Writing Strategies for the Education Dissertation

Diane Bennett Durkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000293807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Ricerca nella didattica

Writing Strategies for the Education Dissertation offers a unique take on doctoral writing. It uses composition and rhetoric strategies to identify key activities for generating thought to keep students writing. It de-mythologizes the view of writing as a mere skill and promotes the view of writing as thinking.

It uses writing to help students invent, think through, write, rethink, and rewrite as they develop and present their innovations. The book opens with this mindset and with the purposes of the task (adding to knowledge); it helps define a "researchable topic, " and provides advice on invention ("brainstorming"). It then addresses each of the key sections of the dissertation, from Problem Statement, through Literature Review and Methods, to Findings and Conclusions, while underscoring the iterative nature of this writing. For each chapter, the book provides advice on invention, argument, and arrangement ("organization") – rhetorical elements that are seldom fully addressed in textbooks. Each chapter also looks at possible missteps, offers examples of student writing and revisions, and suggests alternatives, not rules. The text concludes with an inventive approach of its own, addressing style (clarity, economy, and coherence) as persuasion.

This book is suitable for all doctoral students of education and others looking for tips and advice on the best dissertation writing.

1

De-mythologizing the process

Changing one’s mindset

1.1 Understanding the task (preparing mentally)

While some doctoral students have written original research papers, many come to the dissertation with little or no experience in designing a study. And students in professional programs may not have written an academic paper for ten years or more. Many doctoral students feel uncertain before the task of so large a piece of writing, with its many complex parts. Why is writing a dissertation difficult – different from writing a long class paper? For those who have always been excellent students, why do some suddenly feel overwhelmed when faced with this task?

A dissertation is more than just a difficult task. It asks students to conceptualize a new problem, evolving out of previous studies or work, and to tackle it on their own. Original work is paramount. However, the handbook advice to just “pick a topic” is naïve. Such advice assumes that students’ interests and experience simply land them on a ready-made topic, which is not the case. The student’s job is to add to what the research community already knows. That means that the study needs to evolve upwards out of existing research. The way forward is to read what researchers have already investigated, and look for what they say, or the writer discovers, is a possible new contribution.

That contribution does not necessarily create radical change. In fact, one might determine that a potential solution does not work; or one might discover a new way to test/confirm results. The originality could also consist of creating targeted on-the-ground change, using a new process. For instance, the researcher could recruit teachers, in an under-resourced, high crime urban high school, to implement action research; the study could involve challenging them to create lasting school interventions for their “street life” students. Despite its narrow focus, this kind of contribution requires students to do original thinking: to evaluate the conceptions of others (e.g., what are “street life” students?) and to defend their own choice of questions, conceptual framework (e.g., sense of belonging), and methods. In this endeavor, new researchers often face multiple choices, and that can be daunting.

The difficulty serves a purpose

As doctoral students make choices to construct their studies, they gain many benefits, beyond their own study. They learn to identify the underpinnings of existing research, especially the need to align questions and methods. Through extensive reading, they see how research evolves out of previous research, creating a history, a story, of researchers’ thinking. And they become more attune to the pivotal theories and assumptions that govern previous work. As a result, their own emerging work gives them insight, as both consumers and creators, into the choices researchers make as they design a study.

But new researchers don’t need to feel unprepared for the task. The requirement of contribution leads many to think they need a national, headline-worthy problem, for example, “the achievement gap,” “school to prison pipeline,” or “secondary trauma” – and to find a whole new solution. To the contrary, intransigent problems are unlikely to be solved by a dissertation study; nor is the creation of a new theory likely to come out of a single individual’s work. Rather, doctoral students need to add to what is already being researched, in a defined way. The advice here is to read according to one’s interests, examine carefully what researchers say are limitations or next steps with existing research, and select a doable project. New researchers thus connect their work to the larger problems that other researchers, too, are addressing.

Finding one’s project requires digging

A useful project can be found by looking for new applications. For instance, one student applied mindset theory to urban teachers teaching third grade reading. The gap in the research was in the unique application. Early reading instruction has been studied extensively. Mindset theory has been studied extensively. But no one had combined the two, applying the theory to transforming urban teachers’ practices for teaching early reading. The researcher then added another thread: how mindset theory could change how elementary teachers responded to English Language Learners’ early reading difficulties. Adding an action research methodology gave the study further uniqueness: The doctoral student then participated in and recorded the teacher transformation process.

Despite its seeming narrowness, the study connects to the national problem of low reading scores – highlighting a particular theory, a particular setting, and a particular grade level. The changes in teacher practice were significant and provided ample data for Findings and Discussion chapters. The process became a professional development model for aiding other early reading teachers in urban settings. To make a contribution, the study did not require a whole new theory, just a new application – filling a gap. Dissertation writers need reminding that opening up a new field is rare.

It can be hard to find a gap

Getting to that gap can involve some false starts. One doctoral student wanted to study students of color from low Social Economic Status (SES) communities, many of whom are first-generation students. College persistence for this group is a well-known problem. The study was thus too broad and over studied, and even choosing a particular urban neighborhood did not narrow it. The student then decided to narrow to low SES students of color who graduated from a university-assisted high school but still had college persistence problems. Now the problem stood out: Why do low SES students of color, whose school has K-12 university support based on the latest research, still face problems of persistence in college? Education researchers would likely be very interested in data from that study.

1.2 Understanding dissertation processes

Once students have a realistic notion of what comprises a “contribution,” they still need help with demythologizing initial processes. What follows are some tips to lessen the initial uncertainty of engaging in original research:

Getting used to openness and provisional drafting

The first step in writing a dissertation is banishing the undergraduate mental model of completing an assignment. An assignment has built-in assumptions about the value and approach of a topic – and assignments may limit the topic itself. Assigned work also provides a timeline and final submission guidelines appropriate to a particular course. Many of the processes are assumed in the assignment. In contrast, a dissertation asks students to choose and rationalize their topic, the approach, the timeline, and how to think about a topic. It asks for multiple drafts of a provisional nature. Those who have never carved out a study, or had to generate a process, may feel unsettled about what to expect.

But the student can embrace the openness rather than resist it. Doctoral students can tap new personal resources in setting their own timeline and goals. They benefit from entertaining multiple possible projects, trying out these projects on others, getting feedback, and spending time assessing their own processes. This is unlike any work they have likely done before, and it offers opportunities to really think about what matters to them. They could ask, broadly at first, what is the national problem that has affected them personally? What is the narrower problem, the slice of the pie, they see in their everyday life and feel capable of investigating? Then, having read extensively, what questions do they still want answered? What kind of data will help uncover answers? Who can help them find such data?

With a potential researchable problem, doctoral students might then ask further questions about themselves: When is a good thinking time to sort this out? When is the best writing time? What kind of a project person is the student? (procrastinator? perfectionist? rebel? good enough for now person?). Questions about materials and organization are also important: How does one best keep track of readings? Can Endnote or Zotero help – programs that can keep track of the articles one has read? How best store and label readings? Those unfamiliar with large projects will benefit from writing down answers to such questions, so that they can review their responses. They can also use such notes to record their thinking about where they are and the choices they are making. Having a dissertation diary of activities from each day helps students remember successful processes and emerging new ideas–insights to refer to and reflect back on.

Learning to track one’s thinking

For any project, the early thinking is going to be messy. Small notepads or recording devices might be useful, to capture unpredictable ideas. Students can also identify other doctoral candidates, with whom to share early drafts and ideas. Building good habits helps. While reading itself takes time, writers also need to summarize and evaluate articles, perhaps in extended notes; to put tags on articles for Zotero or other programs; to categorize articles by theme or potential argument; and to keep synthesizing readings (asking how articles relate to one another). Once the literature suggests a potential project, students can summarize the tentative project to share with their Chair, initiating a pattern of written give-and-take early on.

None of these activities is difficult, but many may be unfamiliar. This tracking of thinking and continuous note taking and other forms of writing are not like responding to a typical “assignment.”

Using the writing process itself for thinking

To further change one’s mindset, one has the mantra of this book: Writing is not the aftermath of thought, it is thought. The advice here is to start using the writing process itself to develop initial thoughts. Even at the earliest stages, the student can write to think about possible ways of narrowing a problem. For a general problem, it helps to create a list of narrowed possibilities. If the student doesn’t yet have a problem, or even a broad topic, they can first back away and read in several fields, using writing to take notes on strengths and weaknesses of the existing studies and the direction of the research. This keeps a record of one’s thinking and provides practice with analyzing methodologies. Given that published studies typically identify future research needed, the student can quickly see what is already being discussed – and where others see the research going. Reading and writing about other studies has the additional benefit of exposing new researchers to the academic language and descriptors for different research areas.

Further uses of writing at this early stage include setting the conditions for discovering the gap in the literature – by critiquing existing studies: What questions remain unanswered? What methods would have better answered the research questions? What questions are being ignored? Notes taken while reading published studies can turn into possibilities for a new study, with the writing process itself unleashing thoughts about what one could research. The researcher might stumble across a new kind of study, perhaps in an unfamiliar field, using an unfamiliar vocabulary. This might turn into a highly innovative dissertation, a project that may have once seemed daunting because of the specialized language.

As the student uncovers a possible researchable problem, another early writing process is to list what a researcher would need to know or do to investigate a potential problem. As the list takes shape, the student may uncover a more doable project. The list may function as simple brainstorming and early planning. But it could also reveal what is a feasible project and what is not.

Writing down divergent thoughts

A project notepad – just for the “wayward” thoughts that surface – may keep the student’s thinking open and flexible. Notes may unveil something needed later on – an original purpose or an analogy too easily forgotten. At times, writers find themselves wishing they had captured a thought, as they circle back to old discarded ideas. The dissertation, as original research, poses an opportunity to act as independent researchers/writers. That means staying open and creative, and keeping a record of far-ranging thoughts.

Doctoral students often resist such seemingly inchoate, “creative” processes as writing out incipient thoughts. It is understandable that they measure as “time lost,” this free-flowing writing on multiple problems, seeing it as distracting or divergent. To the contrary, writing something down itself provokes new thinking. The words on the page talk back, become an entity of their own, and stimulate new responses. When writers first set about writing, they create an internal audience, and the need to persuade, so they are already engaged in argument. Then, as they reexamine their words, they change them – remove or refine them, going beyond initial ideas. Writing a dissertation is an iterative process, and one cannot predict how one draft leads to the next.

To return to this book’s premise: Writing is not just the later trappings of thought, it is the constructive act of thinking itself. And if the thoughts are messy, or unsupportable, it is good to get them down and out of one’s head so that one can analyze them – reshape them, save them for later, or leave them behind. Most likely, the wayward thoughts themselves will generate new ideas, thoughts that the writer could not “think” before sitting down to write.

Divergent thinking can also be heightened by exchanges with others. When one talks to people who work in the field, either as researchers or practitioners, new perspectives open up. Questions to ask other researchers include: What are some of the under-researched questions? What questions matter? What are other researchers, boards, or organizations thinking about? Who else might have an interest in this topic? Who would benefit? Are there “clients” for such work? What information do they need or want? Talking to people is a good way to keep moving and to find what one most cares about. Other peoples’ questions and perspectives can push the writer forward.

A word about locking in: Some students decide on what they want to do, write up their project as a statement of desire (“I want to study X”), and lock in – rejecting mentors’ and others’ concerns. They keep trying to make the project work, despite problems such as do-ability, ethical concerns, a weak rationale, or overlap with previous research. Then, with time slipping away, they fight rewriting. The less flexible writers are early on, the more difficulty they will encounter starting again. Having several possibilities (plan A, plan B) helps. A good relief valve is also remembering that a much-cherished idea can always be resurrected after the dissertation is complete, so no great idea is lost.

Understanding revision

Clearly, the dissertation is not a linear process, in which the student writes one paragraph after the next. Rather, the dissertation consists of continuously revisiting one’s thinking. Doctoral candidates take notes and write drafts so that they can rethink their work (otherwise they can’t move forward); th...