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Once More Unto the Breach ...

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After a trying Christmas, I have finally been able to spare a bit of time again for my Fellowship application/writeup about using the Student Forums to support better referencing.

Re-reading my previous e-tivity writeup, I realise it's completely unsuitable for the purpose as it stands. I am not going to procrastinate any longer undertake a proper scholarly review of literature in the field, as if I do that, I will never get the damn thing in. I have got a couple of good articles and I can say I am going to do the proper scholarly thing as part of my application for Senior Fellowship - or whatever the next stage of the HEA is called.

I have found a little set of articles which talk about Voice and Dialogue (and Silence) in referencing practice. They are from tutors who work with students for whom English is a Second Language (ESL), so they are also often dealing with other cultural approaches to writing. They understand our own attitude as culturally situated - not as if we are Jedi battling the Dark Side of plagiarism. The Western (these articles are North American) way is middle class as well as white, and so their reflections are useful to me in thinking about how my more working class students might view referencing.

As well as these, I have got some articles from the module I'm teaching on Education and Equalities, which also talk about Voice and Dialogue.

I'm starting to be reminded of Bakthin's writing on dialogism, which I drew on in my PhD to explore how a poem by a black lesbian writer created Voice. This seems like a promising path to hint at exploring for the future although I must be careful not to get lured off to the Dark Side of procrastination by these thoughts!


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light skinned mixed heritage woman writing letters.

Starting the reading for my Applaud application

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Edited by Anita Pilgrim, Monday, 28 Nov 2016, 13:05

For several months I have had to put aside my application for Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (being conducted through the university's Applaud programme), owing to a sudden upsurge in work.

I have felt just like my own students! pleading a mixture of work-related, family-related and medical reasons (I had a chest infection as well), as I explained to my students that I would not be quite as quick as I usually like to be over marking their assignments. My HEA Fellowship application was actually delayed because my two referees were put under pressure at work too, and didn't have time to do the references.

In the meantime, I felt I should bump up my mostly drafted application with some fresh reading so I did a desultory Google Scholar search for relevant articles. One of my colleagues also mentioned a highly relevant article she had written in a powerpoint presentation. I put these into a list 'for later'.

Much later! I realised that my plan to do my application and other personal development work on Thursday was just not happening. I am always telling my students that setting aside a special day for studying is not a good way to manage time, and I have found this out the hard way myself. I am switching to trying to read an article per day instead.

That habit also takes time to get into! Today I had to rush off to the supermarket at first light as my daughter revealed late yesterday that she had forgotten she would need a pepper, a courgette, some sweetcorn and frozen peas for her Home Economics class. However, mindful of setting a good example to my students, I did try to do some reading a bit later in the day.

I spent about fifteen minutes trying to track down my colleague's article. The internet link she provided in the powerpoint took too long to download. The OU online Library disclaimed any knowledge of the journal in which she had published. I guess I will have to ask her to email me a copy! sad

I moved on to one of the Google scholar articles (one of the few relevant ones I managed to pick out of a big list of irrelevant ones!). When I looked it up in the OU online Library, I inadvertently found out that their search engine will throw up all articles with relevant terms in their titles and key words, so I found a few more articles that way approve

By now I was a bit tired and time was pressing on, so I just carefully put the details of a couple of the articles in my newly formatted Annotated Bibliography (more on this soon). I think I will have a cup of tea after all that!

Cup of tea and slice of cake

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