Research procedures

5.5.1 Selecting participants

In this research study, I interviewed 22 teachers from two New Zealand universities who had responded to an advertisement I sent to their universities. I obtained permission from the research departments of each university to send them an advertisement asking for participants. The advertisements were sent to the appropriate administration staff of various departments to circulate as an email or poster or both. I relied on teachers to respond, to email me indicating their interest, and thus my sample is self-selected and not representative. Sixteen respondents were female and six were male.12 Respondents were from faculties of business, education, humanities and social sciences. Time and other practical limitations meant that I did not approach all faculties in the two universities, and so there are no teachers of science, engineering or law, for example.13 In my

12

I address possible limitations of this gender imbalance on the findings in the final chapter.

13

I also address possible limitations of this in the final chapter. See Appendix A for further information about participating teachers.

96 advertisements I asked for teachers who are employed by their university and teach on campus with at least some of their work involving regular teaching in small groups (less than 30 students). I wanted to ensure participants had face-to-face interactions with a range of students. I did not limit the subject matter, course level or department of participants in order to ensure a variety of teaching experiences and contexts. I did not specify teaching position or academic roles, and thus participants included lecturers and tutors with varying amounts of teaching experience. Most of those who responded to the advertisement were interviewed. Of those who were not interviewed, some did not have the teaching

experience I was looking for while others had work commitments that made it too difficult to set up an interview.

5.5.2 Interviewing and transcribing

Throughout 2008, I conducted individual interviews with respondents at their university in a venue of their choice, usually their office. Each interview lasted about one hour and was audio-taped and transcribed. The interviews were semi-structured, and the main stem questions used to generate discussion were:

What does the term diversity mean to you in the context of your students? Tell me about your experiences of diversity in your teaching practice What challenges have you encountered in responding to student diversity? What support have you received?

How has having a diverse student group helped you as a teacher?

By asking these questions, I hoped participants would describe a variety of experiences related to teaching diverse students. I aimed to elicit data that would provide narratives of experience and also enable analysis of the meanings of „diversity‟. The question about support participants may have received aimed to encourage them to talk about their university context, and the question about how student diversity might have helped them as teachers aimed to provide a balance to the question about challenges. My questioning was intended to encourage participants to talk about their relationships with diverse students and their teaching practices. In asking the questions, I encouraged participants to describe salient experiences and to express their thoughts and emotions. In most of the interviews it was easy to encourage participants to speak, and generally I let them take their time to answer the questions and allowed them to elaborate as much as they wished.

97 The questions I asked often generated detailed responses by participants and I spoke very little, only using prompts and further questions to guide the interview when necessary. In a few interviews, I needed to use more active questioning, such as asking participants to elaborate on what they had told me and asking them to provide more detail. Occasionally I needed to steer participants back to my questions if they got sidetracked.

The interviews were transcribed within four weeks of the interview taking place. I

transcribed some of the interviews myself, but because of time constraints I also employed a professional transcriber. I checked all the transcriber‟s transcriptions to ensure as much accuracy and uniformity as possible in the interpretation of the interview tapes. I then gave all participants a copy of their transcribed interviews to check for errors and also for content that they wanted to exclude or add to the transcript. This enabled participants to co-construct the transcripts of their interviews. Some chose to make several changes and some made just a few minor corrections, while others made no changes. None of the participants made substantial changes or chose to remove their transcripts from my research.

The transcripts of the interview tapes include only a little of the verbal intonation and the non-verbal language of participants. The reason for this is that my analysis focuses on the narratives that participants construct, giving most attention to the content of the stories that are told and how they are constructed, rather than to applying a close examination of the linguistic details of the interview conversations.14 This research considers how participants in the interviews “impose order on the flow of experience to make sense of events and actions in their lives” (Riessman, 1993, p. 2). The „broader brushstroke‟ I applied to the construction of interview transcripts will have lost some details, but it allows larger patterns to be discerned in the stories participants tell and how they are constructed. Thus transcribing is part of data interpretation and analysis, and must be acknowledged as such.

5.5.3 Analysing the transcripts

The first step in the analysis involved reading and rereading transcripts and identifying the narratives. No software packages were used in the analysis because I wanted to examine

14

98 the narratives as a whole and look at the shape of the storylines and plots, as well as investigating the themes present within them. When using narrative methods of inquiry, Reissman (2008) notes that researchers “keep the „story‟ intact for interpretive purposes” (p. 74) rather than thematically coding segments of narratives. While there are many ways of analysing narratives, there are few clearly prescribed methods and consequently I drew on several texts to guide my analysis. The analysis was an emergent process, unfolding as I worked with the transcripts. Josselson‟s (2004) article on the hermeneutics of faith and suspicion provided the overall analytical framework. Texts that provided me with guidelines and suggestions for interpreting and analysing narratives through a

hermeneutics of faith lens included Mankowski and Rappaport (2000) and Squire (2008), and Riessman‟s (2008) discussion of thematic and structural analysis. Gergen and Gergen (1986) provided a model for identifying basic narrative forms. For analyzing the narratives using a hermeneutics of suspicion I drew on Czarniawska‟s (2004) suggestions for close readings of narratives and „strategies of deconstruction‟ and Davies and Harré‟s (1990) concept of positioning. As with any form of narrative analysis, this bricoleur approach requires me to quote the relevant narratives, or segments of them, and document how I arrive at my interpretations throughout the analytical process.

5.5.4 Ethical issues

One of the key ethical issues that I have considered throughout this research project is that of confidentiality for participants. In a country the size of New Zealand, the academic community is small and well-connected. It would be easy to inadvertently reveal details that could identify a participant, in spite of the pseudonyms used in this thesis. I have taken a number of steps to avoid revealing details that could identify participants. These include pooling the transcripts from the two universities participants work at, removing details that could identify the university, and only identifying participants‟ faculties or broad area of teaching and not their departments or the specific subjects they teach. I also invited participants to check their transcripts to remove identifying details, and I have removed from my analyses any details that would identify participants‟ campus, courses,

colleagues, research interests, or students. At times, I have not even used participants‟ pseudonyms when discussing transcript data that might link the pseudonym to a teacher, faculty or university. I have only provided a summary of interviewee characteristics (see

99 Appendix A) rather than details of department, age, ethnicity and so forth for each participant‟s pseudonym. Ethical approval was gained from the Faculty of Education‟s Ethics Committee at Victoria University of Wellington where I was enrolled as a student to conduct this research. I also gained consent to advertise for participants from each university‟s research department and from each faculty concerned, providing them with information about the project and answering any questions they had. Consent forms and information provided to participants are included in Appendix C.

5.6 Conclusion

Research is a complex process that is constructed in certain ways, and this needs to be made visible in writing about any research study. In this chapter, I have discussed the methodology informing this study and the procedures used to collect and analyse the data. Chapters One to Four of this thesis have described the background to this study, discussed the academic literature that informs the study, and explained the theoretical frameworks underpinning the research. Having situated this study and explained the assumptions that underpin it, I now turn to the data analysis. The next four chapters analyse participants‟ narratives using a hermeneutics of faith and a hermeneutics of suspicion to answer the research question „How do university teachers understand and experience student diversity‟.

100