Changes within me

I started working on my Masters thesis with a brashness that I have found something so special that everyone will want to know about it. I made strong claims, too strong perhaps. My writing was harsh, as if I were trying to tell you how great my work is.

Today, as I come to write another draft of my work... I find that I have mellowed much. After having my work criticized by experts and friends, I have lost that brashness and pride. I find that I am more like an explorer now. I am more humble in my attitude. I delete the parts where I was over-confident, and replaced them with more simple and genuine words.

I can sense this change within me, because now I feel so uncomfortable with what I had written in the past. Why did I write like that? Why those lofty words and big concepts? I feel like my feet are more firmly planted on the ground now.

Shifting gaps

Is it me, or do we all experience this?

Depending on how I structure my literature review, I can reveal different gaps. So like a kaleidoscope, with each turn and movement, I see different gaps!

How? It's constantly shifting!

Which structure is best? Which information to privilege, which to leave out?

Re-reading articles used in the literature review

To give you an update of where I'm at doing my thesis. I have collected sufficient data. I have done preliminary analysis, enough to have written two papers that I hope can be published. However, in the process of doing those two papers, I realized that I want to reorganize the way I present my findings, which also means, I want to reanalyze my data. I have been analyzing it thematically, however, recently I realized the strength of using a case study approach is not found in identifying common themes across cases, but finding nuances and complexities within cases. However, owing to the way I have been analyzing data, I have not been able to capture all these nuances within in each. (They were good for finding cool ideas for papers though.)

But also because of this change of emphasis, I will need to change how I did my literature review. It probably means that a lot of what I have read would become less important in significance, but a few key articles would increase in significance. I am thinking of doing it this way in order to be able to rightly position my paper. Writing the papers for publication made me realized that I have been too broad and expansive in review previously and I want to narrow down and be more focused.

So the next step for me is to re-read those key articles that specifically talk about TEACHERS and patriotism. Rather than just PATRIOTISM in general. I will be better able to show the gaps this way... And next step also, to re-organize my findings section. It will be good. Currently there is too much discussion in my findings section. However if I write them case by case, I could more clearly delineate each teacher and later on discuss on findings separately in the discussion section. I believe this would tidy up things quite a lot.

It's already end September... Year ends are usually more busy for me... But my goal is still to complete my thesis within this Semester. But I am not going to kill myself over it. If really cannot, then I will extend by one more Semester, though it's not ideal because I don't need 6 months to write.

The following passage comforts me, at the thought of re-reading my articles to write my literature review...

...remember that in qualitative inquiry reviewing literature is an ongoing process that cannot be completed before data collection and analysis. As you reflect upon the data you collect, you will realize the need to review previously unexamined literature of both substantive and theoretical nature...Regard reviewing literature in interactive terms. You can learn different things from the work of others depending on what you already have learned and what you need to know. You may find yourself both dismayed and pleased to benefit later from material read earlier but overlooked because you lacked the experience to recognize it as beneficial. (p. 32)

Glesne, C. 2011. Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction. Boston, MA: Pearson.

Thinking in absolutes/Over-reliance on theory

I have been sharing my work with another scholar, a PHD student, who is my writing partner. She sees and thinks differently from me and is very sharp, always identifying incoherence in my work. Recently, she shared her observation that I often think in absolutes, it is either this or that, but I do not realized the nuance and complexity about my cases that my teachers can fall somewhere between the two extremes. This was similarly raised during my confirmation exercise last December. My examiners asked me why I saw "blind patriotism" and "constructive patriotism" as two extremes. Couldn't they be on a continuum?

The more I grapple with this, the more I realized the roots of my dichotomous thinking. When I first read about scholars' theories about the two types of patriotism, I was floored! I was so excited as I found theories that I can adopt into my study. But I forgot that the tradition from which these scholars were were from the positivist tradition and quantitative researchers. Nuances did not captivate them, they wanted a way to pigeon-hole people into two groups such that they can easily explained why some people were one way and other people another way. Subsequently, their theories became popular and replicated and theorized by others, yet... people have rarely questioned the limitations of dichotimizing people into just two groups!

What happened to me was that I was "being in the grip" of an existing theory rather than "having a grip" of this theory (p. 61). Rather than using the theory to help me frame my inquiry in a certain way to reflect my aims, I was trying to support someone else's agenda. Why should I be supporting these theorists' agenda? Shouldn't my research be adding on to knowledge, rather than simply reinforcing existing knowledge, even though reinforcing knowledge is not a bad thing in itself. It is important "to distinguish between ideas that were moving [my] inquiry forward and those that, however intellectually compelling, were causing [me] to spin [my wheels]." (p. 61)

This is how Schram (2006) puts it:

...what you should avoid is the tight embrace of theory as a singular preoccupation in your work. Imposing a well-established theory on your developing inquiry may set you up with a neat and satisfying framework for your study, but it may also prematurely shut down avenues of meaningful questioning or prevent you from seeing events and relationships that don't fit the theory...theory can provide perspective and suggest pattern, but it need not define what you can see.

Schram does not deny "the practical ways in which theory can contribute" to our work though, including:

1. Offering us a way to connect our work to some larger issue or body of knowledge by inviting us to consider classes of events rather than single instances.
2. Giving us a critical perspective to criticize prior work.
3. Enabling us to not study everything by narrowing our decisions down "to attend to some things but not others in the course" of our inquiry (p. 60).

Schram, Thomas H. 2006. Conceptualizing and proposing qualitative research. 2 ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey and Columbus, Ohio: Pearson, Merrill Prentice Hall.

What writing a thesis is like...

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invest your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if what you write is demonstrably false. The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days' triviality. - Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, page 11

 Annie Dillard puts it so well. It is "interesting and exhilarating", "engages all your intelligence" and "life at its most free" yet not that free because we want to produce something for the benefit of not just the writer, but all for his or her audience. :)

An encouragement to write a thesis rather than many unrelated essays

"It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn. A project that takes five years will accumulate those years' inventions and richnesses. Much of those years' reading will feed the work." (p. 71)

- The Writing Life, Annie Dillard, pg. 71

Throwing away the beginning of a work

"It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away... In those early pages and chapters anyone may (p. 5) find bold leaps to nowhere, read the brave beginnings of dropped themes, hear a tone since abandoned, discover blind alleys, track red herrings, and laboriously learn a setting now false... Sometimes the writer leaves his early chapters in place from gratitude; he cannot contemplate them or read them without feeling again the blessed relief that exalted him when the words first appeared - relief that he was writing anything at all. That beginning served to get him where he was going, after all; surely the reader needs it, too, as groundwork. But no.

Every year the aspiring photographer bought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length he turned to the young man: "You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?" The young photographer said, "Because I had to climb a mountain to get it." (p. 6)
...
How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally? (p. 7))"

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, 1990