Steeping

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How do you like your tea? (Do you like tea at all?) I am a fan of tea but sadly not coffee because coffee tastes very bitter to me – even if they add sugary syrupy things, or lots of milk, I can still taste the bitterness and I just don’t like it. However, tea – the boring regular type, is the type I can get my head around. I’ve always wanted to like other sorts of teas, the exotic sounding fruit teas and chamomile and such like, but again couldn’t quite get my head around those either. Straightforward, run of the mill, English breakfast tea works really well for me! Anyway, I digress and I haven’t even got to the end of the first paragraph yet!

So, I’ve been thinking about thinking. I had the opportunity to have a lovely catch up chat with Lowis from UCLAN (University of Central Lancashire) who led one of the ThemPra courses on social pedagogy that I took part in earlier this year. It was really great to catch up with her, and talk about the things I’ve been learning on my research journey and the things that I’m hoping to do in the future. At the time, I said to her that I felt like a ‘reverse tea bag’. She looked a little perplexed, as you might imagine, but then I explained: it’s like when you see a tea bag being immersed in water – you can see the colour of the tea seeping into the water as it gently changes colour from clear to brown. I explained that I feel like that but in reverse – that I am an empty blank tea bag being immersed in fully flavoured, deep and thoughtful tea and I’m slowly soaking up all those different ideas and concepts and then using them to make sense of what I’m learning.

When it comes to research, so far, all I’ve seen up close really is the governance side of things (the challenging, at times tedious process of ethics applications, protocol writing, process requirements etc) and the ‘busy doing’ side of research such as data collection, focus groups, etc. But not so much of the other bit. The thinking part. And of course, analysis, evaluation and reflection is a really important part of research, but not the part that I’ve had the chance to do very much myself so far.

And yet, arguably, it is the most important part of the process. The reflection, evaluation, the teasing out of the true story from details that may seem at first to be disconnected, is how we find answers in our research. The alignment of different pieces of information in order to create a whole picture, taking into account the context, the people involved, the wider factors…all of those elements are what makes the whole picture – like a jigsaw puzzle that you assemble but without having the box to look at.

And it has occurred to me, that without the steeping part – the bit where you have time to think and process and make sense of what you’re reading and seeing – without this part, then how can you make the data? Create evidence? Make sense? If it’s just data, and you reproduce it and say to somebody look, here’s this lovely shiny data, but you haven’t interpreted it then how is it useful? It still doesn’t mean as much as it could do, if you took the time to think it through.

I appreciate that sounds really obvious now I’ve said it out loud (or written it down) and somebody once said to me that one of the best parts of research is the luxury of having time to think* but it’s only now I think that I’ve realised what that means and put it together, because without the time to process and reflect and consider the information you’ve gathered, how can you make sense of it?

Since my internship finished, my progress on my research work has slowed, understandably. However, I’m still pursuing other avenues and looking at other options such as applying for a doctoral partnership program with the South Coast team or perhaps getting funding from elsewhere all together? It would be very challenging for me to fund my own Masters or PhD, and I don’t want to do that on a full-time basis, I need to maintain an income for my family, and I want to retain the connection between my practical face-to-face work and the theoretical and academic work that I would like to do. In essence, I want the theoretical to be grounded in the practical, and I also need mental space to be able to get on with everyday life. Sometimes it’s not in the research space that the work is done; sometimes it’s easier to process the research work as if I just leave it to run in the background like a computer program, and then suddenly while staring at the broccoli in Lidl I think: Oh, that’s what it means!

I guess what I’m trying to figure out is how can I protect the thinking space- the steeping space – while still getting with everyday life? Still getting on with my job? Still walking the dogs and cleaning the bathroom and getting the food shopping in? And how can I continue to explore options for future research work – which truthfully, just at this moment feel like they’re slipping through my fingers – and still have space to learn, and read, and think? Answers on a postcard…

*sometimes when I write blog posts, I dictate them first, and then tidy up afterwards. This is perhaps why my posts might seem like a stream of consciousness (because they are!) Interestingly, there were a couple of occasions when the dictation app mistook ‘think’ for ‘sync’…however, I suspect that there are times in research when those words might be interchangeable…