{"id":135,"date":"2011-08-19T17:29:58","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T17:29:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jenrossity.net\/blog\/?p=135"},"modified":"2011-08-19T17:30:58","modified_gmt":"2011-08-19T17:30:58","slug":"thesis-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jenrossity.net\/blog\/?p=135","title":{"rendered":"thesis away!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSC_0569\"<\/a>I’m really happy to say that I submitted my phd thesis this afternoon. I’m pretty much out of words, but here’s the abstract. I’ll write more soon – perhaps a small series of blog posts about the research and where it might go from here.<\/p>\n

My viva is on 11 October, so the blog posts may have to wait til after that!<\/p>\n

Unmasking online reflective practices in higher education<\/strong><\/p>\n

Online reflective practices\u00a0that\u00a0are high-stakes \u2013 summatively assessed, or used as evidence for\u00a0progression or membership in a professional\u00a0body \u2013 are increasingly prevalent\u00a0in higher education, especially in professional and vocational programmes. A\u00a0combination of factors is influencing their emergence: an e-learning agenda\u00a0that promises efficiency and ubiquity;\u00a0a proliferation of employability,\u00a0transferable skills and personal development planning policies; a culture of\u00a0surveillance which prizes visibility and transparency; and teacher preference\u00a0for what are seen as empowering\u00a0pedagogies.<\/p>\n

This thesis analyses qualitative interview\u00a0data to explore how students and teachers negotiate issues\u00a0of audience,\u00a0performance and authenticity in their high-stakes online reflective\u00a0practices. Using mask\u00a0metaphors, and taking a post-structuralist and\u00a0specifically Foucauldian perspective, the work examines themes of\u00a0performance, trace, disguise, protection, discipline and transformation. The central argument is that the effects of both compulsory reflection, and writing online, destabilise and ultimately challenge the humanist ideals on which reflective practices are based: those of a \u2018true self\u2019 which can be revealed, understood, recorded, improved or liberated through the process of writing about thoughts and experiences.<\/p>\n

Rather than revealing and\u00a0developing the \u2018true self\u2019, reflecting online and for assessment\u00a0produces fragmented, performing, cautious, strategic selves. As\u00a0a result, it\u00a0offers an opportunity to work critically with\u00a0an awareness of audience, genres of writing and shifting\u00a0subjectivity. This is rarely, if ever, explicitly the goal of such practices. Instead,\u00a0online reflective practices are\u00a0imported wholesale from their offline\u00a0counterparts without acknowledgement of the difference that being online makes,\u00a0and\u00a0issues of power in high-stakes reflection are disguised or ignored. Discourses of authentic self-knowledge,\u00a0personal and professional development, and transformative learning are\u00a0not appropriate to the nature of high-stakes online reflection. The\u00a0combination creates passivity,\u00a0anxiety and calculation, it normalises surveillance, and it produces rituals of confession and compliance. More critical approaches to high-stakes online reflection, which\u00a0take into account addressivity,\u00a0experimentation and digitality, are\u00a0proposed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m really happy to say that I submitted my phd thesis this afternoon. I’m pretty much out of words, but here’s the abstract. I’ll write more soon – perhaps a small series of blog posts about the research and where it might go from here. My viva is on 11 October, so the blog posts … Continue reading thesis away!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-phd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jenrossity.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jenrossity.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jenrossity.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenrossity.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenrossity.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/jenrossity.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139,"href":"http:\/\/jenrossity.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions\/139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jenrossity.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenrossity.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenrossity.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}