Meeting with Clive

Today, I met with Clive, to discuss my ideas and to see what advice he could give me on my Independent Study. To begin with I felt slightly anxious, I think this was because I had all these ideas floating around my head and I was worried that I may not make any sense or Clive would not understand my ideas. Yet, as soon as I sat down I felt extremely relaxed and my ideas started flowing, I found Clive to be very helpful, he listened and responded to my thoughts in a positive way. Below is a summary of our meeting:

I put forward my ideas to Clive and his advice or the direction that he decided to take, after listening to me was to select a paragraph or a section of a policy document. In my case, I would use the ‘Birth to three matters’ document. From here, unpacking and illuminating the text which is used within the paragraph. I am referring to the word paragraph as a section of text, whether this been in bullet form or several lines of text. Within this text, I would be looking at what language is being used, the way in which the language is being used and possibly why this type of language is being used. This will hopefully lead to a series of questions,

• What do specific words mean?
• Why are these words being used?
• Why are they being placed in this order?

There are many more and I think that even these questions create other questions.

We also discussed looking at who wrote the document,

• Who chose to use this type of lexis?
• What were the issues that were discussed about this paragraph?
• Were there problems that arose from this particular paragraph?

This would involve me working backwards in the process of the document. This could be done theoretically; there may be minutes of meetings that could be discovered on the internet, or by speaking to people. Clive passed forward the idea of getting in contact with the Town Hall and getting in touch with their educational department. Another way would be speaking to heads of nurseries discovering where they received their document from and retracing the document in that way. We talked about creating questions and then seeing who would be able to give me the answer, rather than just relying on known people. For example, I would need to speak to Mr A, Mr B and Mr C to find out the answers to those questions that I have, and they may help me, they may create more questions or they may be irrelevant, yet that is part of the whole process.
We discussed timelines, and I would need to organise my time, to studying the chosen paragraph, creating questions, discovering who I need to contact/what I need to read about (documents I need to find), being able to contact these people or finding these relevant documents.
I was now beginning to worry bout the title, I think a little bit too much and after speaking to Clive I know that the title is not set in stone, but rather allows for a structure, in which I am able to move around in. I also was meeting with Paul, another professional that I felt may be able to advise through this process. Clive agreed that it would still be beneficial for me to meet with Paul as he would allow for another slant to be taken on my ideas.