or approaches.

Doing PhD = Investigating a mystery...

You know, if I'm not an academic, I think I would be a police investigator, doctor or journalist. I love investigating and trying to solve puzzles. Once you get me hooked on an issue or a problem, I am constantly perplexed and trying to seek to understand, find evidence, and solve the "crime", or form the most coherent story I can about what has happened.

So what happened with my study?

There is this law article that I have refused to read for over five years since I first discovered it (White, 2009). I knew it was related to what I study, but because it's from another field, I'm hesitant to read it. I shouldn't have been. So far, of the very few law articles I have read, I have found them to be exceptionally eloquent and well-argued. Maybe it's the training of the lawyer.

Yes, so I finally picked up this thick piece. It's very thick, but as it is with the way law articles are structured, most of the bulk comes from the footnotes in microprint containing a lot of "evidence", a lot of citations and notes. And I really enjoyed reading this piece though it's written in a style I'm not so used to - argument after argument.

And I was referred back to the first IEA Civic Education Study. In this study, a very strong negative correlation was found between students who practiced patriotic rituals and their democratic knowledge and attitudes (Torney, Oppenheim & Farnen, 1975). This was a very strong finding, BUT no one seems to have carried on from there... In the next IEA Civic Education Study, they simply said that they decided to focus more on patriotic attitudes rather than practices, and they say that most nations no longer carry out patriotic rituals anyway (Torney et al., 2001)... Naturally, in the next IEA ICCS, again, no more mention of patriotic rituals (Schulz et al., 2010)...

Because of this, our knowledge about patriotic rituals is so scarce and we are all referring back to a study done in 1975 that does not even clarify the relationship between patriotic rituals and democratic values. I mean, you cannot say that it's because of practicing these rituals that students develop undemocratic views. There's no cause-and-effect relationship. Maybe it is schools that tend to focus on patriotic rituals that have less time to focus on teaching democratic values that have led to this?

More importantly, what are patriotic rituals? This report only tells us it is stuff such as flag raising ceremonies. But what  happens during a ceremony such as these. What other behaviours constitute patriotic rituals? How about the area of my interest - commemorative events? What's the role of symbols?

Why are so few people interested in this area of study? Maybe it's not worth studying, or maybe I have discovered a mystery that has to be solved!

Isn't doing a PhD fun? :D

(Let me self-indulge for a little while, I've been struggling for sometime with the topic and conceptual framework and just trying to put the various things I read about together.)

References

White, B. T. (2009). Ritual, emotion, and political belief: The search for the constitutional limit to patriotic education in public schools. Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No. 09-06.

Torney, J. V., Oppenheim, A. N., & Farnen, R. F. (1975). Civic education in ten countries: An empirical study Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell International.

Torney-Purta, J., Lehmann, R., Oswald, H., & Schulz, W. (2001). Citizenship and education in twenty-eight countries: Civic knowledge and engagement at age fourteen. Amsterdam: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA).

Schulz, W., Ainley, J., Fraillon, J., Kerr, D., & Losito, B. (2010). ICCS 2009 International Report: Civic knowledge, attitudes, and engagement among lower-secondary school students in 38 countries. Retrieved from Amsterdam:

Cohesive and integrated writing

"Sometimes when someone speaks or writes about something that is very important to him, the words he produces have this striking integration or coherence: he isn't having to plan and work them out one by one. They are all permeated by his meaning. The meanings have been blended at a finer level, integrated more thoroughly. Not merely manipulated by his mind, but, rather, sifted through his entire self. In such writing you don't feel mechanical cranking, you don't hear the gears change. When there are transitions they are smooth, natural, organic. It is as though every word is permeated by the meaning of the whole (like a hologram in which each part contains faintly the whole)." (Elbow, 1998, pp. 8-9)

Elbow, P. (1998). Writing without teachers. New York: Oxford University Press