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I teach research and writing skills at La Trobe University. I was part of the team that founded, and still run, #thesisbootcamp with the Graduate Students Association at the University of Melbourne.
researchinsiders.blog
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We all know academic writing “shouldn’t quote Wikipedia”… but what we often get wrong is why it’s not ‘the done thing’.
The real reason isn’t that it’s not peer reviewed–after all, it’s okay to quote primary texts, newspaper articles, memoirs and artistic reviews in my line of research! It’s not even that it isn’t ‘edited’ in the most traditional sense. It’s not even that it’s sometimes wrong (though it sometimes is!).
The real reason is that it’s part of a large stack of reading, understanding and thinking that happens before you get down to the next stage of research. Wikipedia has it’s own take on this, which aligns closely with what I’m going to say here!
I’m going to call this ‘pre-research’ and everyone does it. If you aren’t regularly doing pre-research, that’s usually because you aren’t moving into new fields much, and so you did your pre-research years ago. But most of us who teach need to do it regularly, and many of us who work in interdisciplinary fields have to do it a lot.
What is pre-research? Pre-research is the thing you do to get an idea of the lay of the land, to know what the field is, before you jump in to a deeper literature review.
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I teach research and writing skills at La Trobe University. I was part of the team that founded, and still run, #thesisbootcamp with the Graduate Students Association at the University of Melbourne.
researchinsiders.blog
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Work like you don't need money
Love like you've never been hurt
and dance like no-one's watching
"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it
becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
"it is impossible to imagine a future unless we have located ourselves in the present and its history; however, the reverse is also true in that we cannot locate ourselves in the present and its history unless we imagine the future and commit to creating it" (Anna Stetsenko, 2015).