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Proud to report some achievements … and some set backs!
First of all I had an absolutley marvelous time at the Student Success Conference! It was my first one and it felt like home. I knew more people than I expected to but I think that is because now NAEEA has partnered with this conference. So many enabling program people there! It was SO encouraging!
I did two presentations and a poster. The poster was the Meme project and we got a LOT of interest. I had my speel perfected after the first morning tea. I essentially explained that we were not trying to learn how we could use memes to help students – we are looking at it the opposite way – What can we learn about the student experience from the memes that they engage with? Our poster had all the important stuff – plus a heap of memes that students have sent us. It was a hit 🙂
The first presentation was on the Wellbeing SIG edited book and although I only had about 12 people it got good questions and feedback. The book is on Trauma aware teaching, so a popular topic I think.
The final presentation was with Trixie James and Gemma Mann so instantly it was going to be fun! We presented findings from the autoethnography we did about student support. We wanted to explore the definition of student support – we believe there is not a consistent definition and that has negative impacts on staff and students. For example, the line between the lecturer counselling the student or referring them to the couselling services can be blurred and ultimatley it becomes a lot of emotional labour and can lead to burnout.
We had 30 or maybe more in that session including Cathy Stone. A great little discussion got going at the end. Lots of questions asked and people came up to us later and complimented us on the project. As the project was originally my idea it made me feel pretty jolly awesome.
Overall Student Success Conference 2025 – totally marvelous, very enjoyable, learnt a lot, fun fun fun and a total success.
Th other achievement(s) lately is the NAEEA Seed grants. So these are small ($2500) grants offered to the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and I lead one for the Self- Efficacy SIG that I facilitate and I was also listed on the Wellbeing SIG. We got both!!!!!! Woot Woot!!!
So the Wellbeing SIG is the edited book and I am going to be a section editor, plus I have also submitted a chapter proposal. Ang Jones is leading it – can’t wait!
The Self-Efficacy grant project is to create a Toolkit for improving Self-efficacy – so it’s very complimentary to my PhD. Trixie, Ang and Amy Robinson is on that team so it’s going to be a world of fun but I’m also confident that we’ll get it done.
I have also been offered full time work. I have recently gone from 0.5 to 0.7 so that was a blessing but full time would be excellent. I’m just not sure I could handle it to be honest – not while I’m still trying to get my PhD done. I have made some progress in that area… but not a lot.
So all wonderful news there I guess. In other news, I am taking another break from my PhD. I just have too much going on at the moment in my personal life and I feel like a camel with an awful lot of straws on my back! It’s going to be medical leave, with a letter from my psychologist. So that ties back to the offer of full time work. I still have some time to think about it.
As it stands I work about 30 hours a week and get paid for 25 so I really SHOULD accept at least some fraction incease – at LEAST up to 0.8. I’ll let you know!
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May? My goodness!
Well I’m not quite sure how it ended up the end of April with May just around the corner! I have been lost in marking recently and attempting to balance that and the personal grief I am still going through.
The NAEEA SIGs are going well and both groups got our papers submitted by the respective deadlines. New projects are budding but I’ll try to write more about those later.
My fraction is going to increase from 0.5 to 0.7 in the middle of the year and I am looking forward to that.
I am also looking forward to some time off at the end of May and the Student Success conference in July. So far I have had a poster and an Emerging Initiaitive accepted. I have two more submissions that I am still waiting to hear about (the due date for feedback hasn’t passed yet). The university is funding the registration and I am feeling quite blessed by that. This year it is in Cairns, so I am going to drive up and I paid for the more expensive but fancy accommodation because I wanted to treat myself.
The book that Trixie James and I have a chapter in has still not come out and Susan Emmett and I are also waiting for Australian Journal of Adult Learning to release it’s next issue. The last couple of years they have had issues in April, July and November so we are expecting it any day now. Same with the book! It has been a very long process for both of those. I am hoping the next couple of publications happen a little faster. That includes the Special Issue from the NAEEA conference and the Student Success one as well (that is assuming the submitted articles are accepted).
I have not done a lot of PhD work lately as I’ve been drowning in both self-pity and marking. However I have done a couple of focus groups and got some great data. I’ve also bolstered up large chunks of the literature review and I’m feeling pretty ok about that for now. I’m going to move on and write the methodology section if I can just get the courage to start that!
Well that pretty much covers a general update for now. Till next time!
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Minor Revisions!
I was overjoyed to receive a “Minor revisions required” on what I have called “The COVID article” that I wrote with Dr. Susan Emmett. Sue and I originally wrote the article in 2021 or MAYBE 2022. It has been desk rejected at least 3 times, but I think 4 times. We submitted it to this journal almost a year and a half ago (September, 2023) but we got it back with just minor edits to make. I am so delighted 🙂 Win!
In other news – also very good – CQUniversity has officially offered me an extra day per week starting mid-year. That will mean more teaching (yay!) probably some unit coordination opportunities (yay!) and more marking too (UN-yay! No one likes marking). I will still be classified as Teaching and Research (not Teaching focused) so I will still have plenty of time for study and publishing.
I have re-done my whiteboard after achieving 25 “research outputs” so now the new goal is 30 peer-reviewed publications by 2030. I have 11 so far – after that last “minor revisions” there is 2 in press – so 13 out of 30. That means I have 5 years to get 17 publications, 3 or 4 per year. I think it is very achievable. In fact I have already got the following planned and at various stages:
- PhD article 1 – Scoping Lit Review – almost ready to resubmit.
- PhD article 2 – partially written.
- Intersectionality article – More data analysis to do but some writing has also been done.
- Wellbeing SIG autoethnography – will be submitted within 6 months
- Self-efficacy SIG autoethnography – Will be submitted in March to the Special Issue
- Meme Project – paper should be written this year, submitted early next year.
- Grant project – Data analysis done, just begun drafting the first article.
- TAFE project – Data analysis partially done, some sections written.
- FedUni internal grant paper – just submitted.
So there is plenty “in the pipelines” for sure. Now I see that long list I am going to stop writing here and go write something on the list!
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25 by 2025
Originally I set myself the goal of having 25 publications by the END of 2025. That was when my PhD was going to be via publication and I had the capacity to work on more projects at once. Since I have taken the RTP stipend I have had less time, and now, because of personal issues, I’ve got less “space”. So I reviewed this goal, realizing it was unachievable and decided to include conference presentations as well. I mean presentations, even if they don’t have a paper attached, even if it’s just the abstract that was peer-reviewed. So that is a new goal of 25 research outputs by the end of 2025!
So…..
I didn’t even realize it at first but I got my 25th one a few weeks ago – didn’t even need until the end of 2025! I did it by the start! 🙂
Here is a picture of my whiteboard proudly displaying them!
J= Journal article
CBh = Book chapter
P = Poster
C = Conference presentation
I should write a long list of thank-yous! To all my co-authors, to my supervisors, my friends and family that supported me to do this etc etc etc. But I’m going to assume they will never read this and that sentence covers it.
I am focusing on the positive right now and THAT is it! Goal achieved!
This year my research goals are…
Self-efficacy SIG article 1 submitted
Self-efficacy SIG article 2 planned
Wellbeing SIG article 1 submitted
Wellbeing SIG article 2 planned
PhD article 1 re-submitted
PhD article 2 submitted
Intersectionality article submitted
Grant article submitted
Hmm that should keep me busy!
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Welcome 2025
Well the personal issues from last year have followed me into this year but I am solidering on! I did attempt to replace some of my loss with 2 new cats! They are adorable.
So what are my goals for this year? Well I would like to get most of my thesis written in at least rough draft format. There is also 5 articles I would like submitted (in no particular order):
- The Wellbeing SIG autoethnography article
- The Self-efficacy SIG article
- The grant project article on discourses
- The OLD article with Bryce and David from FedUni
- PhD article
I’m expecting a book chapter to come out this year and hopefully at least one of the articles above as well. It’s more likely that the five of them will be 2026 but that’s ok.
My final goal it to introduce the Learning Disposition Wheel to my students and explicitly talk about learning with them using it. I’m hoping I can build it and turn it into an intervention that becomes a reserach project and fuel for a learning and teaching award. It’s the beginning of a long term plan I guess. See how it goes! I make no promises!
Well I will leave it at that for now! Lots of work to do!
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NAEEA 2024 Conference – Darwin +
Sad news first of all. My principle supervisor Anna Fletcher has had to pull out due to some very serious health issues. It does not look good at all and I think Stuart, my remaining supervisor and I are both in a bit of shock. It has all happened quite quickly so no doubt Anna is too. She’s only young, probably early 50’s so it’s all rather horrific. I am trying to focus on the positives. Recently that has been the NAEEA conference!
The picture above is my with the Self-Efficacy SIG poster. I had feedback from a couple of colleagues but most of it was my work and I’m quite proud of it. I have had other posters but in the past I’ve been only one person in a team and haven’t actually had that much input into the overall feel of the poster. This was my baby though!
All 6 conference presentations went well. The one on trauma and self-care was a bit rushed at the end. SOOOOoooo much good has come of that though because I’ve now realised that Amy C, one of my favorite FedUni people works in that area and WE can do research TOGETHER on this! My pilot study only had 3 students BUT they explicitly explained how a past trauma had impacted their journey to university AND (more importantly) their self-efficacy. It is a huge gap in the enabling literature and Amy and I are going to fill it! Very excited about that… I DO need to get permission from my now solo supervisor I think.
Another good thing to come from the conference was that it introduced me to a few teaching techniques. First is Mechano where one person makes a statement and then others can connect to that (physcially) by standing behind them (to back them up) or beside them to agree etc. The other they called snowballing where you write your idea on paper, scruntch it up, throw into the middle of the room, grab someone else’s and add to it… repeat! Both of these came from a workshop on the 4CTL Learning Disposition Wheel which is based on self-regulated learning.
I think in enabling education where we like to explicitly teach it might be of value for me to use it exactly as they did in the workshop. They introduced it, then the activity was conducted and then we were asked which slice of the wheel we “used” the most in that activity. In other words which skills we needed, used, drew on etc. Different people choose different parts of the wheel because multiple were used in each activity… and that was the point! Use multiple wherever possible.
Here is the wheel for reference – I got it from here (sorry it’s after 4pm I can’t be bothered to reference correctly!!!) https://www.4ctransformativelearning.org/the-learning-disposition-wheel
I’m not sure what else to add about the conference. It was excellent all around. It had a great warm and friendly vibe to it. All the speakers were excellent, especially Sarah O’Shea. I felt like I knew a few people, from FedUni and CQUniversity of course but also Murdoch and other places too. I made a great contact with one of the folks from Macquarie University as well. I hope to get in touch with their senior teaching staff soon and welcome them into the Self-efficacy SIG.
As I mentioned, after 4pm so that’s all for now. In summary great conference. Loved it.
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PhD life goes on!
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! 🙂
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Got my cake and I’m eating it too!
Last year I wont the RTP scholarship but after all the crazy stuff going on in my personal life I took 6 months leave from my PhD. When I got the scholarship I had to be doing my PhD full time to receive the payment (which significantly reduced my financial stress). But when my 6 months off from study was nearing the end I didn’t feel like I could go back full time. For self-care reasons I felt really anxious about being a full time student with a 0.5 FTE job on top of that. I had managed it for a few months but it was not easy and I really felt that I was not up to it. So I made the decision to go back to study part time instead of full time.
That would mean that I wasn’t going to get my payments from the scholarship BUT I thought it would be less stressful overall and I was also comforted by knowing that I had won that scholarship already – it was already on my resume and whether or not I actually received the money didn’t matter – it only mattered that I was awarded it from a CV point of view. So I officially started back on my PhD on the 18th of September and I put in for it to be only part time. Then… much to my surprise… the policy has changed and I am now getting partial payments!!!!
I really DID get to have my cake and eat it too. I feel like God was rewarding me for not being greedy and pushing myself just to get extra money. I am very thankful. No one has confirmed this but I think it has to do with the Universities Accord which (the final report) came out while I was on leave. The Accord highlighted that students from equity groups are more likely to NEED to study part time because of their other commitments (work, caring duties etc.) and it essentially said that offering part time study was important for equity.
In other news I have 5 presentations plus a poster accepted for NAEEA in December and I’ve started preparing slides for a couple of those. I still have a fair bit to do before the first week in December. I have re-written my whiteboard to include conference presentations as well as just journal articles and book chapters. Because conference PAPERS are better but a presentation is still an academic output. I have 22 outputs once presentations and posters are included. My original goal was 25 so yes, happy with that!
Not sure what else to include in this update. I wanted to share the good news but also write down that I am still struggling with personal issues and it is impacting my work, well my research and my motivation at least. I have done absolutely everything I can to make sure it does not impact my students and I am satisfied that so far it has not. I have finished my marking for the year – I am not teaching into the Enabling (Preparatory) program (STEPS) until term 1 next year now.
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Overdue update
I have been playing around with Microsoft Designer lately. Below is an image I got it to create of myself… I’m not sure that my face is quite that round but I like it!
I also used Microsoft Designer to create an image promoting a webinar that I did with the Mental Health and Wellbeing Special Interest Group (SIG). I probably should have written about this webinar BEFORE it happened – oopsy! Anyway the promotional email included this image:
The webinar went really well and we have 40 people there which felt like a lot at the time. It was promoted through NAEEA – so you know, a national organization and it is a great thing to have on my resume. The same team had a presentation at the STARS Conference although sadly I couldn’t attend myself.
I AM going to Darwin in December for the NAEEA national conference… and here’s THAT image/website: https://agentur.eventsair.com/naeeaconference2024/
So I have 6 abstracts going in for that conference. That is one for the Self-Efficacy SIG that I facilitate as they have asked each SIG to have a poster promoting the SIG. Then there is two research projects, one for the Self-efficacy SIG and one for the Mental Health and Wellbeing SIG that I am part of. We intend to also submit articles to the special issue of the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice that is associated with the conference. So that’s two projects, two conference presentations and possibly two articles to go with them.
The next abstract I’ve submitted is again one that they requested because I received a small grant from NAEEA in 2022. I have not actually finished collecting data for that one yet, but I have 8 completed interviews so that was enough to know broadly what findings I am going to present at the conference.
The final two abstracts I have submitted to the conference are related to my PhD. I figured I have done a pilot study with 3 students, I can present those findings as a case study. The second one is a shorter presentation about the trauma that they shared with me, how important self-care and self-reflection is when doing qualitative work and I’ll touch on the ethical considerations as well. Sadly my supervisors were unable to assist in any way with the conceptualization, writing, proofreading or editing of those abstracts as I am still officially on leave from study. I did send the first 250 word abstract to them but, as I mentioned, they were unable to look at them. As they had not contributed I removed both supervisors as authors. I had previously listed them because naturally they have supported me in the process leading up to collecting data from the 3 students I am presenting about. And you know, they’ve been a part of everything PhD related so I figured authorship was appropriate.
The personal problems I have been dealing with are still there, but like most emotional things they are dying down as time goes on. I’ve been talking to friends and colleagues about it all and that has helped a lot too. I am still feeling anxious, like physically anxious when I think about going back to full time PhD study in October. When I reflect on that I realize it’s because I only have so much energy – generally speaking – but I’m most worried about emotional energy at the moment. More worried about the emotional energy than I would have been in the past. And the truth is that I believe my PhD takes more emotional energy than anything else.
That is not because I am not motivated. It’s not that I procrastinate. It’s because I spend a lot of energy on managing my supervisor relationships. By now I should probably know what to expect from them but that doesn’t really help when I think about how much energy I spend on it. At this point I know I still have a couple of months to decide. I WANT to go back to full time study so that I can continue to receive the stipend payments but I know that is probably not what’s best for my emotional energy or my mental health. It is a decision that I am putting off.
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It hit the fan!
I consider myself a professional. Today I really didn’t feel like being around people at all but I delivered a class that I think was exceptionally good. It was on paraphrasing and I started with a brief summary of the paraphrasing techniques that were discussed in the lecture. Then I asked students to paraphrase 2 long and academic sounding sentences. It would have been tough! I know that most of them had to Google the meaning of multiple words. There was a percentage of the class that didn’t get past the first hurdle; understanding what they were reading. I gave them almost 10 minutes to paraphrase around 40 words. Most did not get it finished and that was my point.
From there we talked about the skills needed to paraphrase, and the importance of knowing where you are at in relation to those skills, so that you can accurately plan out the time you need for an assessment. We also looked at Turnitin and talked about those skills in terms of plagiarism. It’s all sounding lame as I write it but you have to believe me when I say that I got my on campus class of 13 students really engaged in a discussion on paraphrasing! I am a professional! Because what I was feeling and what I wanted to do was go home, curl up and have a cry and then a nap.
I wont share too much in this medium I will just say that my personal life is a bit of a mess at the moment. I was on track doing full time PhD and part time work. I was keeping up, at least for a couple of months. But now that things have hit the fan I know that something had to go. I can’t do it all. So I have taken a 6 month leave from study and put my PhD (and the stipend) on hold. That will hopefully allow me the space and time to continue being a professional, put the energy into my students and my personal life and hopefully not drop too many of the other balls that I currently juggle.
In other news the article the Wellbeing SIG had published was mentioned in a Student Success symposium the other day and has also featured in the blog the Sally Kift edits! You can see it here: https://needednowlt.substack.com/p/unlocking-success-the-interdependence
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Equity in higher education - An Australian researcher 