I guess the initial excitement of being able to continue to receive the stipend (RTP Scholarship) payments has worn off a little, but then I look at my bank account and I am happy again! Despite this I am going to apply for a second part time position (online) and hope for the best. It’s unlikely that I will get it, so if I don’t post about it again, assume that!

I have struggled with motivation a little bit lately but that is mainly due to personal issues that are still ongoing and the associated trauma which is still impacting my generally. I have however been very good at self-care lately and I am proud of that. I have lost weight, done more exercise than usual and taken the time to just walk around the building multiple times during the day. That is keeping my step count up, but improving my mood as well. The gardens and the weather here on campus are lovely. I’m also drinking more water… so you see all these things should be improving my performance at work. I’m just not sure if that is the case or not. I can say that I’m not a total mess and I have managed to keep going so perhaps it is just all balancing out!

So my PhD is just ticking along. I’m doing little bits and pieces of the literature review and SLOWLY collecting data.

The book chapter that I wrote with Ondine has finally come out! Perhaps I shouldn’t say finally, but it really FELT like a long process to get it published. It can be found here:

Larsen, A., Bradbury, O. (2024). Examining Strategies to Support Teacher Self-Efficacy When Working with Diverse Student Groups: A Scoping Literature Review. In: Burke, J., Cacciattolo, M., Toe, D. (eds) Inclusion and Social Justice in Teacher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-67612-3_5

The same day that was live online the PhD article (scoping literature review number one) was rejected by a second journal. Again, perhaps there is balance there? Hahaha. That makes 10 publications for me and 2 this year so I am happy with that.

The main thing I am working on at the moment is the NAEEA conference. The program is now available here: https://agentur.eventsair.com/naeeaconference2024/program

If you do a search for my name across the 2 days you’ll see how busy I am making Powerpoints right now 🙂 I’m also working on some sections of my PhD literature review about defining and measuring equity groups. I DID have a non-teaching term, but I think that is about to change with my workload going over the limit NOW and then it will be under next year. That will likely mean I wont have as many online students and will be more on campus which is A-OK with me. I do like both but probably have a slight preference for on campus teaching.

The final thing which I have done recently is my whiteboard. Before, I had the goal of 25 publications before the end of 2025. But with the hassle of switching my PhD to full time, back to part time, from via publication then back to a standard thesis – well with all that I didn’t think I was going to make it. Mostly because I had to withdraw from a few projects when my PhD went full time. I was rather sad looking at my whiteboard and knowing it was a goal I’d set for myself and wasn’t going to achieve.

But then I had a bit of a brainwave and decided to change the criteria. Instead of it only being “publications” including journal articles and book chapters I decided I would ALSO include conference presentations. Even if only the abstract was peer-reviewed and it was just a presentation, (not a Conference Paper). So I erased the whole darn board and started again.

So now instead of being “25 publications by the end of 2025” I say it’s “25 research outputs by the end of 2025″… so when the book chapter came out I added that on and it is the 23rd thing! Just TWO MORE to go!!! So I AM going to achieve that goal and that made me feel better! On that note, I shall sign off for now! 🙂