After the tutorials on research and action research, I began thinking about what kinds of research would be best applied to help me investigate EDF and how it impacts students and staff.
After thinking about my objectives for the project, I decided that a mixture of methods would be best. Most relevant are: thematic analysis, reflexive practice, interviews and literature reviews.
Texts I’ve engaged with on Research about Research:
- Jean McNiff’s Action Research Booklet
- Neil Drabble’s Spark Journal article It’s all about ‘me’, with you: Exploring auto-ethnographic methodology
- Nowell et al, Thematic Analysis: Striving to Meet the Trustworthiness Criteria
- Kim England’s Getting Personal: Reflexivity, Positionality, and Feminist Research
- Robert Schroeder’s Evaluative Criteria for Autoethnographic Research: Who’s to Judge
- Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples
- Brendon Barne’s Decolonising Research Methodologies: Opportunity and Caution
- Nora Cate Schaeffer & Stanley Presser, The Science of Asking Questions
Texts I’ve engaged with so far on Procrastination, Executive Function and Explicit Strategy Instruction:
- Piers Steel’s The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-regulatory Failure and his book The Procrastination Equation
- Lynne Meltzer’s Executive Function In Education: From Theory To Practice
- Paula Moraine’s Helping Students Take Control of Everyday Executive Functions: The Attention Fix
In engaging with these texts, I have been able to reframe not just my own behaviour regarding procrastination and EDF, but what these terms mean from an intersectional, and decolonised perspective. This topic is infinitely complex, varied and subjective. As a researcher, it was a relief to find that there is so much literature on this topic from a variety of sources, although it is worth mentioning that the majority of the authors of the works on procrastination are white. This is largely due to the pervasive colonial/Capitalistic ideology of time-saving and productivity being synonymous with value in human beings (Grooms 2020). Despite all the texts I have engaged with, I feel as though I have only just scratched the surface with this research topic. I also feel that it’s hard to demonstrate how I have engaged with these texts without writing screeds and screeds.
Multi-processing
I recently watched a Netflix documentary about Bill Gates and his career that struck a huge cord with me. Gate’s wife Melinda was talking about his work methods, and she described him as a ‘multiprocessor’. He will be reading something, and while part of his mind is occupied with reading and comprehending the text, another part of his mind will be cogitating on a different problem. Her framing of how his mind works made me think about my own learning processes. I always need to work with music or the TV on to help me focus. If I am having an issue with solving a problem I will usually “procrastinate” by cleaning the house, because I find that doing a mundane activity helps me to process. Even when attempting to sleep, if I do not distract my mind with some kind of sound, I will lie awake in the dark cogitating. Thinking about EDF and procrastination from this angle, are procrastinators multi-processors who need to utilise positive procrastination/ positive distraction to problem solve?
Further to this, moving forward how can I use this idea in my research to help students who procrastinate?