Data collection methods

Teaching observations

My project focused on a year of teaching, so it made sense to begin my data collection in the classroom. I positioned myself as an observer in each of the 28 hour-long sessions I delivered, attempting to capture the experiences of students in the university classroom through examining their interactions with each other and the course I was delivering. To make the most of observations, I would go into teaching sessions pre-empting what I might want to examine, and jot down quick notes during sessions that I could return to later. I would develop these notes into more substantial, ‘thicker’ observations as soon as I could, but I would also return weeks later to examine them in light of following sessions. This would form the basis of the reflective writing I outline below.

The research question that I was particularly interested in when it came to observations was RQ2 (How does a playful approach transform teaching and research in higher education?), which is the question that most relates to teaching practice. However, observations formed the basis of many of the discussions I had with students around the other two questions.

In observing a large number of students across a year, I was aware of what I was not seeing as well as what I was seeing, and this in turn gave me new ideas of what to focus on during observations. The dual role of teaching and observing was challenging, and the ‘teaching’ side would often take precedence within the session simply because of the requirements of the role. Observations tended to take the form of vignettes, as small, impactful experiences which felt powerful at the time, or which suddenly clicked into place upon reflection. Sometimes noticing these would involve drawing upon my experience as

an educator and recognising when powerful learning was taking place; at other times, it would be my experiences as a game player which would point me towards a specific form of play happening.

Interviews

Where my observations of teaching sessions provided me with data on the lived experiences of students across the year, interviews gave an opportunity to check these observations with students and to engage in the sort of meaning-making conversations that form a vital part of inquiry. Kvale (1996) sees the interview itself as a form of conversation that produces knowledge, and I went into interviews with the specific goal of not just understanding but developing and deepening my students’ ideas.

My interviews involved students that I was teaching, either on the Foundations of Academic Practice course or as a personal tutor. Nine students from the cohort participated in interviews regularly (although participation tended to be sporadic in some cases), and as the year went on this group expanded to twelve as new participants signed up. Most of the student interviews were group interviews with at least two students, specifically because I wanted to capture conversations between students about the concepts we were examining. My approach in these interviews was to encourage students to compare experiences and meanings with each other, and to build upon discussions that had already started in teaching sessions. I also held several ad hoc individual interviews with students who I wanted to get ‘on the record’ if they had mentioned a specific idea during discussion in a teaching session.

As Chapter 5 will outline, most interviews took place between teaching sessions on campus. I went into interviews with some key topics for discussion within the fields of play and participation but beyond this, there was little formal structure as I wanted conversation to flow fairly freely. In some interviews, I would take in a game or a set of

images to spark initial discussion; in others we would reflect upon the teaching session that students had just taken part in. In this way I tried to inject some playfulness into what might have otherwise been fairly conventional conversations, again to encourage participation and to open up participants’ understandings.

I recorded all interviews digitally, either with my laptop computer connected to a multi-directional microphone or with the voice recorder on my mobile phone for; the latter was particularly useful for ad hoc discussions with students. I took brief notes on discussions and key questions during interviews, but tried to concentrate primarily on discussion. Immediately following each interview, I would transcribe as a Word document. The transcription process made interviews easier to analyse, but also formed the first stage of interpretation in that I was able to immediately revisit questions and begin to think about themes that emerged. By the end of the academic year I had completed ten interview sessions totalling just under three and a half hours, which converted into 76 pages and over 34000 words of transcribed data.

Reflective writing

Finally, reflective writing formed my third main set of data. My own reflective writing contributed to my use of autoethnography as it provided a set of data upon which to draw, but it also became a method in its own right as I began to analyse and interpret data from my teaching notes and observations. Here my major influence is hooks (1994). Though she does not position herself as an autoethnographic researcher per se, her writing reflects upon her experiences in and out of the classroom across her life, and this plays a major role in her ability to critically analyse her own practice and provide inspiration to others.

I kept a reflective journal across the year, and occasionally wrote longer pieces that built upon the shorter pieces I kept in this journal. Some of these pieces essentially became first-drafts of some of the chapters in this thesis, but by treating these drafts as data I was

better able to understand how my thinking changed over time. This broke down the somewhat artificial barrier between data collection and writing, though this has been reinstated somewhat by the strictures of the thesis itself.

Moon (2006) points out that journals focus on the subjective side of experience, both internal and external, and I saw this as a useful way to gain insight into my own experience. I gave myself time to write reflectively, but I also embraced shorter and more creative forms of reflective writing in order to understand my students’ experiences and inject more playfulness into my research practice. For example, there are sketches, diagrams and slogans in my journal that point to particular ideas that I was preoccupied with as I began to read and explore other data. Examples of these appear in Chapter 8 in particular as examples of the way research crept into other activities.

I also wanted to encourage students to write reflectively for a number of reasons. At the front of many of their minds was the fact that their final assessment for the unit was an extended piece of reflective writing, so this provided them with a valuable opportunity to practice. Beyond this, though, I wanted to encourage critical reflective writing as way for students to think more deeply about some of the concepts that we had covered in teaching sessions (and interviews in some cases). Reflective writing tasks were intended to extend play out of the classroom and into the world around them, to the extent that they might not have even involved writing but drawing or capturing an image upon which to reflect. This, of course, provided me with a more varied set of data with which to understand students’ experiences.

Though all students were given a reflective journal, in practice this method produced the fewest active participants and produced the smallest quantity of data; only three students agreed to share their data with me, and even then it was sporadically completed over the course of the year. The reasoning behind this will be explored further in Chapter 5. I did, however, arrange a substantial reflective writing session at the very end

of the year which encouraged twelve students to look back on the year and write in some detail about their experiences as foundation year students and as players, and how these had changed since they first started. This was a valuable way of triangulating many of the ideas I had captured through observation and interviews.

Across all of these data collection methods, I researched with a spirit of ‘playful experimentation’ and tried not to limit myself to activities that were in the original plan. This meant saying ‘yes’ to opportunities, improvising to some extent, as I tried to capture ideas from students if they inspired something. Several of my interviews with students were unscheduled, often sparked by a comment that was made during a teaching session that I wanted to pick up on ‘in the moment’ (or as close to the moment as I could get). Similarly, the content and structure of teaching sessions and interviews themselves often shifted through the participation of students. We would discuss new topics and follow the students’ lead as we explored play and participation. I began to embrace this through using randomness and chance in interviews in order to heighten the sense of playful exploration. I pick up on many of these ideas in Chapter 7.