Month: November 2023

From previous post:

Expanding on the idea of giving all core users basic skills to navigate and play in the space based on their interest, could empower them to feel a sense of belonging. – Goes back to artefact idea.

Do they feel a sense of non-belonging? INTERVIEW

Are the students that consult more end up being in the space more? Courses like MABD who have a heavy workshop based curriculum end up being heavy users of the space. Correlation with the type of support given or reflection of the course brief?

Reflections for the future and points to keep always in mind when analysing questionnaire data:

Too comfortable in the space – goal achieved or another problem?

It came to my mind that the idea of belonging to a space for some, can create discomfort to others. For example, students that are perceived as regulars, who are comfortable and empowered to learn and explore, could be passing the idea of ‘model students’ and examples to be followed to those who don’t feel the same way? How can the constant presence of ‘regulars’ create an idea of a clique and a perceived status of ownership of the space? How can I intervene and avoid that?

Would the creation of different spaces and levels of support help?

Maybe would be worth considering the creation of different work zones for independent work and other spaces where more oversight is offered. The challenge, in my point of view, is to do it in such a way that it doesn’t create a divide and the perception that the spaces are inflexible. The one who inhabits one category can’t navigate to the other and vice-versa.  Would that create an undesirable structure?

At the same time, being able to offer more support who those who need, would give them more malleability to navigate the different spaces and the feeling of empowerment through independency. My interpretation of Freire’s work is that learning and belonging comes when the individual believes it has control and ownership of its pace and space.

Issues with creating different categories

As an expansion to the previous point, one could also argue that creating different spaces for different user groups could create stigma. An observation of mine is that students that struggle with language are more hesitant to ask for help and request time from the technical team. They end up trying to solve things on their own and getting things wrong, which in turn results in them being corrected and the sense of hesitation is perpetuated. They often tend to be quite apologetic when requesting support, and for me, personally, that is an indication of discomfort. How can I deal with this?

The offer of more one-to-one time is the strategy that we currently use, but if a student is not comfortable with verbal communication, the face-to-face 15min conversation might not solve the issue and even make it worse. If the student feel they are not understood or can’t get their point across, that might put them off trying again or returning to the space.

How can I make students from different language backgrounds and learning skills feel equally supported?

Written consultation / webchat? Those could solve the communication issue and make the student feel understood and the conversation flow in a pace that works for everyone. However, how those tools can be used in a technical space where practical work need to be demonstrated?

The observation regarding language barriers is reflected in the UAL attainment gap report case studies (Israel & Mackey, 2019) that also points to cultural differences when speaking in public.

DEVIATION FROM THE ORIGINAL POINT.

References:

Friere, P. (1968) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum

Israel, A. and Mackey, C. (2019) UAL attainment gap report. Available at https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/62935733/artssu-attainment-gap-report-14nov (visited on 17^th July 2023)

Focus on the following points:

• Students’ views and perspectives

• Are the course leaders happy with this usage?

• What I wanted to do with the data vs secondary research with the data based on time restrains and impossibilities.

• Focus on conversation with managers and course leaders who are excited to use the analysis as a tool, to be continued. Positive outcome regardless of initial limitations.

• Separate YR1 and YR2, vs consultations and see how times are distributed. Aside from course distribution.

• Ask students how comfortable they feel asking questions and exploring the space. Is the space open enough for exploration to be done your way, how to be more inviting?

• Ask stakeholders how they feel about students perceptions of the technical space and how that aligns with their plan to include laboratory experimentation in the curriculum.

KEEP ALWAYS IN MIND: Paulo Freire’s idea of social capital of communication, theory of social justice and equality.

Expanding on the idea of giving all core users basic skills to navigate and play in the space based on their interest, could empower them to feel a sense of belonging. – Goes back to artefact idea.

Do they feel a sense of non-belonging? INTERVIEW

Are the students that consult more end up being in the space more? Courses like MABD who have a heavy workshop based curriculum end up being heavy users of the space. Correlation with the type of support given or reflection of the course brief?

The attached questionnaire draft sums up my overall ideas and intentions. That would hopefully help me gain a better understading of the students perspectives. I could introduce this questionnaire at the end of term, as a feedback form open to all students to fill.

The idea of self-assesment of ‘frequent’ vs ‘sporadic’ user could bring interesting reflections and saves me from putting the students on the box of my own perceptions.

Another point that can have practical consequences is the feedback on time and space limitations affecting student experience.

I then needed to manually assign each student to a course based on my memory from who they are and which course they are from. The one’s I could not recognise I left to one side before doing a more in-depth comparison with the enrolled student’s lists that I got given by their course leaders.

A reflection I make here is that we should have a much better system of knowing who is booking and a way of keeping this data for future use. It is such an important piece of information that seems to be just thrown away and lost forever. It took me a long time, but I finally assigned the 359 names from 2022 and 1129 names from 2023 to the courses they belong to and organised in a month by-month secondary table. Again, I can’t post an example image of this here as the data contain many personal identifiers. They will be shown in the presentation.

I moved on to divide this data into courses, months, and which bookings were for workspace vs consultation time (one-to one). After doing that, I manually counted them and started playing around ways to visualize them in a meaningful way. At this stage, I admit I was getting confused about the way forward. My initial idea of analysing trends was no longer possible or comparing one year’s cohort with another was also not a reality anymore. I let the data and my curiosity lead the way and gave myself a couple of days to just observe and ‘play around’.

Challenge 3:

How can I reframe my questions without trying to force a narrative now that my initial idea is out of the window? I didn’t want to deviate from the core idea of the project. I still wanted to focus on the ideas of inclusivity, availability and perceived openness of the space and staff support. I had a few interactions with my tutors, colleagues and PgCert peers and that helped me add the following reflections:

Look at the data I have and try to gain relevant information, what can I learn from what is available?

How do consultations (one to one time) translate into usage?

Are the students feeling empowered to navigate the workshop through ono-to-one time or through technician lead workshops? – add this to the questionnaires.

Get formal letter of approval from Line manager to use data retrospectively.

Consider replacing the students’ questionnaire for a focus group.

Make sure to unpack terms such as ‘welcome’ and ‘experience’.

Initial idea:

The Action research plan came to my mind as an expansion of the Artefact and some personal observations of how the technical space is used. I wanted to quantify and qualify the usage distribution and reflect on how we can improve diversity and be a space where students feel welcome to explore, experiment and develop their skills in however way it feels right for them.

On my artefact, I reflected on the idea of making the space more equal, open, and fair. Based solely on my personal anecdotal observation of unequal usage distribution amongst courses, students’ backgrounds, confidence levels and language barriers. See below:

I wanted my research project to be a chance to quantify and therefore give significance on the issues I observed and reflected upon. Not to say that personal observations alone are not relevant, but they can gain strength when paired with data and analysed using appropriate tools. I embarked on a journey to organise my ideas and articulate where I wanted to get to – see scribbles below:

It is easy to see how I quickly found many questions and possible ways to deal with this project. It soon become a very ambitious project and also a quite exciting one, perhaps too big for the timeframe, but I continued on developing the idea.

After attending the workshop on 25^th October, I strongly resonated with the discussion around the Action research spiral by Kosher (Kosher et al, 2010). It was discussed how research sometimes can be a spiral of going back to the original question, reframing it, spiralling back and perhaps even changing the question based on reflection.

O’Leary’s cycles of research (Kosher et al, 2010: 8):

References:

Koshy E, Koshy V, and Waterman H (2011) Action research in healthcare. London: Sage.