I have taken a break from PhD frenzy to participate in a workshop that was concerned with university didactics. What's knowledge, how does it get inside our heads, and what can a teacher do to facilitate this? Very interesting, and in a sense a psychological question, since the most important issue in my opinion is to reduce the students' fear or embarrassement. One of the most memorable sentences of the last four days has been "If I don't speak in the first two or three sessions of a seminar, I won't open my mouth in the rest". Luckily, there are a couple of methods which help to break the ice, to involve the students in active learning, and which motivate to try out new things and to think differently.
However, now I am back to work, which is an adventure in itself. The essence of discourse analysis is that you have no idea what is going to be the result of your analysis; you may have a working hypothesis, but are required to be as open as possible to different outcomes of the very close look you are taking on - in my case - oral data. This is highly fascinating on the one hand, and highly frightening on the other, since of course there's the possibility that everything's totally different from what you thought it would be like. So we will see what the Israeli and the Palestinian water discourses have in common ... or not.
