Reconciling Different Professional Roles in Pursuit of a Professional Doctorate

In this blog Kumar Jayantilal explores how students could attempt to reconcile different professional roles - teacher, lecturer and researcher - and achieve peace on a postgraduate degree.

Postgraduates find themselves juggling multiple professional and personal responsibilities. Often, when afforded the opportunity to engage in higher learning alongside work, there can be a sense of self-realisation. However, among such beauty, rarely do we talk about the barriers (or the messiness) that is concomitant with the postgraduate lived experience. Put simply, we document the successes yet refuse to admit the invariable periods of low. Failure, however, is an apt opportunity to learn. Therefore, in this reflective piece, I explore how students could attempt to reconcile different roles (and the associated challenges with each position) and achieve peace on a professional doctorate degree. It is hoped that, through writing this blog, I can cathartically write myself out of my own writer’s block and rediscover my sense of academic purpose after a prolonged period of procrastination from my postgraduate studies. First, however, some context.

I am a primary school teacher with a specialism in physical education (PE). To cultivate my lifelong ambition of being an academic in higher education (HE), I lecture in Early Years Education and Care alongside PE and Sport in two different institutions. More than three years ago, to complement my primary teaching and lecturing commitments, I decided to undertake a Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) degree. With a voracious appetite for learning about the world and myself, I relished the intellectual rigour that came with doctoral study. At the beginning of my studies, I examined schools of philosophical thought – a beautifully disorientating experience. Indeed, the doctoral degree, compared to the traditional Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) route, offered a liminal space for thinking, carefully curated blocks of time for me to read and think about the world, myself and research. We were, I discovered, irreducibly related beings rather than disparate phenomena. However, at a time when the soul of the social world was being shredded by technology, hedonism, greedy corporations and a cost-of-living crisis, it felt indulgent to sit in a room and contemplate philosophical questions all day. Nevertheless, and perhaps emboldened by the plight of humanity, I discovered the things that truly captivated me: I was stirred, like a method actor, by the essence of existence.

In the contemporary world, existence is largely underpinned by neoliberal performativity – a way of maximising economic efficiency through a culture of accountability (Ball, 2003). Think about your own schooling: it was most probably punctuated by high-stakes testing, a teacher-centred curriculum, gradings and inspections, and the terror and fabrication of performing. While such features might seem natural, ask yourself: who are (or were) the winners? If you are entrepreneurial, individualistic and workable, performativity loves you. Otherwise, more than likely, you lose. Entering school as a practising primary teacher, grappling with such provocative thoughts, I was drawn towards teachers’ ways of being within performative work cultures, especially in PE. Inspiring children to achieve the best outcomes was (and always will be) my priority, while I am able to keep current with best practice by being in schools. However, being in school I was now able to contextualise the philosophical and theoretical aspects of the doctorate, giving my abstract thinking a professional edge. In fact, due to my privileged professional circumstances – a teacher and researcher – I made exponential progress. I drafted workable chapters for my literature review and methodology, while conducting a pilot study based on my evolving research ideas. Meanwhile, I presented the findings of a reflective methodological paper I published at conferences nationwide (Jayantilal and Lalli, 2023). However, while my research profile was burgeoning, I was simultaneously being pummelled by performativity in primary schools. Believing that life would be slower, easier and better as a lecturer, I decided it was an opportune moment to make the professional ‘jump’ into HE.

In a changing world where reality was becoming more fluid, I had to reconsider my views on (higher) education. I could no longer cultivate the impressionable, often docile university students that, until my doctorate degree, I was – ensconcing myself in a study room for hours on end, trying to manipulate subordinate clauses to form the perfect sentence. Instead, universities were (and should always be) bastions for criticality, a safe place to question one’s social and political circumstances – who they are, the work they do, and where they want to go. At the same time, students should be embraced for the knowledge, wisdom and creativity they already possess, while university should be constructed as a living, breathing, ongoing dialogue to co-create meaning about a given phenomenon. The university climate, therefore, is slower, gentler and more mindful. However, segueing from primary teaching to lecturing was an uncomfortable experience. Like most primary teachers, I enjoyed exercising a degree of control, linearly (and unproblematically) transmitting knowledge to obsequious students. I was always the protagonist (or antagonist, depending on who I was required to play), occupying centre of the stage, a Daniel Day-Lewis of the classroom. Therefore, I struggled to give students the necessary thinking time in response to group discussions – I incessantly intervened. Coming from an environment, where reality is quick, ordered and often unforgiving, I also could not adjust to the speciously relaxed ways of university working. In fact, I felt a degree of compunction, asking myself whether I deserved to be standing in front of thirty students who were paying inordinate sums of money for a meaningful learning experience. However, lecturing was otherwise exceedingly rewarding and alongside publishing papers, HE was where I unequivocally wanted to be. There was an ineffable beauty in being collectively disorientated, in learning together and not always knowing the answer. More importantly, however, there was a beauty in bringing the abstract, highly technical, evocative concepts of doctoral thinking closer to students through my resources and delivery. However, ironically, as I was writing and talking to students about performativity, while altogether trying to sophisticatedly evade it, it was performativity that pulled me back into the cauldron.

Lecturing, I naively thought, would buy me the extra thinking time and breathing space to seamlessly complete my doctorate degree. For example, unlike primary teaching, when the vestiges of a long, arduous working day stick to you like glue, I thought I would find regular days in the week to conduct and write up my research. However, HE is plagued by some of the same performative problems as primary teaching. The insurmountable marking loads, heavy hours of teaching, and the minutiae of administrative tasks. HE is gripped by its own crises, too. At a time of heightened fiscal uncertainty, with tuition fees frozen and student intake low, there is a palpable need to recruit (and keep) students to keep the financial juggernaut moving. However, while I would fabricate my performance to satisfy inspections as a primary teacher, I never felt the need to tender for money, always residing in the sanctuary of my classroom. At university, though, the stakes are higher: academic institutions are having to market themselves to ensure their survival, akin to a business or salesman. There is also the performative paradox of our existing students, the consumer: are we superficially championing an inclusive, meaningful university experience, yet burdening students with excessive amounts of debt and assignment anxiety. Then, to seemingly countermand such a perilous situation, are we macadamising the degree experience (our product) to keep the student happy, breeding overworked, ontologically insecure academic staff who (like me) often have their own research commitments. How, in the midst of such deleterious circumstances, do you possibly contemplate, let alone complete, a professional doctorate, a degree that is mired by its own performative pressures, not least the need to complete the degree within a performative philosophical and methodological framework, before a set time? As I mentioned before, somebody (or everybody, in this case) must lose within a performative work culture. And, since performative can shape the head, hands and heart, it is easy to lose one’s sense of academic purpose, with prolonged period of procrastination, writer’s block and academic unbelonging commonplace. The following section will transparently identify some of the ways I reconcile different professional roles to achieve peace on a postgraduate degree.

First, there is no hiding away from one immutable fact: a professional doctorate is hard. You will have to surrender to the fact that, to do the degree well in the midst of other professional roles, you need to explore uncomfortable aspects of yourself and be prepared to get messy. Like a marathon runner, a familiarity with running for long distances, irrespective of whether you want to give up or not, is required. Such familiarity can be made more difficult if – like me – you are preoccupied with achieving excellence in your running cadence and form. However, while the doctorate degree is understandably difficult, and this difficulty is a temporary reality, you must (at times) be easy on yourself. To be perfect, year after year, is difficult. Instead, there needs to be a recognition that doctoral progress is iterative, rather than linear. As a result, you must become acquainted with one of life’s most elusive constructs: time. You cannot rush experience, and doctoral work demands that you allow your thoughts to mature fully. In fact, as I explained above, occupying a profession alongside studying for a postgraduate degree can only buttress your doctoral thinking – the contextualisation of abstract concepts through lived experience. However, although time can be a great revealer, do not become too friendly with it. There is a performative necessity to complete the doctorate in a timely manner which, when reconciling three different roles, requires something to give. Some, albeit quixotic in today’s volatile, uncertain world, leave their professional altogether; others sophisticatedly elide the pressures of performativity by working irregularly around doctoral commitments. Either way, after engaging in thinking (breathing in), blocks of writing time (breathing out) need to be formed. Ultimately, however, such strategies are meaningless if you do not have a purpose to root your doctorate degree in. For me, my purpose is to bring glory to God and, the process of self-elimination while engaging in the intellectual rigour of a postgraduate degree, allows me to bring glory to His kingdom. If that sense of purpose is lost, you can quickly find yourself excavating – or ranting, depending on how you want to view it – yourself on a blog, trying to write yourself out of a writer’s block when there is data that needs to be collected!

References

Ball, S. (2003). The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), pp.215-228.

Jayantilal, K. and Lalli, G. (2024). Doing qualitative research: Methodological reflections on researching teachers work. European Journal of Education, 59(1), e12575.