Julie Mills

Society and College of Radiographers (SCoR) South West Study Day

I gave a presentation to an audience of radiographers and academics on the following subject: 

The positivist paradigm in radiography research - Does this reveal our truth?  

I presented this as I believe that many of the practising radiographers working in clinical environments have probably never heard of the research paradigms and the paradigm wars. I discussed the history of radiography research being undertaken by physicists and radiologists and mostly being positioned within a positivist paradigm.

I also argued that as our healthcare system has changed to become less patriarchal and more patient-centred there was now room and an urgent need for interpretevist approaches  

GSE Summer school 2019

This week-long summer school is the highlight of the year for me as I find this to be a really useful week to discover the taught sessions, discuss my research ideas with my cohort and other colleagues in the GSE.

I stay up in Exeter for the whole week, to ensure that I can fully utilise this time to concentrate on assessment writing and fully immerse myself in the timetabled activities

To be able to have protected time with tutors to discuss assessments and how I need to meet the requirements of each assessment are invaluable  

Exploring Pluri-Logicality (CEE)

A half day symposium involving discussions and workshops around the centrality of difference and emergences in our practices of thinking, being and doing.  The pluri logical name was used to challenge dominant linear, "mono logical' understandings, which are conducted exclusively within one point of view or frame of reference.  

I attended the following optional session:  

Puri-logical relationality: co-constructing through 'being-with" non human and human others (about decolonisation) where we were invited to sit in an outside space (a garden) and just sat there and took notice of nature, our surroundings and were able to 'be' for a few minutes.

 We were then asked to come back to a seminar room and form groups and put together a box from several different items that were on a table and then discuss why we chose the items in the box.  I worked with other peers who all had different perspectives on this activity.  Some were thinking about the task for a long time and sat there ruminating on the prospect of the task, whereas I am a completer/finisher and I wanted to get the task done. Through understanding each of our positions and view points, we were able to produce something eventually.  This was a frustrating task for me but was helpful in identifying the roles everyone in a group or indeed a research team has and how their position may influence or indeed hamper the speed and direction of travel.

The other optional session I attended was:

Pluri-logical anticipation: overcoming normative ethics through symbiotic play (about responsibility)

We discussed a case around an employment opportunity at a university, where a staff memebr had been approached internally over another potential candidate and was advised to apply for a role that both people were qualifed for and the ethics that would surround such a situation for the person who had been approached.   We discussed the case and tried to investigate whether it would be a prersonal ethical conundrum for the individal who was approached or was the university itself at fault ethically, for putting that person in that situation in the first place?

GSE Summer school

This was the first Summer school I attended and found it was really helpful with it being a residential course that allowed me the whole week away and to really engage with the taught sessions and discussions was really helpful. It was also really good to meet up with my cohort of the GSE EdD and PhD students and to identify my own support networks early on.

I discovered the different types of paradigms within research and we discussed how each of them is used. This helped equip me with the ability to better understand the dominant positivist position of my own discipline of Diagnostic radiography and to be able to confidently argue for more qualitative research opportunities. 

GSE conference

I attended the GSE conference to immerse myself into the research that is delivered through the GSE to ensure that the EdD that I was applying for was the right programme for me and my research interests.  I was also able to attend several of the CRPL sessions as this will be my research area of interest.

The most positive thing about this event was the range of research activity going on and observing the posters for ideas as to how to further my ideas and knowledge of educational research

Confidence and Resilience of PGRs

This was a really useful workshop as we were given the headspace and chance to learn some coping strategies and to really understand our internal and extrinsic motivation for doing doctoral-level study and also chance to reflect on our barriers and what we as individuals had in our own resilience toolboxes to help maintain a work/study/life balance 

I discovered that I have control of my own time and space and that I have to be really clear with my family that I will need support over the coming months and years to allow,e space to study.  

I must also learn to allow myself time off even just walking the dogs or going to the gym to allow my well being to be preserved  

Shut up and write

I attended the first of the workshops that comprise of 3 x 30 mins sessions where you have space to work/write alongside other PGRs and then socialise in between sessions with coffee and cake

I used this time to write up an assessment and found it really useful when I had a period of writer's block.  To know that you are not alone and that there are others in a similar position to you really helps with self-belief and motivation 

GSE Summer school

I attended the GSE summer school as a mandatory component of starting the generic EdD.  It was really interesting and very useful for ensuring that the foundation knowledge of education and paradigms within research are discovered, disucssed and understood from the very start of the programme. 

The discursive nature of the sessions enabled me to gain a basic overview of the various research paradigms and how they are used in education.  Also I began to understand and discover my own paradigmatic position and realised that this is of vital importance in going forward when undertaking any research that I might do.  

I was also able to start reading around the subject matter of the discussions that took place and was able to gain a very clear understanding as to the nature of the delivery of the EdD and how the prethesis and thesis phase works and the doctoral level nature of all of the assessments so I was very clear as to the expectations of the programme from the start.

PGR Executive

The student PGR reps from all the Colleges meet once a term to discuss university level issues and concerns for the PGR student population. 

This was my first meeting and it was interesting to see the range of issues and common problems that occur across the university.  There wasnt much to feedback to the EdD cohorts so I just updated them to say I have attended and said that for them especially I would wait until the St Luke's specific SSIS student rep forum to take place.

I emailed the GSE St Lukes office to ask when the next date was and that I would be attending as the EdD rep and in the meantime arranged face to face meeting with Dr Phil Durrant to give him some specific feedback as to the EdD cohorts experience so far.

PGR rep training

I applied online to the advert in October 2019 to become the new PGR rep for the EdD rep and was successful, so I attended the training to ensure that I was clear on my responsibilities as the student voice of the programme and how the role works. 

Once my training was over I emailed all of the EdD students to introduce myself as their rep say and started to gather student feedback as to their experiences so far 

CRPLresearch tea Building resilience strategies in to the development of professionals

Discussion around how resilence is important for working professionsals  and how it could be improved using resilience training using the Exeter MBA as an example.

The Academic woman

I attended a meeting with other members of the university who are academic woman and/or early career researchers to ensure we are able to discuss common issues, engage and supoort each other as academic woman at Exeter university.  

We watched a vidoe presentation from Michelle Ryan, Professor of social and organisational psychology, about the challenges that she has overcome and other challenges she still faces in the academic world in which she works.  

We also discussed our own workloads, parenting, support, and possiblle future funding sources from the university to support this group going forward.

Mental Health First Aid training (MHFA)

Although funded by my own College to help staff better understand, signpost and support those students who are struggling with mental health issues,  this workshop has also been really useful for me to ensure I have the right skills and knowledge to improve my own mental health and anxiety, particularly when faced with mounting work pressures and EdD deadlines. 

Reliability of muscle volume measurements using MRI

I volunteered to be a participant in a colleague's research into the effect of positioning on measurements of lumbar muscle volume from magnetic resonance images which aims to investigate the reliability of muscle volume measurements in the spine, using MRI scans.

This was a valuable lesson in being a research participant as I had a mini panic attack whilst in the scanner, even though the research forms had all been filled out correctly and I had read the information sheet. I have worked in MRI as a radiographer many times and I was entirely happy to be volunteering.  However, during one of the longer scans,  I felt very claustrophobic and became quite agitated. The researcher was brilliant, really sympathetic, gave me time to recover and so I felt able to continue with the scans which could then be used for the study.  

This really bought home the effects of research on the participants and that we must pay every attention to the welfare of our participants, before, during and after our research takes place. 

As a member of staff on the College of Medicine and Health, I am able to attend most of our PGT modules for free,  so I enrolled on the taught sessions of a module called HPDM055 (The Qualitative Methods and Process Evaluation) to further my knowledge of qualitative research methods for my research proposal EEDD042.

This module covers Identifying qualitative studies for review; Methods of qualitative data collection (interviews, focus groups, ethnography); Qualitative data analysis process (Framework); Process evaluations; and Qualitative synthesis (Meta-ethnography);