Vlog 259 - Literacies

So many words are thrown around contemporary schools, universities and workplaces. Literacy is one of the most frequently used words. It is also a site of confusion, ambiguity and lost opportunities. Let's talk literacies as a word to enable change, revisioning, emergence and citizenship.

[SleepEludesMe]

I’ve been backtracking my thesis journey to try and figure out what on earth went wrong (struggling to write my chapters) and I accidentally stumbled on 4 ideas that put my struggles into perspective by pointing out the invisible steps and skills and structures that go into requirements:

1. An online chat with a friend that ended up with me comparing my difficulty with my thesis to my ease with writing lab reports and having the terrible realization a thesis was similar to a lab report with extra parts like the soft skills and the self-determined topic and that while I was trained to write lab reports, I had almost no good training on the rest of the research skills needed to write a research paper with a self-determined topic that must be carried out with a partner community.

2. An ADHD podcast being suggested to me on Spotify and they helped me make sense of why I struggled so hard with making sense of my thesis. It came from two main difficulties: (a) people with ADHD often struggle with executive thinking, that is, the function that allows our brains to more or less organize, summarize, and prioritize information, and (b) my ADHD brain saw too many possible routes and ideas about how things could work, like a dozen racing thoughts with dozens more in the background that I couldn’t even decipher because I was too overwhelmed from just trying to hold onto the twelve. With my system overloaded like that it puts me in so much distress and frustration that my brain starts begging me to look away and do something that’s easy and stimulating (escapism in it’s many forms). In order to avoid that cycle of avoidance, I needed to learn how to off-load my executive thinking from my brain alone to things more external to me such as writing thoughts down on post-it notes (while my thoughts are racing) and then refining and arranging it in a mind map tool. Focusing on one post-it and one branch at a time also helps with keeping my thoughts from thinking about the rest of the topic and getting overwhelmed by all the moving parts that my poor brain simply cannot organize or anticipate how to visualize all on its own (especially with how much I was thinking about).

3. Reading a good research paper for the structure so I can try and see how everything fit together and how the author understood their topic. Basically trying to breakdown why and how the research paper works instead of trying to absorb all the ideas they put forward for once. Turns out that they had a very different (and very clearly organized) way of thinking about their topic. It was far more honed than mine and I got that insight from the numerous papers and guides and videos that I consumed to try and figure out how to make sense of my research. It’s hard to describe the difference but I already had a vague notion of what I was doing because I conceptually understood the things I’ve been taught about the research process but practically, I don’t know HOW to do it or what standards I need to meet about how I conceive of my topic. I was way lacking on the pre-writing and conceptualization process and I didn’t even know because I was mostly just trying to answer the outline my advisor gave me and adjusted when something wasn’t fitting.

4. As I tried to grapple with how to organize the information I have about what went wrong with my thesis (taken from 400+ pages of written and electronic notes from over 2 years or work) I found myself thinking back on frameworks and other ways of displaying information so that I can more easily describe what went wrong, I had the idea to look back at my project management frameworks like the work breakdown structure to organize all the things I have done for this thesis and how most steps did not work as they should. Ended up refreshing myself with some projman fundamentals and jesus christ I’ve gotten step 1: defining your project entirely wrong and that’s why I keep losing track of what my thesis statement is and find myself being pulled in several directions because of potential routes I could take (actually directions that could lead to another research project entirely). And I also had little clue as to what I was working towards (what standards I must fulfill apart from passing) and project management stresses the importance of having success criteria for every deliverable I need to work on. It’s probably overkill to use project management to deal with my research but with my ADHD brain generating too many ideas and limited ability to organize them so that I could subconsciously figure out what options to filter out as irrelevant, the structure, goal-setting, and strict path-following of projman just might be necessary.

My education has mostly taught me to understand things on a conceptual level and the exams were doable so long as I liked the lesson and made time for studying. My test scores let me pass but I never picked up with invisible skills that actually went into requirements. I didn’t realize what I was missing until now either because my grades were fine and professors don’t get why I’m struggling when they know I should be smart enough for this, given my performance in other requirements. In the end, I had to wait for social media to suggest ideas about what was going wrong after I’ve spent several hundreds of hours working on a thesis that other people have crammed into a few weeks or months while juggling classes.

P.S. Also, I remember feeling immense confusion and frustration over writing these chapters have not at all been like the schedule we have be given deadlines for or how it’s been presented in books. The linear research process was a lie. Research gets messy and non-linear because your views change throughout the research process and if it’s a topic you aren’t very familiar with AND you’re a novice at researching, you won’t even realize just how incomplete or mistaken your perception of the topic is.

[vrixphillips]

one of the most fascinating literacies to me is Music literacy and the perception of tone: some people are born/develop perfect pitch, others develop relative pitch, but perfect pitch degrades with age apparently. Singers and even some musicians can develop "fluency" in sight-reading/singing and instantly sing or play a note as they see it without the slightest pause to think about it, while others have to hear the note to match it, or stumble constantly.
Really enjoyed this video and look forward to the rest of the trilogy! Is there a recording of your presentation on "The New PhD"/Artefact? It sounds exciting and I'd love to see it :D

[marychenka]

Thank you Tara. My research lab is the world and I claim it proudly in my thesis. Thank to your previous vlog about positionality I do not think it is a mistake anymore. :)

[cigdemfndklar]

I think as a female I am in love with you Tara. Your gothic, metalhead, startrek vibe and your wisdom are making me watch all your videos with excitement as a PhD candidate in urban planning. Your City Imaging and Unique Urbanity books are also added to my must-read list. Much love ♡

[diana_raie]

Great as usual! I am waiting you every week and learning a lot from previous vlogs.

I wonder please if it is possible to group vlogs of related topics into playlists (like folders). This will help audiences to follow these valuable videos.

Regarding this episode,

Watching this video creates an imaginary question about hidden world. Are dealing with hidden worlds or meta physics can be considered as Hidden world or meta physics Literacy?!

Thanks

[swilliamsMHS]

This was very thought provoking as I’ve never heard literacy used with such a broad meaning. The closest I’ve encountered working in my field as a practicing pharmacist is the distinction between literacy vs. health literacy. I think that the definition of literacy is illuminating in a lot of areas. For example the idea of “cultural competence” in “communications” seems to me to be a type of literacy.

[ronwilliams]

Thanks for your always thought-provoking videos. I'm 68 in a couple of days, and am going to re-enter University a.s.a.p. probably starting Mphil, going to PhD (astrophysics). I've watched most of your online explanations partly as a motivational stimulus, lol. It helps me to get get into it.