When I first applied to do a part-time PhD at Lancaster (a while ago now), I thought that doing a doctorate would be challenging. I had no idea it would challenge more than simply whether one is becoming a subject-matter expert. Among the questions I find being prompted by this month’s exercise are:
a. Am I doing this for myself or for an audience? [and what is the significance of the answer to that question?]
b. Then, what significance does undertaking a PhD in my mid forties have in my understanding of who you are?
I really wanted to have a go myself at an educational biography writing task, one of two that I recently piloted with a group of managers at Henley. The intention then was to provide a focus for thinking about personal reflection and also with some “food for thought” at their two-day off-site meeting. It worked well, both as a pre-work exercise and even more so when each person actually read out what they had written to the others at the workshop. The discussion that followed each one, the respectful yet probing questions, the noting of the contrasts between styles and stories, and the added insights on their own stories from listening to others were noticeable.
This was the brief I set them:
1. Life Chapters
Start by imagining your life as if it were a book, with each part or stage making up one chapter. Although the book is still unfinished, it probably already contains a number of interesting and well-defined chapters.
Divide your life into its major chapters and briefly describe each one. Whilst you may have as many as or as few chapters as you like, we suggest a minimum of two or three and a maximum of seven or eight. Think of this as a general table of contents to your book. Give each chapter a name are describe its overall contents to give a flavour of the story. Discuss briefly what makes for a transition from one chapter to the next.
You can use any style you like, and it doesn’t have to be long. Most people take about 250 -400 words for this activity. “
Life Chapters – Chris Dalton
Chapter 1 – Ages 3ish (or 4ish) to 16ish (0r 17ish)
My life begins, and I have no idea for several years that it’s going on. When consciousness begins to stick, the toddler years and teenager years are still both a blur. My earliest memory is of jellyfish on a beach (probably a snatch of imagery from younger than 3) in Sandycove, a Dublin suburb where I lived with my older sister and brother and my English mother and Irish father. She took us back to the UK – apparently a very brave and audacious thing to do in those strict days, leaving him there. We moved to a Kent seaside town, which is where I did my growing up, living and squabbling with a kind of middle-class poverty . First loves, dreams, jobs, friends, broken hearts, they litter the streets, pubs, bus shelters and friend’s bedrooms of Deal and the classrooms of Sir Roger Manwoods in Sandwich. I can recall my liking (though this is a retrospective thought) for the instant enthusiasms (and, equally instant disinterest, often) for certain people and (as soon as puberty hit) painful crushes on certain girls. Also a comfort with being on my own with my own thoughts, in having only a few close friends, and for giving things up (e.g. most projects before completion, belief in God, any subject related to science or maths). I connected with language and felt the importance of words, but since I didn’t really read much (oh, the wasted years!), could do nothing with those feelings.
I left the grammar school at the end of the 5th form, which I had convinced myself was a very mature thing to do, and started doing ‘A’ levels at a college of further education in Ashford. I had picked English, History, Geography and Drama as courses. I applied myself, sort of, and even applied to study archaeology at university. But, a new world had opened up. Cigarettes. Alcohol. Long hair. Politics. (to Mrs Thatcher I owe a lot since she provided me and an entire generation with something to believe against).
Chapter 2 – Ages 17ish to 24ish
I left the FE college before that project could be closed, somehow moved up to London, and got a job volunteering for a couple of years in the CND office in north London, working mostly as part of the Youth CND office. I felt then and still feel now that this was a rich period, full of novelty, importance (at the time, CND was really big…), and this was the first of my five “real learning” events to date (turning points, that is). On top of the excitement of the campaign, there was communal living in flatshares and squats, the Dole, Ken Livingstone’s GLC, music, bands, clothes, travel to demonstrations, independence (all without money), and a banking of experience and experiences for a rainy day.
After CND I held a series of part-time jobs. I was a bicycle courier, I delivered pizzas, I worked in a Covent Garden music venue behind the bar. I loved and hated London in equal measure, and I was completely without any goals. Then in 1984 someone suggested volunteering on a kibbutz. What sense did that make?! Of course, I did it. I spent six amazing months on Yad Mordecahai and it was there I learned what it really means to work (and enjoy the feeling of physical exhaustion from manual labour), to build something alongside others and be judged for your ability to work, and to live and argue with others in a complex environment. This is my identity/learning event number two.
Back in London again, and more drifting from job to job, back on the bike, some DJing and even a short and disastrous spell as a self-employed painter and decorator. This time, I only hated London, and the transition out of this chapter was via another suggestion made by a person at the right moment – if I liked travel, why not learn how to teach English as a foreign language? I did an intensive, month-long course at International House in Piccadilly. The course was an incredible piece of training and the principles of instruction they used are still with me in my classroom management today. That month is key learning event number three. I passed with a good enough grade to be offered a job in another IH school abroad and I was determined to head to the mediterranean. However, the only IH School with a vacancy open was in Budapest. In Hungary. 1987. Behind the Iron Curtain! What sense did that make?! So, of course, I did it. I had no money, so I travelled to Budapest from England by train, crossing the channel on the ferry and feeling very adventurous as I watched the Kent cliffs retreat in the wake. A slow train journey allows for a transition to occur.
Chapter 3 – Ages 25ish to 42ish
I felt very alone in my first few weeks in Hungary. But Budapest is where my career in management training and education began. I first worked in the language school, and marvelled at the novelty of the crumbling grace of the city, the time-warp one-party society, and the impossibility of ever learning the Hungarian language. I found that, being a Brit there and then, actually it was I who was the novelty, but mostly in a good way. I worked my way up from running general English classes, to taking business English groups, then to working mostly with corporate clients, and after a short return to the UK in 1991, and a few months commuting between Budapest and Vienna for work, I arrived at the International Management Center in Budapest. I have no doubt that my credentials then would not have got me hired to work in a business school in the UK or US, but everything about Hungary in 1992 was flux, change and possibility and I was just in the right place at the right time.
Hungary is also where I got married in 1989, and where I had two daughters, got on to a post-communist property ladder, endured the intricacies of the Hungarian school and health systems and a Hungarian version of a whole set of “grown up” family experiences. I did my MBA, distance learning, whilst there. I was very glad that I did as it laid to rest some very long-standing questions about finishing difficult projects once started. And, for a while, I was no doubt convinced and resigned that I would remain in Budapest just about forever.
Chapter 4 – Ages 42ish to present day
The fourth turning point was a marriage break-up and divorce, and a return to the UK after 18 years abroad. This was a turbulent couple of years, and one where I found dread and exhilaration in equal measure. My work was my focus, as were my children, but I also found tremendous solace in finding out some family history (which has been covered in other, much earlier, posts in this blog) that played a key role in forming my sense of self.
Professionally, I had built up a lot of experience working in training and education in management, had been in charge of an American MBA programme, gained an MBA from Henley, developed a strong method for working in a classroom or training room using experiential learning techniques. And I really wanted to come back and settle in, and to pick up my career at Henley. I have been very fortunate in both respects. I’m happily remarried and following a wonderful (and stressful!) five years in charge of the Flexible MBA, here I am now enjoying a new position at Henley in a subject close to my heart and also experiencing the fifth of the key learning events in this narrative – my part-time PhD.
Reflections on this exercise
- Reading this back, it feels now like the early part of my life was a series of themes being opened, and that the mission of my middle age is to understand those things and be able to close them.
- Another recurrent theme feels like it is saying something about the role of chance and the suggestions of others in the beating of what i could easily look back on as my personal path.
- These little chapters can shift their sands all the time. Told again, tomorrow, they would probably run differently. Is the reflecting on one’s past therefore a document of the present?
- It feels very broad-brush. Big chunks and important minutiae are both left out, and the fact of ‘public’ation is an ever present thought. Nevertheless, I can sense already which are the “knots” in the wood, the stubborn parts that call for more work.
- I speculate that a single narrative might contain its own patterns, but if identity is collective, those patterns will emerge in relation to other people’s narratives. I’d be curious to know what those reading this think about this.
Good Morning, Chris
You really touched me with the refreshing candour and wise insights. A couple of thoughts is that you are so ‘ dead right ‘ how we all skip over uncomfortable moments in life, and miss the chance to truly draw down the value from even an ‘ instants reflection ‘
The other is having after an herculean effort managed to get my DBA accepted supported by 2 invincible ‘ Prof’s ‘ Malcolm and Vic ! But the point here is quite rightly the redefinition of who one is through this journey of at the outset unimagined consequences.
Best to you for the New Year
Frank