Climbing Out of the Void: Moving from chaos to concepts in the presentation of a thesis

This article is concerned with the processes that lie between the sensing of an idea and its subsequent presentation in a written 'academic' style. It is based on the experience of writing a PhD thesis that set out to explore a 'felt-reality' concerning the relationship between community education and spirituality. Central to the paper is the description and analysis of a critical incident, involving a supervisor's feedback, which caused the thesis to be abandoned for over a year. The article describes why and how the writing was eventually resumed using a deliberately reflective style. This produced new insights and ideas out of the very process of writing. The paper highlights a number of parallels between the content of the thesis and the process of writing it. An illustration is given of how the experience of writing the thesis can be 'mapped' against three different models of 'ways of knowing'.