Inductive Coding

With regard to the inductive process of coding, indigenous categories – through which participants both made sense of the world (Patton, 2002, p.454), and the “recurring regularities” (patterns) that provide evidence of these categories (ibid., p.465)– were coded in order to inform my analysis, enabling the data to become grounded in the fieldwork (p.453). In order to make this process comprehensive and explicit, I will provide an example of the inductive coding process. In the following example I will provide the transcript and I will describe the action that accompanied it.

Second lesson, School A:

Context of the following dialogue: At the beginning of the second lesson a whole class discussion was held order for participants to remember and discuss how ensemble was defined in the previous lesson. After this discussion, I asked them to think and discuss in pairs possible ways that connect membership in ensemble and citizenship.

162

Dialogue:

Female student: Maybe … but … we are not sure. The ensemble has rules and the citizens have rules. They both have things that they must do.

Myrto: Is it a positive thing or a negative? I did not understand. Male student (interrupting): The laws.

Male student: Yes, but the citizens are not asked. Myrto: What does this mean? Who is not asked?

Male student (the one who gave the previous answer): The citizens have to follow the rules but they are not asked.

Myrto: Who indicates these rules in a democratic regime? Students: [Laugh]

Female student: “Democratic?” [Laugh]

Male student: Where is the democratic regime, Miss, tell me so I can see it?

Myrto: Don’t you consider our regime democratic?

Male student: They say that you vote and it’s fine but then they do nothing for us. Only for themselves.

Myrto: What we can do for this situation to change?

Female student (the one who gave the initial answer about the rules in the ensemble and in citizenship): Nobody pays attention to us, Miss.

Male student: Things do not change so easily.

Male student: There are a lot who like the situation and, us, only us, we are not enough.

163 Myrto: Why not?

At this point the reactions varied. Some of them (eight, the majority of whom were male) agreed with their classmates’ answers that “there is no real democracy”; others (more than five) did not consider themselves citizens “because I can feel it Miss. I am not so important” (female student); and other students, without providing a specific reason, expressed that they do not feel like citizens, but that they “do not know how to explain it” (female student). Finally, one of the boys raised his hand to say:

Male student: Miss ... can you explain it [citizenship]? ... We are not sure ... We know it. We have done it. But I don’t know ... I am not sure I understand it as you mean it.

Recurring content/themes from the dialogue:

1. Citizens: not asked + regime: not democratic.

2. Nothing for us, no attention to us, us: not enough, me: not so important.

 First phase of coding: identification of patterns: descriptive/open coding 1. Students believe that there is no democracy or rules applied by others. 2. Students believe that they are “not enough”.

 Second phase of coding: identifications of themes: interpretive coding 1. Feelings of injustice.

2. Feelings of exclusion.

Context for subsequent data that were gathered in the same lesson: The same lesson included three activities of drama, but the pace of the process was slow in an attempt to follow participants’ rhythm and enable them to familiarise themselves with the process. The first activity asked students to read an abstract from the dialogue between Antigone and Ismene, to choose a phrase for each heroine and to present it. Only three, out of

164 twelve pairs, completed the activity. Two pairs started to improvise but stopped while students from other pairs said:

Female students: We don’t know what to do, Miss. Myrto: You can try.

Female student (the same): No Miss, no. I will try the next time. Myrto (addressing to another couple): Why you do not try? Male student: We don’t know how to do it, anyway.

Male student (the other member of the same pair): I don’t want to play the woman. I will play Creon next time.

Myrto: Who wants to try something? And maybe we can inter- complete each other’s attempt, like the previous time when you liked it.

Female student: I don’t want to show Miss. Really. I don’t feel comfortable.

Female student: Miss, help us to show something, because I ... want to do it.

Recurring contents/themes from the discussion:

1. Don’t know what to do, don’t know how to do, don’t feel comfortable, help us to show.

 First phase of coding: identification of patterns: descriptive/open coding 1. Students believe that they “don’t know” what to perform.

 Second phase of coding: identifications of themes: interpretive coding 1. Lack of confidence in theatre, or feelings of inability in theatre making.

165 I constructed a final, third code, of collective “self-perception”, which arose when taking into account the final, interpretive codes of the two units of data which were analysed according to their content (recurring themes). The first unit of data provided information about students’ perceptions of themselves as citizens, while the second unit of data disclosed students’ perceptions of themselves as drama participants.

The final code did not remain as negative self-perception, because the improvement of participants’ self-perception became a further target of the ensemble-based learning. Therefore, it was renamed as self-perception in order to be compatible with the overall analysis of this case, and flexibly adoptable to the different phases of the interpretive narrative of the case of this classroom.