I attempted a few different designs for my research, before arriving at the plan I actually carried out. Though I knew I wanted to find out and design an intervention around student definitions of ‘research’, it took me some time to refine my exact research question and process. In truth this refining continued through the planning and ethical enquiry process, through to after I collected and began to analyse my data, when I realised what it was really telling me.
You can see how, between my in class drafting (above) and completing my ethical enquiry form (below) my research question has evolved from ‘How can students use site visits as a research methodology?’ to three questions:
‘What are the barriers to indendent research for marginalised students (particularly Black and global majority students)?’
‘How can students use site visits beyond the classroom as a research methodology?’
‘What do students classify as learning and how can Western, imperial modes of learning be challenged?’
By the time of the Ethical Enquiry Form, the questions more clearly implement the social justice motivation for my research question. However, in hindsight they are still extremely broad (not least because there are three questions being asked rather than one). In fact in reflecting on how I then took my planning forward, it is the last question of those three, that I focused on answering:
‘What do students classify as learning and how can Western, imperial modes of learning be challenged?’
Now having collected two rounds of data, I would refine this further:
‘What do Stage 1 Performance: Design and Practice students classify as ‘research’ at the beginning of their undergraduate degree?‘
‘How can student definitions of ‘research’ be expanded beyond limited Western, imperial definitions of ‘research’, through my own teaching interventions?’
Below you can see the refined research design, which I repeatedly returned to an edited throughout the ARP process, according to what the data was telling me.
Before carrying out my interventions, I first needed to get a sense of existing student understandings of research. In order to do this, I decided to ask them two questions: What is research? and How does research take place?
These questions were left open to allow themes to emerge that were student led.
I asked two questions, which were really quite similar, in order to try to steer students to give as much information and specifics as possible.
In hindsight, as you’ll see from the data I collected, these questions didn’t actually lead to very specific or personal answers. This could have been because of the questions, or it could be because the students had quite surface understandings of research.