Doctoral Seminar 1
Doctoral Seminar One (DS1) was a place and time for becoming. While the focus of the course may have been on becoming an academic by examining research, theories and issues in qualitative research methodologies, it was a space of four weeks where I became a critical synthesizer, research analyzer, and reflective academic writer. The course started with writing personal stories (Richardson, 2001) and developing an epistemic genealogy resulting in 'My Snake Story'. The course ended with examining 'big tent' measures for qualitative research (Tracy, 2010). This course was an immersion and re-immersion in some cases into educational theory, issues in educational research, examining academic writing, engaging in discourse, and developing my scholarship practices. Being away from home during this course provided me with dedicated time to read prodigiously, write thoughtfully, and reflect deeply."... constructing an academic self occurs in and through writing. When researchers make writing choices they conform, adapt, reframe or resist dominant academic textual genres." Mewburn & Thomson, 2018
DS1 revealed paradox and binaries in academia that continue to plague my thinking. As a result of this course, I became more comfortable as an academic while living and learning in paradox - self vs other, conforming vs resisting, iteration vs completion. During DS1 I became familiar with, but couldn't yet claim ownership of, terms like ontology, epistemology, axiology, ideology, methodology, academic genealogy, heuristics, and intersectionality, as seen in this blog post [Understanding Terminology]. Examining terminology and critically constructing word choices became part of my ethos and praxis as academic reader and writer, while the caution about zombification (Sword, 2012) in academia still resounds.
During DS1 I took to blogging as a "technology of the self, a generative form of habituated 'self-writing' (Mewburn & Tomson, 2018, p. 22), my hupomnemata (Weisgerber & Butler, 2016), as evidenced in my calendar of blogs. This notion of a solitary, ego-centric, self construction became diametrically polar to my belief of embodiment of self in/within community, as exemplified by the conception of ubuntu (Eze, 2010).
It is this self constitution in relationship, notwithstanding distance and technology, that echoes into my research inquiry. I didn't know it at the time, but have come to realize it since, that it was here in DS1 that I began to frame my ontological and epistemological foundations for my research. Some of these positionalities may have been within me all along, but it was here that I began to understand the pivotal impact of social constructivist theory (Dewey, 1916; Freire, 1998, ), critical theory (Ladson Billings, 1998), and critical ethnography (Fine, 1994). DS1 provided an opportunity to discern my research interests. I discovered the philosophies of digital technology (Ihde, 1979), rediscovered Piaget's theory of constructivism and Papert's theory of constructionism (Papert & Harel, 1991) and connectivism (Siemens, 2012), while continuing to ponder the definition for 'open educational practices' (Cronin & MacLaren, 2018) when describing my research inquiry.“Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance.” (Eze, 2010, p. 190-191)
While the academic and scholarly tasks within DS1 - journal writing, workshopping a paper, qualitative research methodology multimodal presentation, and research paper - honed my reading, writing, thinking, and discourse as an academic and scholar, this was only the beginning of further steps yet to be taken into the labyrinth. It was here in DS1 that I explored the worthy topic, rich rigor, sincerity, credibility, resonance, significant contribution, ethics, and meaningful coherence (Tracy, 2010) I need for my future research.
References
Cronin, C., & MacLaren, I. (2018). Conceptualising OEP: A review of theoretical and empirical literature in open educational practices. Open Praxis, 10(2), 127–143.
Dewey, J. (1916). Chapter 7: The democratic conception in education. In Democracy and Education (pp. 85–104). Pennsylvania: Penn State.
Eze, M. O. (2010). Intellectual history in contemporary South Africa (1st ed). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fine, M. (1994). Working the hyphens: Re-inventing Self and Other in Qualitative Research. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Freire, P. (2009). From pedagogy of the oppressed. Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, 2(2), 163–174.
Ihde, D. (2011). Stretching the in-between: Embodiment and beyond. Foundations of Science, 16(2–3), 109–118. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-010-9187-6
Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/095183998236863
Mewburn, I., & Thomson, P. (2018). Towards an academic self? Blogging during the doctorate. In D. Lupton, I. Mewburn, & P. Thomson (Eds.), The digital academic: Critical perspectives on digital technologies in higher education. New York, N.Y.: Routledge.
Papert, S., & Harel, I. (1991). Situating Constructionism. Retrieved May 26, 2019, from http://www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html
Siemens, G. (2012). Orientation: Sensemaking and wayfinding in complex distributed online information environments. (Doctoral Dissertation). University of the Highlands and Islands, Aberdeen, Scotland. Retrieved from https://pure.uhi.ac.uk/portal/files/3077978/George_Siemens_thesis.pdf
Sword, H. (2012). Beware of nominalizations (AKA zombie nouns). (video). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=24&v=dNlkHtMgcPQ&feature=emb_logo. TED-Ed.
Tracy, S. J. (2010). Qualitative quality: Eight “big-tent” criteria for excellent qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(10), 837–851. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800410383121
Weisgerber, C., & Butler, S. H. (2016). Curating the Soul: Foucault’s concept of hupomnemata and the digital technology of self-care. Information, Communication & Society, 19(10), 1340–1355. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1088882