Constructing Writing Practices: A writing model for all disciplines

Posted on by academicswrite

I woke up yesterday morning to an email from an unfamiliar name in my inbox titled, “article you just published.” It was a nurse scholar from Georgetown requesting a copy of a publication I knew was coming soon, but I didn’t know had hit the presses yet. Hot off the press at the Journal of Nursing Education.

Screen Shot 2018-07-04 at 1.03.51 PMconstructing-writing-practices-in-nursing (ooh I hope this PDF works — it may be linked here, and it probably isn’t copyright appropriate but we’ll see how long it lasts)

This is the first time I’ve been emailed directly for an article of mine. But it is also the first time my current work has been published in a journal with a > 2.0 impact factor (high for nursing education journals). And then the ivy league comes calling. Also a first.

I tell the story of the birth of this paper in the article itself and my engagement with the literature to produce it. Believe it or not, this section was requested by reviewers. I think they expected a couple of sentences and I gave them about two pages instead — oh well — be careful what you ask for.

The paper started as a philosophy of nursing science assignment where I was asked to address a controversy in my research area. What immediately came to mind was the deep sense of devaluing of writing in nursing and nursing’s anti academic discourse — both of which contribute to the much talked about theory-practice gap that pervades practice disciplines such as nursing (and most health professions, but also other practice disciplines like education and business).

In combination with the anti academic discourse, I had just spent the fall revising a paper exploring all the writing self-efficacy measurements developed for post-secondary populations through a template analysis of the items on these questionnaires. I was looking to find out the constructs psychometricians were identifying as having influence on writing self-efficacy of students. The largest category of items in the template focused on surface writing elements like punctuation, and putting together a paragraph, or writing sentences with subjects, verbs, and nouns, or can you write clearly, with focus. Those were not the elements of writing that I saw my students agonize over when writing for me. They agonized over topic choices and ideas and understanding what they were reading and how frustrating writing could be. The model that developed from this template analysis was a combination of Bandura’s self-efficacy theory and Flower and Hayes’s cognitive processing model of writing and a reviewer asked me if this was it…. was this template enough to describe writing — and more specifically, writing in nursing? I wanted to address this question.  I had also been simultaneously immersed in the literature talking about writing as a socially constructed process so I also knew the model I would eventually develop would be situated in a socially constructed epistemology.

The components of the model can be defined liked this:

Identity: Incorporates writing voice, the self as it appears within a written text, past experiences with writing and their influence on present writing, and levels of writing self-efficacy. Reflexivity facilitates the metacognition and intertwining required to activate the other components of the model as they relate to writing and nursing identity.

Creativity:Novelty and originality as defined by a discipline inform creativity. Idea generation, synthesis, and interpretive abilities all require creativity. Creativity fuels passions and develops identity.

Emotions:Writing emotions can be positive or negative, are subject to roller-coaster extremes, and will drive or inhibit the writing act. Emotions are present at all phases of writing from planning to feedback.

Relational Aspects: Writers form relationships with the sources they incorporate through citation, inspiration, or interpretation. Writers write for an imagined audience and that audience connects with their writing when a writer reveals themselves in their work. Students also form relationships with their teachers during pedagogical processes and feedback interactions.

Context:The writing context includes perceived difficulty of the writing task and writing evaluators, the stakes involved in producing a well-received product, and the values and demands inherent in a disciplinary discourse.

The paper emerged in four phases:

  1. A two page proposal which focused on the theory practice gap and anti academic discourse. I didn’t know at this phase I would be building a model.
  2. A seminar on my topic where I presented the first drawing of the model based on the layers of a globe. I even had a visual image of that globe which when I shared it with my classmates and asked them to reflect on it and discuss it, really fell flat. They didn’t get it — although I have to say that one of my classmates recently, after writing her candidacy papers said to me, “I totally get this now.” It just takes the right kind of writing experience. Screen Shot 2018-07-04 at 12.49.51 PMI don’t remember combining creative and emotional knowing at this stage. I wonder when that changed? Probably where everything changes: in the act of writing.
  3. The final draft of the paper where I removed the visual drawing from the paper because it hadn’t worked when I presented it to a test audience. The paper just described the model as an intertwined process, with identity at the core, where each one of the any the five factors could be the focus at any point of the writing process or they may be simultaneously influencing one another and merged through reflection.
  4. The post submission review process the article changed again mostly in my discussion of nursing’s relationship to writing. Virtually nothing of the text of the model changed other than the reviewers asked me to attempt to draw the model again. So I did… I drew some rough sketches of the model on my own and then I called in an artist pro (my 17 year old daughter Emma) and asked her to draw me a better version. She was a real pro. She drew me four versions on her digital drawing tablet using my version as inspiration and we ended up combining two together. I liked the angular look she had given one version — the twisted strands of the model that you see with the labels on them. They reminded me of how you wrap a tensor bandage. But I liked the the round twist she put on her rounder version of the model so we combined the two into what you see as the header to this blog. IMG_7725My very rough trial drawing of my vision for my model. I saw the intertwining as a braid. As you can see, Emma’s final version at the top of the blog is just so much more effective.

The model is black and white in the article but for poster presentations I had upcoming I asked for a coloured version. I let her pick the colours. Then with the help of some text templates from @academicbatgirl I decided to make a mug of it.

fullsizeoutput_1b06NSFW — but it will comfort me at home.

I wrote the paper for nursing, prepared the poster for a nursing education conference,  but I decided with a bit of an elbowing from my advisor to enter the poster in the faculty of health sciences poster competition. I had no chance of winning in this biomedical positivist world where most of the work is physiological or microbial or population health so I was curious how the judging sessions went. I ended up with two judges one from microbiology and the other from molecular genetics (hilarious — I don’t even know what this is) and I spend my 10 minutes just talking about academic writing and its genres and I managed to get one of them to say, hey … this isn’t just for nursing, this could work for all disciplines. Getting that statement out of a judges who were very unlikely to share my worldview, was winning enough for me.

This model is what I will use to develop the items to assess writing self-efficacy on a new questionnaire designed from a constructivist perspective of writing. I’ve already developed the items but you know how the PhD process goes — several hurdles to jump over before I can get started on testing the questionnaire.

The paper appears here:

Mitchell, K. M. (2018). Constructing writing practices in nursing. Journal of Nursing Education, 27(7), 399-407. doi:10.3928/01484834-20180618-04

If your library doesn’t subscribe to it and you would like a copy of the article please feel free to email me at academicswrite@gmail.com or contact me on twitter @academicswrite

 

The Value of Valuing Writing Self-Efficacy: Changing thinking

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If Doctoral programs didn’t change your thinking, they wouldn’t be doing their job would they? Here at the start of a new year, I thought I might reflect upon what has happened to my thinking on my planned thesis project to develop a measurement instrument to assess writing self-efficacy.

I finished all my required course work toward my doctoral degree last month and I’m itching for the next steps.  I still have one more course to take and that is an elective I, and my committee, have agreed upon which will fine-tune my skills in measurement of psychological concepts and the statistics of assessing those measurements.  I’m really looking forward to the change in pace as I have been immersed in philosophical ramblings for quite some time now and that is hard thinking. Something a little more “rule based” and structured might be nice. I say that now but I’ll be frustrated, no doubt, by the particulars in no time. In some ways, taking the course is a bit for show on my transcript so no one questions where I got my measurement training from when I go to defend. I would rather sit and read a hundred articles on my own and figure it out with textbooks and conversations. The bad thing about courses is that the structure I just admitted to craving, hems you in. I really hope I have some flexibility in terms of what I read about and how I tackle my assignments but that is usually not the case.

Since 2011 I’ve been studying writing self-efficacy. I’d like to say I fell into that area of research inspired by something profound I read or a conversation I had but it was quite happenstance and to some degree arbitrary. I had read nothing. I just knew my students lacked self-efficacy about their abilities to write the paper I assigned them. I’ve since read a lot and my thinking has shaped — it is a little less a big lump of clay… it’s taking form. I have opinions. I am developing expertise.

Before I even entered my PhD program I had conducted three studies and a questionnaire review on the topic. I knew when I was writing my please-admit-me letter that I wanted to develop a measurement instrument to measure writing self-efficacy. Nothing about that has changed. I’m going forth. But my thinking about how to approach the project has changed a lot. One of my classmates just asked me recently how it is I’ve managed to get this far and not change my topic.* (She, incidentally, has changed her study focus three times). My response was, first, that it was a bit of pragmatism…. the most direct route to graduation so I could get on with doing exciting and meaningful stuff.

My second response was that it had changed, philosophically. I wouldn’t have considered myself a theoretical thinker when I wrote that admission letter — that turns out to be absolutely not true, and slightly lacking in self-awareness. The originall vision was straight up statistical psychometrics. But, partially because I had to for a course, I developed a constructivist model of writing (for nursing) — bracketed for a reason — which I revised and sent back to a journal at their request over the holidays. But the reading for that has lead to other thoughts about writing self-efficacy, my chosen concept. I chose the concept when I had read nothing but now I have read plenty.

  1. Constructivism is the road to better measurement of writing self-efficacy. Writing has been through three epistemological shifts (product, process, social) that happened in fairly rapid succession and the tools that measure writing self-efficacy reflect that. The earliest tools assessed it by grammar fault and ability to construct sentences and be clear. Later ones took a more cognitive process, motivational, self-regulation, perspective. But none of the tools take a social constructivist perspective. Some of the tools have the occasional item that brushes up against constructivism but they don’t capture all the social aspects of writing bound to affect writing self-efficacy. How do I know this? I did the work and it was published in the Journal of Nursing Measurement along with an accompanying editorial.
  2. Writing self-efficacy does not have as strong of a relationship to grades as we would like to think. I certainly have not seen any convincing evidence in my own studies or anyone else, that it actually predicts grades…. at least not in a real-world relevant way. (In health research they would call what I am talking about clinical significance.) Part of this prediction failure is related to context. People assess their self-efficacy based on previous performance but in the face of a new teacher, a new subject, a new discipline, new rules, they may assess their own ability poorly. I for example would tell you right now that I believe I have fairly strong skills and knowledge of measurement based on the reading I’ve done and my research experience. I should ace my measurement course without difficulty. But I’m walking into a course on Friday in a new discipline (psychology), with an unknown professor, into a post-positivist world when I have been firmly living in social constructs for the past year, and I may really have no hot clue how well I’ll perform or live up to expectations. Writing self-efficacy may not be able to adequately predict grades. It may however predict the behaviours you require to get a good grade. It may also predict your willingness to keep writing. The only thing that will make your writing grades better is more writing. And are grades really a good reflection of the quality of a writing product anyway? Food for thought.
  3. I believe that the way in which people cognitively interact with a questionnaire and come to a decision on what score to give themselves is a complex process. And this is one part of my thesis project that has evolved dramatically. I was going to do straight up psychometrics — factor analysis, multivariate statistics — but I want to know more than that. So I will develop the questionnaire based on my constructivist theory and I will do think-aloud interviews with students to assess how they interpret the items and come to a decision on how to score themselves. Cognitive interviewing, the psychologists call it. So the project has become more qualitative. I will also use a delphi panel to help me with final edits. The question is, what comes first, the delphi or the think-aloud interviews…. Hmmm.
  4. I’m becoming more interdisciplinary in my thinking. Strange since I’ve been immersed in the nursing world for all my courses and my teaching but what I am doing is not just for nursing. I’m discovering quickly that my work will spread further if I quit spinning it for nursing journals. I published the questionnaire paper and it was really good. The theory paper is awesome and I called it a theory for nursing education but…… it is a theory for all disciplines. It’s almost too bad that I sent it to a nursing journal but I also had some bones to pick with nursing and their writing publications so it is OK there. I’ve published a few other studies that have had some interesting findings and I’ve had more than one moment of being ready to lose my shit with some of the overly structured rules attached to some nursing journals. I nearly pulled one submission recently because of that. I had a great journal choice in educational psychology all picked out as my target for resubmitting and then when I went to read the paper for fit, it was all nursing this, nursing that.…… and it was going to be more work to remove the nursing spin than I was willing to do. I just want the damn paper published. I fear that the psychology people doing work in writing self-efficacy won’t find my papers in order to cite them. They will be unlikely to search CINAHL for this topic — for good reason.
  5. My study needs to be about more than about undergraduate writing. I was going to only interview undergrads but the fact of the matter is that I do want the questionnaire to be applicable to research on grad students as well. I also don’t want the questionnaire to be only applicable to nursing education. It needs to be interdisciplinary.

I need to be thinking about writing my research proposal soon even though I am about a year away from being ready to move to that stage. I’ve written now 4-5 papers that have required me to summarize and present a review of the literature on writing self-efficacy. It is going to be tough to find yet another way to write about the same findings without self-plagairising.

I still have a lot of reading left to do. The pile in the photo is all the articles that I have collected since summer of things I want to read. Some of those articles are about construct validity in writing and assessing writing outcomes so I hope to fit them into my  work this term. Hence, since I often focus this blog, and my Twitter on what I am currently focusing on, there may be a little bit of a flavour change in what I write about for the next three months as I explore measurement, and hopefully, measurement as it relates to writing.

 

*In some ways, I would love to change my topic. I have been introduced to all kinds of shiny things that have grabbed my passions — eg. Narrative Inquiry, for one. But I have a committee now set up to get me through a measurement project so I carry on. And, this IS the next step in my work, this tool development. The big qualitative study will come after.

Is Social Media the Creation of a Never-Ending Research Story? 

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“At its heart, research is storytelling.”

How do we know our research has impact? What science seems to value in terms of impact is metric based: number of publications, citation counts, uptake of an intervention into practice. But research is a social process perhaps even more than it is a measured process and what if you do the kind of research that seeks social change, or change in beliefs, or adoption of new attitudes? What if your research explores how individuals learn and adopt that learning into their identity?  In those venues, measurement is irrelevant. How could we possibly count how many people change their behaviour or beliefs based on our research?

My focus as PhD student this term has been knowledge translation. Knowledge translation goes by many alternative names — knowledge mobilization, knowledge diffusion, the movement of theory and research into practice — just to name a few.  This focus has caused me innumerable struggles. What does research impact mean when what you are trying to do with your work is invoke a paradigm shift about writing in a health discipline (nursing)?  Traditional discussions of KT and the oft-cited Canadian Institutes of Health Research definition, take a very linear approach – top down, some might say.  You do research. You get practitioners (knowledge users) to implement your research. Success happens. How successful might depend on how quickly that happens (rate of uptake). The knowledge translation model may seem simple if your research is about use a of a new drug to treat a disease symptom but less simple if you are looking at insidious changes that happen in practice attitudes and beliefs.

No matter your research focus, you aren’t getting through a grant application without explaining how you will share your research.  In practice-based disciplines, such as nursing or education, this is a tricky  obligation. We know from our lived experience that when we have a real-world problem, we and our colleagues, don’t immediately go to the library databases and search for a solution.  Our problems are more context-based and require solutions that consider that context. For example:

How do we get students to understand what we mean when we say we want them to integrate reflection and literature into their assignments?

How do I make this rubric assess what I want it to assess on this specific assignment?

As educators most of our knowledge doesn’t come from books. It comes from experience. When we have an immediate problem in our work our first search for knowledge involves walking down the hall and knocking on the door of a colleague or mentor.  That colleague usually responds with a story. Remember the time when…. ? or I had a student once who…. ? And we absorb these stories into our own experience and it changes who we are as educators. It changes what we know and how we practice. This is our mechanism for learning. This is our mechanism for change.

So my struggles with knowledge translation (and the more pragmatic requirement that I write a paper worth 50% of a grade on the subject) have made me ponder my existence on social media. I started the @academicswrite persona to talk about my research — to talk about all change that needs to happen in academia surrounding writing. It occurred to me while reading about the various modes of knowledge translation that I had created for myself a mode of community building and knowledge translation. But through what mechanism does social media work as a knowledge translation strategy? Is social media the creation of a never-ending research story? Is social media a mechanism for social change, and by extension, the uptake of (educational) research into practice?

But change is hard. And in academic writing you are coming up against belief systems that are outdated, emotionally charged, opinionated. There are so many faulty assumptions in academia, especially in the disciplines, about academic writing. I’ve written before about how academic writing instruction is devalued so I will not repeat those points here. In writing there is also a novice to expert trajectory that influences the academic community.  There will always be new people coming into that community that will scream loudly at the top of their lungs that student grammar is so bad and it makes their writing unreadable and this is the fault of someone else — high school teachers, the intro to writing teacher, texting culture.

(Novices can only see grammar problems. Experts can see past the grammar to the real causes of those writing problems that appear to be grammar.)

So, I have to write this final paper and I decided I’m going to tackle the role of social media in creating communities of practice through networked participation, because without knowing it, a year and three months ago when I started this blog and its sister-Twitter account, I was formulating the beginnings of my KT plan. And this KT plan works through a complex web of identity building, storytelling, and the changing of belief systems — a complex blending of the personal and the professional.  Drawing inspiration from Naomi Barnes, a member of my Twitter community, I can see how the relationship between Twitter and Blogs is a subtle process of knowledge building.

It starts with a Tweet that is a small spark. That spark may not look anything like the idea that is brewing inside. In fact, it might appear in your Twitter feed and go by completely unnoticed.

Your psyche may be sensitive to the topic so that you start to see it everywhere.

I tell my research story through tweets. I research and read papers on the topic and I tweet about what I read.

Then I write this blog you read now as a preliminary sketch of my thinking on the topic. The comments I get about the blog and the tweets will continue to shape my thinking. The blog will inform what I write in the formal paper to meet the requirements of my course. That formal paper may turn into a publication. The publication will be released and I’ll tweet about it. More twitter conversations will ensue. I may write a blog telling additional research stories that relate to the publication. I’ll create a larger narrative of my research which adds to the collective meaning and knowing on the subject.

I see blogging and social media as the construction of an ongoing story that blends the personal and the professional.  Because academic writing and publishing is one thing but blogging and micro-blogging, like Twitter, are a whole other genre of writing. A genre created for persuasive purposes. Through my Twitter (primarily) and my blog I’m telling a story that has no beginning and it has no end but that story is intended to seep into your emotions, your psyche, and your identity. And I’m doing it all though telling you stories that contain fundamental truths by using conventions that are part fact and part fiction.

But how do we use storytelling to persuade and create change through social media?

  1. Stories lead to reflection – I’ve often said on my Twitter account I am not a writing tipster but I do aim to inspire. If I make you think about your writing approach, even if what I say just resonates, I will improve your writing process. That improvement may come through simply providing you with assurance that the way you write is not abnormal. I may provide you with the courage to try something new whether it be in your own writing, or in how you guide your students. I will make you think.
  2. Stories create meaning – Meaning comes through creating a supportive relational space. Telling stories to help new community members feel belonging means you take your work seriously and the work of your colleague’s seriously too. These stories move our theory into practice because those experiences are lived.
  3. Stories “freeze thoughts out of context” – Social media becomes a permanent record of thought and its evolution. You can trace your own evolution of thinking through the trail of tweets you leave behind and by the correspondence it elicits.
  4. Stories create community by binding a listener and the teller together –Transformation may occur within a listener/reader in how they view themselves and how they view others. Empathy results. I follow people on Twitter based on who I can learn from. I follow scholars of different races and genders, ages and stages of life, different socioeconomic statuses and backgrounds. They tweet about their lived experiences which are different from mine. I don’t always interfere with their stories by commenting but I read and I learn and I come to understand.
  5. Stories evolve with discussion – we tweet and we write blogs and other contribute to the conversation, and by creating that conversation our thinking changes.
  6. Telling your story teaches others how to tell their own stories – when we tell stories we encourage others to tell their own stories. By listening to the stories of those with experience we can absorb their stories into our own sense of identity. Having an identity within a community means a sense of belonging will develop. In this way, the community continues to change and the collective knowledge developed within this situated learning is in constant evolution.

Storytelling is one of the mechanisms through which our practices change. Social media can facilitate that.  Please comment or tweet at me the aspects of storytelling that work in your community and networks. It will most certainly inform the paper I will write about this process.

In Defence of 2016

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2016 was a pretty good year. Yes, it was shit politically in the USA and the Brits lost their senses. Lots of cool people died this year. Women’s and LGBTQ rights likely took a giant leap backwards and race relations are abysmal — if they were every improved from the days of slavery.

But for me, personally, 2016 was pretty good. This is the year that for me, things have started to come together, where all my wandering paths are merging.  Bear with, or not, in the stream-of-consciousness rambling that is to come.

I am an age that 20 years ago would have scared me to think I would ever be this old, and I know from years of nursing that I’m not remotely close to being old yet. I have enjoyed my 40s, with 4 and a bit years of them left. My 40s have allowed me to be who I was always meant to be without feeling pressured to keep up with some feminine so-called ideal. I don’t have to feel like I should keep quiet when I have something to say, or when some injustice needs to be corrected.  People have listened to me in my 40s. What was, in my 20s, labeled as rudeness or negativity is now called directness and criticism. Strangely, I don’t feel how I say things is different, but the perception and reception of what I say has changed. I choose my battles more carefully, perhaps, but I’m also less willing to back down when I take on a battle. It’s a trade off.

Academically, I’m hitting my stride and everything is coming together. I’m not your typical PhD student who hopped from undergrad, to masters, to doctorate.  In many ways, this route to higher education has likely been a benefit to my confidence. My path has been more meandering. I started with an undergrad in English lit (mostly the classics, Victorian, Romantic, Canadian lit, and creative writing) with a minor in History (mostly white man’s Canadian history and American history — I didn’t choose white man perspectives by choice. The white man part is just how it was taught back then). I was right out of high school, when I started university, with the intention of getting an education degree afterward. A plan I abandoned after volunteering in an elementary school and realizing what hell teaching that age group was.

So I followed up the English degree with a nursing degree. And nursing degrees demand practice experience if you wish to have any shred of credibility. Nevertheless, I was working in a hospital less than 3 months when I realized I couldn’t do that work for the rest of my life. The practice side of nursing carries an inferiority complex. The bullying behaviour is everywhere. And the practice community is anti-academic, and I’ve talked like an academic without knowing it before I became an academic. I did not fit in with my practice colleagues who had different values.

I began my Master’s a year and a half later. It took me 3.3 years to finish. I explored waiting for cardiac surgery as my thesis research project. I published everything I wrote in that program. I gave birth to child #1, 6 months before I defended my thesis. That child is now 15.5 years old. I began teaching nursing at a non-tenured college 6 months after graduating from my Master’s. Child #2 came 2.5 years after child #1. This is where the gap in my scholarship started. But to me it feels as if there was no gap at all.

Editorial Aside

Here marks the just over 500-word point of this blog. That’s exactly the length an editor gave me to write an editorial about writing in nursing education. This is one of the reasons why 2016 has been good to me. Pockets of my profession value my work. (Pockets of it doesn’t value my work and I’ll give examples of that too.) I’ve just awakened to how difficult 500 words will be on this topic. As the editor said:

screen-shot-2016-12-27-at-11-16-26-am

I am wondering how this editor might feel when my editorial says that the problem with student writing is far bigger than basic skills and grammar which is what the bemoaning is usually about at faculty meetings. The problem is with how we teach writing and how we nurture it across a curriculum. The problem is with our outdated beliefs that writing instruction ends at one introductory course or, worse, sometime back in high school.

End of Aside

I looked into starting my doctoral degree in spring of 2005 but there was no local nursing doctorate back then and the alternative non-nursing local program I looked into was going to essentially make me re-take all my master’s coursework. No thanks. I decided to write a novel instead. Then I got divorced. Then I did the carpe diem thing for a while. This is the rest of my gap in my scholarship. Then sometime around 2011 I started coming back to my academic ways.

The years 2006-2010 were not good years. That’s all I’ll say about that. 2011 is the year I turned 40. It was also the year I met my current partner, but we wouldn’t get together for another year and a half. 2011 is also the year I started planning my first writing self-efficacy study. I suppose it takes 5 years to settle into a new area of research because the article I wrote describing that study is due to be published in spring of 2017. In 2016, I did the project on writing self-efficacy instruments (which is a damn fine project if I don’t say so myself) with 2 colleagues — a close friend, and the professor who would eventually consent to be my PhD advisor. That project is getting published in summer 2017 and it is also the project that got me the invited editorial.

In September 2016 I started my PhD studies  at the same institution in the same nursing faculty where I did my undergraduate and my master’s. Familiarity is kind, but I can see in my 15 year absence from that faculty that not much has changed culturally around the building. The faces have changed somewhat… they are a little older, a little more experienced …. but so am I. I was told when I applied that I had experience that most other applicants do not have. I can see, three months into the program, that this is true. I am older than most of my classmates. I am much further ahead in my thinking about where I am going with  my studies than most of my cohort and perhaps the cohort a year ahead of me too. This is despite the fact that my first PhD course was something I had no experience with — philosophy. We went around the table the first class and were asked to discuss what theoretical/philosophical lens we applied to our focus area and everyone had a ready answer except me — 15 years out of my masters and I had no hot clue about theory/philosophy anything. Till the prof, who is also my advisor, prompted me with post-positivism — OooohKaaay — maybe it is? All I needed to do to catch up was read and read and read and read. I’m still reading. I am post-positivist. I’m also post modernist. My classmates, who appeared more philosophically grounded than me at the start, are all extremely smart women who amaze me everyday, but they are plagued with more uncertainty than I have about what they are doing and where they might end up in this program.

Sometimes my certainty in what I am doing makes me wonder what I am missing. I wonder if I am completely misguided and I’m not yet seeing it. If perhaps, I am really just an unworldly, simplistic, chump and no one has figured it out yet. I decided to try my hand at grant writing.  I had a brief moment of panic and almost didn’t go through with it, but the panic was allayed by a hallway conversation with my advisor. The grant application for this studentship required me to plan the design of my main PhD study — 3 months into my PhD I was required to be certain about how I would conduct my research. I think it turned out really well.

That may be naive. There is no way I’m getting out of this first draft of this grant without major revisions. Maybe I won’t get this grant, but I have a good start of a draft for all future grant submissions, assuming some of the other outdated assumptions of academia and doctoral studies don’t render me unfundable in the grant application process — e.g. that I didn’t bridge my PhD work from my Master’s, that all my publications are over 5 years old, and I have a full time academic job already 14 years in the making. Decision makers seem to assume a full time job means I am not dedicated to my studies. That I won’t finish as fast as others or be as productive.  It seems the expectation is that in order to qualify for grant money  I should drop my full time job, be supported by my spouse like many of my classmates have been able to do — which for me would mean needing to give up my house. Live in a tent, perhaps. Feed my children mush, maybe. Continuing to work full time seems to mean I shouldn’t need money. Yeah, I’ll be alright without grants to pay my tuition but likely my colleagues who can afford to be supported by their spouses could also be financially alright without scholarship money.  But they’ll still qualify for the money and the academic merits that come from being able to report winning that grant on their CV. I’ll get neither the money or the merits.  I have to accept the reality that granting bodies may deem me unqualified for student grants because of my employment status. No grant pays enough to give up my salary.  Maybe the solution is to just be better than the other applicants so that part of my CV is overlooked. Maybe there is no solution. Academia is what it is and what it will always be.

The not so good: My abstracted submission for a presentation was waitlisted for a conference I’ve attended and presented at every year for the past 4 years. My one-of-a-kind 3-year longitudinal study on writing self-efficacy and writing across the curriculum was waitlisted for a conference which tends to be weighted in anecdotal presentations about the “cool things we are doing in our classrooms.” I could take this personally but I know what I’ve produced with this data. The abstract did what it could with a 250 word limit. I’m trying to find out how they made decisions to accept or waitlist presentations (no rating criteria was posted as it is for most conferences) but I suspect, like most of my other emails to these organizers, I will be ignored or get some vague platitude as explanation. I declined the waitlist. I don’t need to be forced into last minute inconveniences, presentation prep, and travel planning. I can shoot for something better which will more benefit my learning. Maybe I’m arrogant and overconfident but… naaahh. There have been more things stroking my ego this year, than flattening it.

I wrote two amazing philosophy papers this term that have taken my thinking leaps and bounds from where I was when I started the year. The feedback from my first paper was encouraging and inflating and I’ve already submitted it for publication. I’m still waiting for feedback from the second paper, but this one will likely be the foundation for the design of the writing self-efficacy instrument I develop for nursing. Who knew I would come to think of the writing process as socially constructed? Maybe I did already but I just needed a label.

In July 2016, knowing I would be starting my PhD and wanting to document the process, I started this blog, and an account to participate in academic Twitter. I started it with nothing. I had no following and no plan. I just posted and people responded and retweeted and the followers came. I’ve been strategic about it. I am an astute observer. I learned what tricks worked to draw followers. Like all good academics, I also did some research to help my strategy.  I’m heading into the new year — a little over 5 months into participation — with just over 700 folk, most complete strangers, watching what I do every day. I’m doing something right, I suppose. The plan for the account is still evolving — I will always be “Academics Write” but my real name may start popping up here and there over the next year. I have connected well enough with a couple followers that I chose to voluntarily reveal who I am. I knew the account would be primarily about academic writing (and it is), but it was bound to turn personal as well (and it has). I have blogged before but I did it with high anxiety. I would post something I wrote, often about anxiety, divorce, or relationships, and immediately panic that people were seeing me. I eventually quit blogging because of the sleep I was losing and the worry about what people were thinking and saying about me behind my back in my real world. That I haven’t panicked about my writer here as of yet, may just be a function of anonymity, but so far so good.

If I had to sum up 2016, it would be that it is a turning point year where I have spent many moments looking back at how far I have come and the many things that have shaped my life to bring me to this moment. In many ways, 2016 has been great because of how I am coming to life, coming to know myself, and acting on my dreams and desires. That, more than anything, has made 2016 a great year.