As illustrated in Figure 5.1, the first phase took place from 2 to 26January, 2012. The focus was on generating initial understandings of teacher educators’ pedagogical practices when they used digital technologies. I carried out two main tasks: hanging out with participants over about four weeks; and conducting individual interviews with eleven participants, as shown in Figure 5.2. The hanging out activities are discussed more fully later and the details about the interviewing process are provided in the following section.
Interviewing process
The first task was to organise suitable interview times with each of the participants. These interviews took place between 9and 26 January, 2012. The day before each interview I reminded participants and confirmed the interview time. The interview schedule is given in Appendix A. These initial interviews centred on generating data about teacher
educators’ backgrounds (Figure 5.2). Participants talked widely about their previous experiences, including early learning experiences and how they use technologies in their
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teaching. The interviewing process took place relatively informally, and each audio recorded interview lasted for about an hour.
Figure 5. 2. Initial interviews
At the start of every interview, I always introduced my topic and started my conversation with everyday talk, using phatic communion phrases such as ‘How was your day?’, ‘How is it going?’, ‘It’s really good to have you here’. These introductory conversations helped my participants to relax. Though I had a question guide prepared ahead (Appendix B), the interviewing process did not completely follow this sequence because participants covered many areas at once that I had intended to explore with them. However, they talked much less about their existing uses of digital technologies. On such occasions, in order to expand their conversations I probed their responses using such phrases as ‘Why do you use…?’, ‘How do you use...?’, ‘How does it help you?’, ‘Did you find it useful?’, ‘What sort of changes do you realise?’, ‘What does that mean?’ and similar prompts when necessary. These prompts enabled them to continue to share more about their existing practices, and me to understand their experiences more deeply.
The interviewing process allowed me to notice things and add questions in later interviews with other participants (Figure 5.2). This therefore, mirrors three processes suggested by Seidel’s model (1998). When completing an interview, I listened to the audio recording repeatedly to collect information, notice important things from it, and think about what I might gain through asking different questions or more probing ones in the next interview. To document this, I also kept a reflective journal about what I was
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learning from different interviews and through the hanging out activities. The hanging out with my participants during this period was useful for guiding my investigation.
As I continued with the interviewing process, I also began transcribing interviews. These initial transcriptions assisted me in deciding what I next needed to observe, thus I was enacting Seidel’s (1998) QDA process. For example, some participants mentioned that when they used digital technology, they noticed that students’ interaction and engagement appeared to increase. I, therefore, decided that I needed to explore the nature of this interaction and engagement when I was observing classroom teaching. At the end of this interviewing phase, I noticed specific ideas arising from this first set of data collection as a focus for the next phase of data collection. These included things like the main
technological tools teacher educators used, how they used them, how they interacted with students, and how their chosen technological tools created/enhanced interactions between teacher and students.
At the same time, I realised that there were some limitations in collecting data through interviews, so these are addressed in order to maintain the ethical validity of data. Firstly, as I was an insider researcher, I had many challenges in managing the interviews in the early stages, because of our existing close professional bonds. For example, sometimes participants spent more time talking about things outside of my research focus. DeLyser (2001) noted this, believing such experiences are a natural process of the insider journey in the interviewing process. In my experience, this played out in participants’ over- eagerness to please me, which made it difficult to elicit the responses that I wanted to understand. At other times, my participants’ experiences appeared to be very similar to mine. In my analysis, this made it hard for me to separate my experiences from theirs. Over time, I learned to manage these tensions. I learned that more prompts and probing made it easier to direct my participants’ conversation towards my research focus. Secondly, since my participants’ first language is not English, interviewing involved translation. While some participants gave interviews in English, others talked in our local language. I was not sure if some participants who spoke in English had any difficulty in expressing their original meanings and experiences. On the other hand, since this thesis is written in English, I cannot be certain that my translations are absolutely accurate. In this regard, my insider status was a benefit, for I could interpret the expressions and the meanings participants articulated because of our close familiarity. Cortazzi, Pilcher, and Jin (2011) argued that if the interviewer is an insider it has less effect on generated meanings, as an insider researcher can effortlessly contextualise the meanings regardless of which language the participant chose to use. With their experience in mind, I am
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hopeful that I have properly represented my participants’ ideas. In this regard, the choice participants made about the language of the interview was immaterial. Listening to interviews later and transcribing them helped me to decide who to observe, what to observe, and what to clarify in the second phase of data collection. The following section describes the process of data collection in the second phase.