The logistical pressures of moving countries and cities – from London to Calcutta – and a nasty bout of flu meant that it was sensible to stay offline for a while.

Over the next few blogs I will seek to provide an overview of the educational climate in India, and the extent to which international alliances are changing or are likely to change the university experience .

Why are British universities seeking to find a presence in India?

The Indian government has plans to increase the number of university goers from a current 12 per cent of the population to 30 per cent. In plain terms this works out to a present university student population of 12 million, and a projected increase to 30 million. This is clearly a very ambitious plan and opinions are mixed as to whether it can or should be achieved.

In this first piece though I want to present a side to the global impact of the ongoing changes in the Indian university system that is seldom seen in the media.

That is, what is the university experience in India from the point of view of the student and the lecturer?

I went to school in Calcutta and also did my first undergraduate degree in the city. When I went to the UK to do my second undergraduate degree it wasn’t the differences in the educational culture that I noticed but rather the continuities. This was probably because both the school and university I attended were established in the nineteenth century when Calcutta was the capital of British India, and at the heart of a close engagement between the cultures of India and of Britain.

What I experienced in India was a meticulousness of detail and depth of approach which I am truly grateful for. Somewhere along the way I also became firmly imbued with the idea that the big picture matters. So valuing the humanities was important because it helped one to link the puzzle pieces of the world together.

A common expectation and hope amongst the educational community in India is, I think, that alliances with British or other overseas universities will mean more flexibility for students and teaching staff. By which I mean exposure to the arts, sciences and perhaps even technical knowledges together. It seems rather harsh to expect an eighteen year old to choose a “stream” and stand by it life-long.

A simple scan-through of the weekly educational supplement to the Kolkata edition of The Times of India gives a thumbnail picture of the kinds of degrees and career pathways being offered to current undergraduates. Management and science degrees predominate but there’s a wide range of IT -related and engineering courses, along with intriguingly specialist courses in things like wine-making, chocolate making and magicianship (though not at Hogwarts).

What I wonder as a global citizen and a teacher is this – how are we going to help students join the dots? Will the view that learning has value in and of itself because it nurtures creative and critical thinking hold in the new university environment being fashioned?

This wider view of the meaning and value of education already has a space both in India and in the UK. But I have also experienced the piece meal view – in both countries – that being educated in order to find and keep a job is all that’s needed.

It’s an interesting time to be in education – and I hope in succeeding pieces to chronicle more of the changes taking place. The future – not just for the UK and India but for the world – looks an utterly different place than most would have imagined it a mere ten years ago.

I think he meant by this that there is a craft and a science to producing that finished piece of work, whatever the discipline.  When the moment comes that you submit, defend and are finally awarded a doctorate by your examiners, you are being recognized as a worthy peer by the academy.

What is it then in your hands to do with the piece of work you have invested several years of your life in?

Publication – yes, but in what form and with whom? I was approached shortly after being awarded my doctorate by a company that wanted to publish my thesis. However, they did not have a peer review process. A friend of mine was similarly approached, and accepted. But she is a communications professional. The value of having her work out in book form supercedes the necessity of peer review. For someone like me who is building a career in scholarship, peer review makes the difference between work that will stand me in good stead when being considered for a lectureship, and work that may not carry so much weight.

How do you find the right publisher and the right audience for your work? Who will hold the copyright and for how long? How long will it take to appear in print?

To all researchers – please consider this an open call to write in with publication questions and answers. The greater our knowledge, the better our decisions.

It’s always said that you cannot be a writer unless you read, and I find that reading teaches better than any textbook. In this case, several novels were extremely instructive, with the added bonus of being unputdownable.

The Butcher Boy, which I mentioned in my last post, was a great lesson in how to deal with first person narrative, with possibly the most unreliable narrator I have ever come across.

I carried on from there, and read and learned from a couple of Welsh writing in English books. One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard is The Butcher Boy in a Welsh setting. There’s a young Welsh boy, a mother who goes mad and a chilling and sad finale, but the main thing it shares is an amazingly convincing voice. The gaps are intriguing, the boy’s trajectory utterly believable until the final few chapters, where you are thrown off balance by the developments.

Similarly, The Schoolboy by Holly Howitt charts the obsessions and mental instability of a boy growing up. It was shocking, but convincing all the way to the end, which again threw a curve ball. The dialogue was particularly interesting, with the monosyllabic exchanges of teenage boys used subtly and effectively. This is what I am trying to do myself, and shows that staying true to what I hear used, really used in daily conversation, will produce genuine character interactions. I actually have a notebook (in Evernote) which holds all the little sayings and original turns of phrase that I’ve heard and thought notable, and I intend to expand it.

All of these texts, as well as Rachel Tresize’s In And Out Of the Goldfish Bowl (with a narrator I didn’t like one bit) and Robert Lewis’s The Last Llanelli Train (with a total anti-hero saved for me only by his humour), have inspired me to carry on and just try to write true, keep myself out of it and let my character have her way.

Having said all this, let’s see what my supervisor says before I can say I’ve nailed first person narrative!

It may seem strange to link the two things but I hope it will become clear why I am.

As reported in The Guardian last Saturday Mr. Schmidt said, “Over the past century the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. You need to bring art and science back together.”

My deepest sense of where we are – as a scholar and a human being – is that we need to renew our ability to make connections.

I write this blog to make connections with people I would never have the chance to communicate with otherwise.

Maybe the riots would not have happened if we had been better at talking to each other.

Maybe this is our chance to stop them from happening again.

Art and science. The working and the not working. The very educated and the less educated.

I don’t know when the idea that life and the world can best be described in binaries took such strong hold of us.

Can we soften and expand and shape our categories – instead of allowing them to control us?

How else can we make our work – and play – relevant and enduring?

What are the binary ideas you would like to change? Are you going to let your inner polymath out?

Yes, I have been in revolt against the idea of the celebrated ivory tower – both a cradle and a grave if ever there was one – for several years. And yet, oddly enough, I was indeed ensconced in a small room in a large building working on ideas – which is to say I was marking my students’ essays- when I first understood the scale of what had happened in the country.

My brother called me to ask if I was alright and told me what was happening in London. Miles away in Leicester, I thought of areas I had lived in or spent happy evenings out in, now open to attack: Walthamstow, Camden, Hackney, Oxford Street.

Because of the things I learned in that city, wherever else I go in the world, I will always consider myself – amongst other things – a Londoner.

Why did it happen?

I don’t want to add to the analyses contributed by politicians and journalists.

I simply ask – what goes on in the mind of a child or an adult who feels so utterly disconnected from everyone around her/him that turning on a neighbour is no step at all?

My life has always been about education – it formed my mind and now I am helping to form the minds of others.

How do we draw on education to speak beyond ourselves? To those who have gone so far beyond the bounds of civil behavior that they seem to have given up on words – violence was the language of the rioters.

How do we not let silence win?

In my last post I looked at the issue of teaching modules which may seem to be at some distance from the discipline in which you did your research.

From amongst a wide circle of friends and colleagues who are both research active and teaching-active – to coin a new phrase – I’d say it’s extremely important to acknowledge that flexibility is both a personal and professional good. A friend who was awarded her doctorate in 2006 found a permanent teaching post within twelve months of completing. Her lectureship was not in History which was her “home” discipline if you like but in Criminology – she was able to develop a subsidiary interest into one which she could use as a foundation for her career.

In my present teaching post where the focus is on English for Academic Purposes, language and study skills  although I am not teaching literature, I find myself drawing upon my doctoral research constantly. Accuracy, structure and space for the imagination – are the three things I would name as the basis of every class I teach.

To put it another way – the proof of the research commitment is in the teaching practice.

Here’s to all researchers and teachers, as they seek to bring two worlds together : ).

I’ve been pondering what to write for this post, as I haven’t been that successful with my work recently. At my last meeting my supervisor again expressed doubts about my main character’s voice — it’s not very believable.

Although I’m dismayed, I have to agree. Part of the problem is that I have shifted from third person to first person, so the original omniscient narrator’s voice is now too sophisticated for my surfer, tomboy, farm-raised, school-hating young girl.

I will admit to not having rewritten substantially — instead I went through and changed ‘she’ to ‘I’ and so forth, changing other bits that didn’t fit her voice as I went. Clearly, that didn’t work, didn’t go deep enough. Some of it does, but I’m not getting the strong characterisation and compelling identity for her that I want.

My rather lazy rewriting into the first person was picked up straight away by my supervisor months ago, but we have been concentrating on other problems — there are plenty of them (mostly structural) to keep me busy!

Having been a bit demoralised by all this, I haven’t written very much for the last two weeks, instead concentrating on some great books with strong voices. I’m currently on The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe, which I find headache-inducing due to the lack of commas, but it certainly works as a first person narrative.

Then I found the fiction masterclass on first person voices in the latest issue of Mslexia. Jane Rogers, Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam Uni, talks about the pros and cons, how language used is key (for me, using Welsh and surfing terminology), the possibility of introducing other material to counterpoint the narrator, and uses Jane Eyre, Adrian Mole and Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly to illustrate her points. A happy coincidence, and just what I needed!

The fact that my own first person narrative doesn’t ring true is strange in a way, as I’ve written a diary every day almost since I could write. I still have my first diary, one of those chinese-embroidered books, with back to front letters and awful spelling, in a box with 20 or 30 others. For the last ten years or so it’s all been on the computer — I dread to think how much drivel is stored on my hard drive (and Dropbox)!

In the process of ‘journalling’ as the Americans like to call it, I’ve lost my self-consciousness and learned to just write, write, write whatever I want however I want, as it’s not for anyone else’s eyes. Some of it is some of my best writing, because I’m not worried about anything external like other people’s opinions. I’d recommend the process to anyone.

So I am sure I can write like this, and to get me going I’m starting a whole new chapter, forgetting the first three which I am, by now, rather tired of seeing! I’m going to have fun with it and really discover my character, who is very different from me (a good thing, says Jane). Wish me luck!

To coin a metaphor, it’s rather like preparing a one course meal from the grand banquet you prepared for a once-in-a-lifetime festival. What to put in? More importantly – what to leave out? Most ironically, it is becoming clear to me that this whole process is in a sense the opposite of what it took to produce the thesis itself.

Let me explain with reference to the actual context. As a scholarly writer my great struggle has always been – to find the right design and the right connecting axes for my argument. Structure, structure, structure. Words and ideas rushed in on me  – but the simple and absolute necessity of putting each one in the right place occupied my days and nights.

However that story doesn’t concern us for the purposes of this post – somehow, like other survivors of this marathon, I found a way through this terrain and at an unsuspecting moment reached my destination. Aspects of this journey have been discussed elsewhere on this site by Heather http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/phd-student/2011/06/15/what-makes-a-phd/ and Kat http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/language-and-literature/2011/05/30/world-building-with-mind-mapping/. My own work now is to scale down – to sift through the first chapter of the thesis and produce a unified miniature – something which will tell the reader what I feel it is important for them to know about the forty two year poetic career of my subject:  D.L. Richardson. A British-born poet and teacher who, like many of that generation of Anglo-Indians, lived between nineteenth-century Calcutta and London. The first time around it took me 20,000 words.

Hm.

Well…the FIRST thing I’m doing is to follow my supervisor’s advice to “write what you need to write.” I mean that I’m following the mysterious, rational and more than rational shaping instinct which allowed me to form a view of Richardson’s life in the first place – I’m combing through the chapter and cutting and pasting the sentences and passages which form an outline of his poetic life into a new document. It’s amazing how your focus changes with your word count –like packing a smaller suitcase.

The SECOND thing – is that I’m making space for change. Putting in the final full stop was definitely not the end of my thinking about Richardson, the nineteenth century or the Romantic movement. It was a stage in the development of that thinking, and I would like the finished chapter to reflect that ongoing growth.  Nothing complicated about this – I’m simply adding in new thoughts and ideas as I go along in brackets containing both short, haiku-like questions and long, rambling ones (nothing like the bracket for relieving the military precision of linear sentences, eh?).

The THIRD thing is– carving out and creating time to deal with the copyright permissions I’m going to need to get and the formatting of the chapter in accordance with a new (to me) set of style rules.  

And – finally – given the hours, energy and patience this takes, I make time to remember why I’m doing this. The joy of work can seem very far away after hours at a stretch on my laptop – so I need to remember that ,in fact, I’m recovering – or rather helping to recover – the life and hopes  of a real person. And presenting him to an audience that probably would never otherwise come across his work or feel any relationship to it.

I had a look at one or two commentaries in the library and was reassured to see that they aren’t too scary, more a chance to talk about wonderful stories and inspirational writers who have influenced a writer’s own work. But where to start?

I came to the PhD with a useful amount of background reading already done — loads of texts that I love and which definitely influence my writing, from non-fiction like The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron to surf fiction like Breath by Tim Winton and Welsh writing in English novels such as my favourites by Niall Griffiths (Grits, Sheepshagger and Runt).

It’s all really varied stuff, in terms of perceived literary merit, age, subject matter, audience, themes and so on. So how on earth am I going to synthesise all this material? I have some idea of how I want to analyse each text in terms of my research questions, but I also want to look at how I write, and for that I need to look at storytelling in general.

My supervisor recommended that I read The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, almost a textbook for film students and Hollywood employees. It’s ‘a practical guide for designing and troubleshooting stories’ (xi) — in all forms, not just film. The author is at pains to point out that this is not a formula, but an exploration, via Joseph Campbell, of the simple idea that: ‘All stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams, and movies.’ (1).

He might well have added ‘novels’ to that list. Straight away I was excited, because my story is all of the above (except, at this embryonic stage, a record-breaking Hollywood blockbuster…).

Vogler’s book is an attempt to map the stages that stories present, and the way that mirrors human life and experience. I was skeptical about putting all stories into a mould or formula, but Vogler stresses that ‘It should be used as a form, not a formula, a reference point and a source of inspiration, not a dictatorial mandate’ (xix).

The simple structure that he explains is amazing, an explanation in clear terms of something that readers — and in fact anyone who comes across stories in any medium and thinks about their creation — will instantly latch on to. It clarifies and helps with writing, and it’s fun to point out the different stages as seen in films or books — “Hey! That guy is definitely going to be a Mentor, and that pub is a Threshold for sure.”

It also, very helpfully, gives me and my supervisor a common vocabulary with which to discuss storytelling in general, and specifically my characters and the structure of my work.

For a theory, it is immensely accessible and well written, using clear and almost universally known film examples. If you write, you will begin to think in more detail about your own structure, and it may well help you to see where you are going wrong — where you should be challenging the heroine instead having another love scene or argument with a Guardian.

A recommendation worth its weight in gold for me, I hope it intrigues you enough to check it out of the library. I did, and instantly jumped on Amazon to get my own copy so I could cover it in sticky notes.

Vogler, C., 2007. Writerʼs Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, Michael Wiese Production. Available at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Writers-Journey-Mythic-Structure/dp/193290736X

A wider view of Adrian’s teaching, research and publication profile can be found on his homepage:

https://sites.google.com/site/adrianholliday42/

Could you very briefly comment on what the humanities bring to public life in your opinion?

They bring a complexity of perception which helps us all to put aside our prejudices – a  complexity which cannot easily be put into ‘straight’ words or images. I would like to expand this concept to creative aspects of the media, particularly to satire and comedy. It is not an accident that many of our intellectuals are comedians. The problem is that we may not be aware that we are putting aside our prejudices when we encounter this complexity; so that when we come back to ‘thinking logically’ about things, the prejudices come running back and it is as if we have learnt nothing.

What kinds of research do you hope to see early career scholars in the humanities undertake?

This is hard for me because I don’t consider my own discipline to be in the humanities, but in social science, which is a very different matter. There are however hard decisions, especially in Britain, where academic institutions want one to publish in the journals and to get funding which will tick the right boxes in government research assessment exercises. Here one must ‘give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar’, distinguish one’s job from one’s work, and try also to work on areas which will make one’s academic community rock and inspire one’s students. I suppose it is important to remember that we are getting paid to do our jobs, but that this enables us to have the immensely privileged life of being free academics. 

Career planning and decision making hold many challenges. Would you like to share a very positive decision you made and its outcome?

I began my academic career in very different times; but I remember I worked hard to get research students from the very beginning – to go to conferences, to write and publish, and to get myself known for being critical and adventurous in my thinking, mainly outside my university I must say. This attracted students I think.  In publishing I never ever gave up, and bore all the criticisms sent back by reviewers, and felt that my teaching would never be sound unless it was based on my own published research. I had the conviction that I would not be able to change things until I submitted to the academic community first.

Are there decisions and career moves you would like to advise early career academics  to be cautious of?

There is never a better time to do things than the present. Life will never get less busy. One must carry one’s writing project with one absolutely everywhere and squeeze it into the smallest spaces between meetings and administrative duties. Being an academic is not a 9-5 job.

What has helped you the most in defining and achieving your career goals?

Never being bitter or defensive, at least not for long, and never publicly. At the same time, never submitting to established thought. Having a trajectory of investigation which can be traced back to my undergraduate days – a personal project – but which has never ceased to develop into new thinking.