Logistics

This section presents how the case study school was chosen, demographic data about the area and students, steps taken in addressing the college and recruiting participants, conducting the interview and finally, how the data was handled.

4.7.1. Contacting the school

A preliminary online search of typical skilled trades work was done prior to contacting any school for research purposes. This was to ensure certain programs were offered at the case study college. I chose to focus on work that does not require formal schooling because these tend to be held in lower regard. This was the basis of the inclusion and exclusion criteria used to establish the population from which the participants were selected (Robinson 2014). Nursing and

radiation therapy are trades that require formal schooling to begin work in the

field, with certificate and degree requirements set by a governing body. They typically enjoy more professional respect than a mechanic, for example.

Mechanics do not require formal education to start the job, though continuing in the field may require further education. I developed a list of trades to focus on when recruiting participants, and then looked at colleges that offered programs:

 Automotive Collision Repair

 Automotive Mechanic

 Diesel Mechanic

 Electrical / Instrumentation

 Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning, and refrigeration (HVAC)

 Machining

 Plumbing

 Welding

Further online investigation of technical schools and colleges that offered some of all of these programs was done. This was the first criteria in my search, the second was the school had to be of a suitable size as to afford anonymity of both the programs and the participants.

4.7.2. Interview pool and participant recruitment

To recruit instructor participants by first defining the study population (Robinson 2014), I obtained the list of all faculty and staff at the college from their web site based on the list of crafts above. Nearly 30 people were identified as instructors of the skilled trades listed above. I put all their names in a bowl and drew twelve at random. I emailed all twelve prospective participants at once and within days received four replies. The emails sent to the faculty to request the interviews is in appendix G. Hoping for more than four instructor interviews, I drew two more names and emailed them as well. Both follow-up requests responded affirmatively. I arranged the interview times and dates initially by email, but with a phone call if confirmation was needed. One of the instructors had to cancel our appointment, leaving a total of five instructor interviews.

To solicit the student participants, I visited the classrooms of four of the five instructions who graciously granted me about ten minutes of their class time. I

offered an introduction of myself and the study including its purpose and my motivation for the project. I included a brief statement of transformative learning as a means of explaining changes in perspective or their way of viewing the world that may occur during the educational process. I also offered that there was no prerequisite; that I was happy to hear anyone’s story. This brief presentation included acknowledgement of approval from the college to conduct the research.

Copies of the participant information sheet were available. I passed around a sign-up sheet for anyone interested, expressly noting that providing their name and email was not committing them to anything. Of the four classes, twenty-six students signed up with interest to possibly participate in the study. I began the same process as with the instructors by putting all the names in a bowl to draw them randomly, except I began with six names initially. I emailed the first six students and being very aware of the timing toward the end of the term, only waited 48 hours for a response before drawing two more names until I had a total of six student participants.

For both the instructors and the students, I requested about an hour of their time, on campus, with a possible follow up email or phone call.

4.7.3. Conducting the interviews

The interviews took place over an academic year, between September and June.

The instructors were interviewed in the winter during the months of December and January, then the President and students the following May. I interviewed all the instructors prior to the students. The students were interviewed close to the end of their education, to allow the most experience possible at the

institution. When soliciting student participants, I specifically asked for people completing that spring.

All twelve interviews took place on campus for the comfort and convenience of the participants. The interviews with the instructors and president were held in or around the instructor’s offices. Some of them offered shop and lab tours when personal protective equipment was not required. The student interviews

were all conducted in study rooms or quiet lounge areas scheduled with the help of an administrative assistance in the Director’s office.

At the beginning of each interview I provided the participant information sheet and offered a verbal summary during which I explicitly stated their anonymity will be protected by the use of pseudonyms and they are free to end the interview at any time. I appreciated a couple of the participants wishing to be named after famous action figures, but politely told them for the purposes of this research, they would likely be penned something more mundane. All the participants then signed the participant consent form and were offered a copy of both that and the participant information sheet to retain for their records.

After the formalities, each interview began with my request for them to share the event or string of events leading to their current role of instructor, student, or president. From there, I mainly listened, asking questions, and ensuring at some point the main concepts outlined previously in the interview guidelines were touched on in some manner. After getting over some initial nervousness, I really enjoyed the interviews. I found them enlightening, inspiring, and some were quite humorous.

The twelve semi-structured interviews lasted an average of 63 minutes each.

When they went longer than an hour I paused and reminded participants of the time. Although very happy to keep talking, I didn’t want to compromise their schedule or take too much of their time. In all cases, they said it was fine to extend the interview beyond the hour.

4.7.4. Data handling and storage

All interview data was self-transcribed on my personal laptop. Transcribing them myself, whilst it seemed to take a very long time, was an opportunity to

familiarize myself with the data. More about this process is described in the next section. To protect the anonymity of the participants, pseudonyms were

assigned during the transcription process. When the participant referred to someone else in the program, whether another participant or not, that person was also assigned a pseudonym as well in the transcribed copy. Only the

participant consent form contained the real name of the participant, and these

are not linked in any way to the recordings. Once transcribed, the interviews were printed to begin the analysis. All of the data, in printed or electronic form, remained under two levels of security unless I was actively working with it. The interview recordings were deleted after the physical versions were saved in two locations, one printed and one electronic.