Monthly Archives: November 2014

My article was under review for six years: Here's the story.

railways, research

Nearly 15 years ago I submitted my first ever article to a peer reviewed journal. That paper was a version of “Motivation for volunteering on heritage railways”. The fact that the paper is now self-published on my website indicates that the paper was never published. It was never actually rejected, but after six years under review I’d had enough.

I won’t name the journal or the editors involved. Although this is not an area I publish in now, (or am likely to) I am somewhat risk adverse. The three editors involved in the process are no longer editing the journal. My memory on some points might be a bit hazy, especially regarding the order of some of the events, but here goes:

  1. I submitted the paper in January 2000. It was based on my MSc dissertation. This was the days before electronic or online submission (at least was for this journal). I sent the paper (2 printed copies plus a 3.5 inch floppy disk) to the editor at a UK university.
  2. I heard nothing. I tried to contact the editor but could not find a phone number or email. I got in touch with the press. Still nothing. [Submit somewhere else which desks rejects it. My PhD supervisor assured me this was OK since I hadn’t heard anything after about a year.]
  3. Two years later (!) a new editor gets in touch by email with a single review of the paper. The reviewer makes helpful comments. I spend a couple of months responding to the comments. I then send the new version to the editor by email.

Interlude: Strange twist here which is nothing to do with the process. My MSc supervisor forwards me an email from a postgraduate student who wishes to read my dissertation. I get in touch with him and he comes to Bristol to read my dissertation in the library. We arrange to meet up and have a cup to tea together. It turns out that his supervisor was the reviewer and guessed that I was the author. Reviewer suggested to student that he get hold of my dissertation as it might be useful for his own work. I now know the identity of the reviewer and know that the reviewer guessed my identity.

  1. A few months later I get a second review from the same single referee. Comments were mostly helpful, but referee says that a lot of new work has been published since he/she last read the paper. (This indicates that the review was probably done soon after I submitted the paper, but I was not sent the review until about two years after it was conducted.)
  2. I revise the paper again and send it to the editor. We are probably up to about mid-2003 or 2004 by this point. The editor and I exchange lots of emails. Editor makes lots of helpful comments, helps me with matters of writing style etc. Indicates he/she is keen to publish it. No further reviews are conducted.
  3. Correspondence with the editor comes to a close. He/she recommends that it should be published in one of the 2006 editions. However, there is a catch… he/she is stepping down from the editorship and won’t be editor in 2006, so it’s not his/her decision.
  4. 2006 arrives and I hear nothing from the new editor. I email the new editor (not a name I know) who gets back to me fairly promptly. He finds my paper in the trail left by his predecessor. He informs me that it is now journal policy for all papers to be reviewed by at least two people. Mine has only been reviewed by one person so it can’t be published. Editor also informs me that that they want to publish more things which are not about railways.
  5. Get fed up and withdraw the article.
  6. Sit on it for a while then put it on my website.

Lessons learned.

Fortunately I now have many positive experiences of the publishing process to share. It has not been all plain sailing, but even the worst experiences have not come close to the ludicrousness of this article’s journey through peer review. Here a few lessons I would pass on.

  1. NEVER EVER let any journal not get back to you for one year, let alone two years. You are perfectly within your rights to submit elsewhere.
  2. Try to be clear on whether your article has been accepted or not.
  3. If you are not sure if the editor agrees with the reviewers, ask.
  4. I think I let the new 2006 editor off the hook. It seems a bit strange that a new editor would feel able to apply new rules about reviewer numbers retrospectively and ignore the recommendation for his predecessors.
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Preparing for war: Memories of GF Canning (1918-2012)

GFCanning
In the army
In the army

My father was always trying to persuade his own father to write his memoirs. My grandfather wasn't one for writing, but he did get some of his memories into writing. As it is Remembrance Sunday today I thought I would share his early experience of life in the Army in the Second World War. It is a humbling experience to remember that the people who fought this war were not professionals, but ordinary men and women. Although he spent most of the war in North Africa and Italy his first brush with death was in the Cornish town of Falmouth. Everything that follows is his own words.

 

 

In 1939 preparations were being made for war – conscription was being introduced for twenty year olds and then twenty-one year olds had to register for national service followed by older men up to the age of forty in stages.

War broke out in September 1939 and everything changed. The blackout and rationing were introduced and shops had to close early at about 5pm.

I registered for service in October 1939. In November I had to go to Worcester for a medical examination.

On Thursday 15th February 1940 I had to report for military service at the barracks of the Worcestershire Regiment at Norton, near Worcester. We all thought the war would be short and were looking forward for the holiday with pay! As things turned out this was far from what was going to happen.

On the morning of the 15th I left home and made my way to Evesham railway station where I met a chap named Arthur Locke who was also going to Norton Barracks. However we decided we would have a drink in Worcester before going on to Norton but the army had other plans. As we got off the train at Shrub Hill a big burly seargent wearing a red sash came up to us and said “Are you for Norton Barracks?”. When we said we were he directed us to a waiting bus. We got on the bus for our “holiday” and never had freedom from that point for six long years.

I did my initial training of four months learning how to kill 1914-1918 style and I did a further two months barrack guards at depot HQ. During my time at Norton the evacuation of Dunkirk took place and we were moved out into billets to make way for the survivors who had to be re-kitted and re-posted to their appropriate units. I stayed in a garage at Norton Vicarage for this period. What a sight these chaps were unwashed unshaven some in civilian kit, navy uniforms, French uniforms all sorts of attire completely demoralised and not a pretty sight. From that point it was obvious the war was going to last a lot longer than we at first realised.

After the six months at Norton we were posted to the eighth battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment who were in camp at Kington in Herefordshire. There we joined what was left of the original battalion 100 men out of the original strength of 1000 men. All the rest were either killed, drowned or taken prisoner in France. The reinforcement consisted of 500 from Norton Barracks and 350 from the Welsh Fusiliers from Wrexham Barracks which more or less brought the battalion up to full strength.

Incidentally I was posted to B Company which was formerly the Territorial Company for Evesham and Pershore so a lot of the survivors were chaps that I knew.

We were under canvas at Kington it being summertime.

It wasn’t long before we moved to another location one of many which was subsequently made. However this last move was to Castle Cary in Somerset where we were housed in the former Territorial Drill Hall. After about three weeks were on the move again this time to Lanhydrock in Cornwall. We were under canvas in the woods which gave us good cover as a German invasion was expected at any moment. We had a fleet of Western National busses standing by to get us to any given area quickly. We were standing to every morning at dawn and at sundown which were the times that the expected invasion would be attempted.

However thanks to the RAF and the Royal Navy he never made it although he did make attempted large scale raids as it was reported that a large number of German soldiers bodies were washed up along the Cornish coast.

We moved from this God-forsaken area to Budock just outside Falmouth in fields under canvas again, but still doing the standing to routine as the expected invasion was still a possibility.

However as Autumn approached the powers that be decided to move us into Falmouth into commandeered houses by the football field.

I had my first brush with death while in Falmouth.

The Methodist Hall was turned into a canteen and games complex for servicemen and it was run by the WVS. We could get a cup of tea and a cake very cheaply and have a game of table tennis or darts and it was run by lovely Christian people. When I went into Falmouth I made it my first port of call.

One evening I made my usual visit and had my usual tea and homemade cakes and after I had a game of table tennis with one of my mates from the same room I was billeted in by the Wylde – a young lad from the Black Country. However after we finished the game he asked if I wanted another game. I said I wanted to go to the cinema, the Odeon, which was just across the road. So I said cheerio and I’d see him back at the billets and made my way into the cinema. However after I’d been in there for about a quarter of an hour there was a terrific explosion. It was thought at first that a bomb had hit the cinema and panic broke out temporarily, but the audience soon calmed down and continued to enjoy the picture. After the show we went outside into the street and had a shock. They had the Methodist Hall cordoned off. A bomb had drifted into the hall completely demolishing the ground floor and killing everybody in there including young Wylde, my mate. For the next few weeks we were getting nightly bombings of Falmouth. The target was the docks.

However Autumn was approaching and we were preparing for our next move which was Truro, twelve miles away where we marched to with full pack. We arrived at our new billets which was the school on Fairmantle Street right in the centre of the city. Our dining hall was the Regent Annexe a hall at the back of the Regent cinema on Lemon Quay. During our long stay in Truro (9 months) we attended St George’s Church every Sunday for church parade; fired our rifles on Idless Ranges, foot and arms drill on Lemon Quay and night exercises. At that time I didn’t think that Truro would play such a huge part in my future. It probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t met a certain young lady by the name of Doris Gallie whom I happened to bump into in the Blackout who would bring Cornish pasties around to Farmantle Street to keep me sweet. One of the duties while in Truro was guard duty at Truro martialling yard (railway).

During this time Plymouth was being bombed nightly with huge casualties. We used to use a railway coach as a guard room and one night I remember they shunted a passenger luggage coach into a siding near us and when they opened the doors it was full of coffins which were the dead from the previous night’s bombing in Plymouth. Just after a fleet of hearses drove up and carried them off.

We spent Christmas 1940 in Truro where I visited and was introduced to Doris’s family. Truro was to become a second home to the 8th Worcesters as quite a number of chaps married Truro girls.

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Drinking the wisdom of the sage on the stage: the traditional lecture on iTunesU

Christian, learning, lecturing, OER

trueman170x170Over the past two weeks I’ve been making my way through a series of lectures on the Reformation by Carl Trueman of the Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. I understand the lectures form part of a masters’ degree. They are available free through iTunesU.

The first thing I should say about the lectures is that I am enjoying them. They are well presented, full of interesting facts, contain some interesting and sometimes funny stories, and contain a great deal of Trueman’s own scholarly analysis. The course is also very broad covering the reformation from a historical as well as theological perspectives (not that Trueman would suggest the two approaches could be divorced). I’ve listened to the first seven lectures, which have focused not only on the person of Martin Luther himself, but also the geo-political situation of the German states and Holy Roman Empire in the early sixteenth century. Occasionally students ask questions which try to relate Luther’s experience and views to trends and movements in contemporary Christianity. While this may be expected in an evangelical Christian seminary where the students are in or are preparing for ministry, Trueman resists any attempt to draw such parallels and always falls on the side of constraint. Luther himself is a complex individual, his theological and political thought evolves over his lifetime and he lived five centuries ago.

However, I did not start this post with a view to discussing the Reformation, Martin Luther or Carl Trueman, but the nature of the traditional lecture. There are an astonishing 33 lectures in this series, most just under an hour long. I don’t know how the lectures fit into the Seminary’s (orthe accreditor’s) credit system, but 30 hours strikes me as a huge amount of the contact time for one ‘module’. The students ask occasional questions, all of which Trueman thoughtfully answers.

My own practice as tutor on the Postgraduate Certificate course for new lecturers could not be more different from the traditional lecture. My own input is generally short, activities tend to be group and discussion based, and assessments are varied. I’m well aware that some new lecturers would quite like to come to an hour long lecture where they could take notes, not be called upon to discuss as a class or in groups and write an essay and/or a traditional exam for the assessment, but such passivity goes against what I believe about learning.

My own undergraduate study was very lecture-based assessed mainly by unseen two-hour exams at the end of each module. There was some ‘coursework’, but the exams probably made up around 70% of the assessment. Most of those lectures were actually very interesting, but it was the small group tutorials which encouraged me to learn think independently and develop intellectually into the sort of person who could undertake postgraduate study.

Listening to and enjoying Carl Trueman’s lectures has presented me with an intriguing dilemma about teaching in higher education. Trueman lectures are incredibly detailed. Each time I listen to one I look forward to the next. I almost feel I am walking in Luther’s shoes. However, I really need to ask myself whether this is the best way for Trueman’s students to learn? It is tremendous that I can sit in East Sussex listening to fascinating lectures from Pennsylvania, but I will not be taking the exams and writing the essays. If I had to write an essay, a project or exam I would be somewhat overwhelmed that I could possibly produce anything interesting or original. If I taught about the reformation (which I don’t and never will as it’s not my area) I would be very tempted to tell students to listen to these lectures., and use my own time in the classroom differently.

Perhaps it is the enthusiastic amateur (like me in the case of the reformation) who benefits the most from freely available online lectures like these. I listen to ‘sage on the stage’* drinking his wisdom in a way I could not possibly comprehend if he was in my area of expertise. Trueman relates stories of email arguments he’s had the various (named) individual scholars. He tells of how one of his book reviews exposed so many factual errors it led to a whole edition getting pulled.** This is a teacher and colleague to fear!

Note: I’ve picked on Carl Trueman because that is what I’m listening to at the moment. I’m sure my feelings would be the same of a lot of other publically available online content.

*King, Alison. ‘From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side’. College Teaching 41, no. 1 (1 January 1993): 30–35. (Not open access).

**Carl Trueman (2012) You Cannot Judge This Book by its Cover: A Review of Evans, G. R. The Roots of the Reformation: Tradition, Emergence and Rupture. IVP Academic, 2012. The publisher brought out a second edition with corrections.

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