Don’t hide the mess!
One of the key points I’m beginning to understand is that the process of action research is a messy one, and that’s ok. This is something that my tutor mentioned in a recent catch up chat. It was reassuring as I have felt lost with which way to go with it this past month. My question has changed back and forth. Although it’s been stressful not yet pinning things down, I can see the not knowing exactly what I’m doing is definitely a valid part of the journey.
This week I attended the 2nd SIP Seminar and turned up feeling behind with things. I heard that most people were experiencing the same. Again reassuring. Since then I’ve been talking to my line manager and the outreach team about working with the CCW Art and Design Saturday Club on my research question and so I’m seeing this could work.
My new question: How do students experience materials/led activity with regard to ideas generation and creativity? (still needs work) I’m planning to collect data from the reflections written by my students about their activities. I’ve been thinking a lot about the methods and really liked what I read about focus groups in Vaughn et al (2013) especially the qualitative nature of this approach, it’s flexibility to work alone or in combination with other research methods, and the possibility of dynamic group interaction. Because of these elements I’ve really wanted to use a focus group as a method, but I’m realising that this may not work so well for my students who are aged 15. It might be hard to recruit willing participants who would get into a flowing conversation without some input from myself as from past experience teenagers can be reluctant to contribute in group discussions. Instead I’ve opted for using something that is already part of my lesson plan, reflective questions, which I can tailor to work with my research question. I’m hoping to also work in some group discussion activity before responses are written which, I hope will give some benefits of the focus group, and I won’t be relying on this alone, it will work as a warm up to thinking about the questions individually.