When I was in my fourth year at the University of Guelph, a professor told me about something she called "The Grad School Skim." This was by far one of the most useful things I learned during my time at Guelph, and ended up being a technique I used to survive an MA. Hammered with more journal articles than I could possibly read, like, ever, I read the introduction and conclusion to get the thesis and the author's findings. If I had time, I then went back to read the first and last sentences of each paragraph to better understand how they reached their conclusion. I passed it onto colleagues of mine in my program, and they all agreed it was a great technique, and one that could be used for other works (like monographs).
So, when I was reading Lukar's description of "Harvarding," I smiled to myself. First, because "Harvarding" is a way cooler name than "the grad school skim." Second, I smiled because she gave me ways to better perfect this research/reading tool. Perhaps the most helpful advice I learned from Lukar's description of "Harvarding"was "If I'm not getting it, it's her (or his) fault" (Lukar, 2008, p. 94). Sometimes, when I'm reading a text and I don't get it, I absolutely think it's my fault. I think to myself, "This has been published, clearly it's my fault that I'm just not getting it." I always consider that it may be important to my research, so I should use all my brainpower and make myself understand. This, apparently, is how I wasted a lot of precious, grad student time.
Thank you Lukar, for having faith in my intelligence, and for telling me that I spent a lot of time on what were probably bad books.
I, too, have been pretty inspired by Luker's suggestion of "Harvarding". This is a technique I sort of naturally fell into throughout my undergrad in Philosophy and Psychology. I really hit my stride in "Harvarding" once I began doing the literature review for my Psychology thesis.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I would trudge through pages of philosophy papers (or books) dense with terminology, verbose language and layers of reasoning... OR research papers in psychology full of extensive literature reviews, advanced statistical techniques and other elaborate research methodologies that sometimes left my head spinning.
It became clear to me that focusing on abstracts, skimming through introductions and conclusions, and, ON OCCASION, reading through SELECT, HIGHLY RELEVANT papers was the only way that I would be able to survive the literature review and discussion sections of my undergraduate thesis.
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ReplyDeleteI'm going to try this for the first time! Confession time: in undergrad I sometimes simply cited papers with barely a glance at them, just to pad my bibliography. Even worse, in order to convey the sense that I actually did read all the papers I was citing, I would pick a nice phrase that said what I wanted to say, but way better, and simply insert it into my paper, citing it properly, of course. I had no idea if the author of the article actually meant it the way I used it, or whether this was an idea that he was disputing or ridiculing. It's amazing I didn't get caught!
ReplyDeleteThis time I'm going to make sure that what I cite actually means something. No more padding biblipgraphies. I think that by "harvarding" properly, I can actually get a good sense of what the article/monograph/whatever is about, and I won't feel bad about including it in my papers!
Laura, thanks for highlighting this. I wish I had learned this earlier! I certainly will try to apply Luker's suggestion of "harvarding" throughout my MI experience - although I must say I'm the type of person who feels I might miss out on something very important if I just skim through. Still, with the amount of reading we're expected to do not only for the course material but assignment work, it will definitely come in handy.
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