Thanks Jack.
I will explore your suggestions. I think that
in a number of the students' PPVs there are often indications of the educational
influence the author is having, but ofttimes barely recognised/ taken for
granted/ down played (how much do we need to move from the deficit 'how can I
improve ...?' to the more appreciative 'how I did achieve ...?' to explore the
elements of good/ expert practice?)
In response to your comment that
I've responded to Pip's ideas with a focus on her point that “that these changes are
indicative of an epistemological transformation in what counts as educational
knowledge"
I might add, that in the conversations with my
Learning Development peers, Meeta and Heather, there has been an enunciation of
the concept of epistemological-"I', as distinct from the grammatical-"I" of the
text. My linguistics colleagues are recognising that teaching the use of
"I" as a grammatical exercise, a text construction technique, is not
sufficient to make the moves we are grappling to express, to describe, and to
indicate how we are recognising when we are evaluating assignments.
The use of the term 'epistem-' takes me back to my
reading of King and Kitchener, and their views and research about the
development of reflective judgment (rather than 'critical thinking' - and
perhaps in some of the circumscribed use of 'critical thinking'), as a move
towards a more 'open epistemology'.
Bringing some of this back to 'breaking free from
the traditional scholarship model' focus, I would share that during the middle
stage of my thesis development, when I was struggling to 'do the literature
chapter' I echo-ed a comment heard back in 2000 from a young postgraduate
student who was railing against taking up other scholars' material, and asking
about the 'originality' factor being sought in PhD assessment, and asking why do
so much of the literature work, if it was your own original thinking that was to
be recognised?. My bleat, to a peer, was in regard to finding that
as I read my scholarly area, and drafting material for my 'lit chapter', I
was also taking on the terminology of these writers, and therefore wondering
'whose thesis is this anyway?'
It took me another two years to move to the point
where I was able to deal with the scholarly material at both the beginning of my
writing and at the end, representing what had been my experience: that the
material in the field (the literature, the documented practice knowledge of
other practitioners, who also researched) had instructed my thinking and
professional development design (so upfront placing my idea within a body of
knowledge), and then later at the end of the thesis, when the revisiting of the
material in the field was now informing more of my understanding that had
developed out of (1) the implementation and evaluation of the design, (2) the
gathering and processing of data, (3) the working on my understanding to build a
coherent representation of a model used to help me think about what I was doing
and why, and how it was probably working.
To learn the first discipline of attending to the
field enough to identify a gap, is one step. To learn to move beyond
there, to learn to change, to have one's own authoritative (or 'assertoric'
voice as John Heron puts it) stance to the research that you have done, and
are now reporting to the field, is another learning task, and one which takes
time - so says my thesis argument.
Dianne
