Following a break of several weeks (owing to a rather nasty with respiratory condition), it was great to get back into the school and see the kids again. They were particularly pleased to see brand new folders, and I surprised them with some other wonderful stationery, including post-its shaped like speech bubbles and some rather cool highlighter pens. Although there was some minor disagreement about ownership of the sky blue clip folders, compromise was reached reasonably quickly.
Anyway, we caught up, reviewed where we had got up to in discussing research methods, and then began to lay out plans for their research. There were a couple of striking points for me in this session. First, the dynamic and the overall feeling of the session was distinctly different from sessions before: it was less frenetic, there was less chat and giggling, and there was quite a bit more focus. In particular, as the group began to plan out there ideas research, the room seemed to full silent (well, almost), the general hubbub giving way to more earnest contemplation of the task ahead. In fact, all four children present in this session decided to go it their own way, and began jotting down ideas. I talked with the group about the choices that they were making, and I was able to circulate among them and discuss their questions and strategies behind the various approaches. One of the girls indicated that her preference for collecting data would be by interview, and that she would ask her peers to talk about their learning in reference to their book work; she was very emphatic that focus groups would not work as there would be too many distractions, and this would generally be less straight forward than engaging in a one-to-one conversation. The other two girls were both working on separate questionnaires for surveys, and they may end up collaborating as they realised they might be covering the same ground. One of the boys (the other was absent) was also making a paper-based questionnaire, and he seems keen on the idea that his peers would respond creatively to this. However, there is still quite a lot of work to do, but now that they have access to their own materials, which are stored separately in securely for them, they may decide to progress in their own time; in fact, they seemed quite keen with the prospect of doing this.
My biggest takeaway from this session relate to my own self-consciousness as a researcher; it's quite difficult to get away from the fact that I know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, and that there is a recorded evidence trail of the activity. There's an additional layer of pressure as a researcher that you don't perhaps experience as a practitioner (time is more limited, the objectives seem more pressing, and you are conscious of wanting to maximise the potential of the research space). In this session, though, I feel as though some of those pressures dissipated, and I was clearly more relaxed and at ease than I had been before. There is definitely a question here about the structure and organisation of this sort of methodology when working with children, and although the approach appears for now to be working, in that the children are constructing viable instruments for data collection, and understand the research question, there is potential to rethink how quickly children begin this design work, and how as a researcher leading the activity, I can allow it to be more organic. In a way, this is no different from how I would practise as a teacher; knowing my subject and knowing how I wanted to teach my subject enabled me to be relaxed in delivery. So, same situation, different context.
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