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The Questions We Ask Empower Us

How are you feeling today? What are your thoughts on your writing process at present? 

You might be feeling confident and proud of yourself for the progress you’ve made so far and may even be motivated to take your target goals a step further. Someone else, on the other hand, might be feeling demotivated and finding it difficult to connect with their writing process. Neither one of these two states are a universal yardstick for absolute success or failure. In truth, they are the realities of us, as humans, journeying through life - one pocket filled with stories of victory and the other with the setbacks we’ve experienced. So, progress comes in many forms. For one person it might be finally coming to understand a journal article that was confusing, while it could be renewed hope for someone else and, for another, it could be making sense of their thoughts about a certain life event. Every form of progress is significant and being aware of this helps us to connect back to the bigger picture of our writing process and our research at large.

In attempt to track my research progress, I recently revisited the “social circle’s activity” from one of our workshops. The activity poses the question, “Why do we ask the questions we ask?”. In this activity, the researcher must engage with this question by exploring the connection between themselves and their research. They must focus on three aspects; the personal, social, and theoretical factors that influenced their interests and decisions for undertaking research. Using prompting questions, the researcher then unpacks each aspect. The personal aspect includes the researcher’s strengths, values, and beliefs; the social aspect includes what has happened or is happening around us; and the theoretical aspect includes literature and the knowledge that the researcher possesses about the field.  I took this activity and used it to reflect on my research journey because I needed to be reminded of why I started and why I should keep going.

Perhaps finding out why we ask the questions we ask, or understanding what led us to our research questions, or even identifying a part of ourselves in our research work can also be a useful tool through which to draw strength, courage, and motivation for the process? This may not be an easy activity, but it will be empowering, and it will augment our self-awareness about our research work and the academic tasks we engage with.

I wish you a great week further; filled with gratitude and peace

Regards

Silindile Ngcobo


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