In order to focus on the field of reproduction, and examine and analyse pedagogy, the sources of data selected for this study all related to pedagogic practice. Thus, the data gathered included course documents; PowerPoint slides from lectures; classroom observations and videos; interviews with lecturers and additional sources. These are discussed in detail below.
4.1 Documentary evidence
I collected various documents from the Political Studies and Law departments and also from UWC more broadly. I used the UWC Charter for Graduate Attributes and Strategic Plan on Teaching and Learning as a source document for examining UWC teaching and learning approaches and policies more generally because it has been designed to guide academic faculties and departments in renewing, aligning and benchmarking their curricula against it as a standard. It has been approved by Senate and so is a public document. From the departments I collected study guides and course readers for each course as well as course information guidelines. I further requested from the lecturers their PowerPoint slides from lectures which were useful in reading the field notes and video transcripts and in writing the analysis of the cases.
Table 3.1 Documents gathered
UWC documents Political Studies Law
Integrated Charter of Graduate Attributes and Strategic Plan for Teaching and Learning
Course outline for POL131 Course outline for LOP112 Lecture PowerPoint Slides for
POL131, Term 1 [120 slides divided into 7 ‘weeks’ used over 21 lectures]
Study Guide for LOP112
Lecture PowerPoint Slides for POL131, Term 2 [207 slides divided into 7 ‘weeks’ used over 22 lectures]
Lecture PowerPoint Slides for LOP112 [203 slides divided into 7 study units12 used over
approximately 32 lectures, each repeated 3 times in 3 lecture blocks; an average of 35 slides per study unit which lasted roughly 4 lectures each]
12 There were 10 study units in the course, but one was made self-study and the Graduate Lecturing
Assistants or student tutors taught two of them. I only focused on what the two lecturers were teaching, excluding the student tutors (more on this in section 4.6).
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4.2 Lecture observations and field notes
In order to analyse the pedagogic practices, particularly in relation to the unfolding of a pedagogic process within a manageable and marked space, such as the two first year courses in the case studies, I attended almost all the lectures for the first semester of 2013 in both case studies. There were lectures missed due to clashes between lectures and my work commitments, such as writing workshops, as well as illness. However, the majority of classes were attended in both academic terms of the first semester. I attended 32 Law lectures with Rachel and 17 with Courtney13 (I missed most of her Monday lectures as the Political Studies class was held at the same time). I attended 16 lectures with Mike in Term 1 and 14 lectures with Frank in Term 2 for Political Studies14.
I sat in on the lectures as an observer, watching, listening and making detailed field notes. These field notes were made in a series of handwritten journals and later transcribed into Microsoft Word. They were not written into electronic format from the beginning because students in the Law course were asked not to use recording devices and laptops so I decided that to bring one in would make me conspicuous in a way that may prove distracting for students around me and possibly for the lecturer as well. Writing the notes by hand also enabled me to take notes in more graphic and creative ways, for example drawing images or writing across the page or in circles to represent visually what I was hearing and experiencing as an observer in the lectures. I found writing the notes in the moment and then organising these notes as I transcribed them electronically into more linear and traditional formats also enabled me to begin to analyse the data in a ‘soft’ manner (Hood, quoted in Chen & Maton 2014) as I was observing the lectures and later during transcription, so I felt more immersed in the data and not separate from it.
4.3 Video-taping of lectures
In order to capture verbatim the ways in which the lecturers discussed and presented the pedagogical knowledge during lectures, a discrete series of lectures was video-taped during the semester in each course. In Law this took the form of a particular study unit – The Beginning of Legal Subjectivity – which amounted to four consecutive lectures with both lecturers, and in Political Studies this amounted to a theme – social movements in Term 1, and Realism and Liberalism in Term 2 – which comprised five lectures in term one with the first lecturer and 5 lectures in term two with the second lecturer. As these lectures were an hour long, this
13 Rachel and Courtney are both pseudonyms chosen for the two lecturers in Law. 14 Mike and Frank are both pseudonyms chosen for the two lecturers in Political Studies.
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amounted to a great deal of detailed data and time-consuming transcription. Considering the time this would take, as well as the focus of the conceptual tools which made it easier to select relevant or illustrative examples or episodes from the data (McLellan, Maqueen & Neidig 2003), I selected relevant sections of the video footage that corresponded with the data I was looking for and only transcribed these. I watched the footage several times, making notes of ‘episodes’ that would be illustrative or useful in analysing and discussing the data using the timeline, for example 11min 50 secs to 22 mins 35 secs. These episodes of data were then transcribed in Nvivo 10® and later coded and analysed with the field notes and other data.
The timing of the video-taping was negotiated with the lecturers and before taping the lectures I addressed the students, explaining who I was and why I was there and the form that the taping would take to assure them that they were neither the focus of the video-taping process nor would these tapes be seen by anyone other than me and the lecturer concerned. No objections were raised by either the lecturers concerned or the students in the classes, and the taping proceeded smoothly.
4.4 Interviews with lecturers
There were four in-depth, loosely structured interviews conducted during the first semester while the courses were in session. In Political Studies there were two lecturers engaged in team teaching, so one lecturer taught in the first term for seven weeks and the second lecturer taught in the second term for a further seven weeks. Thus, the first lecturer was interviewed in March as the term ended and the second lecturer was interviewed in early May, the week before the end of the second term. There were also two lecturers teaching in Law but they were teaching simultaneously as the class size was big (over 590+ students) and the class was split into three smaller lecture groups, A, B and C. One lecturer, who also coordinated the course, taught groups A and B, and the other taught group C. Both Law lecturers were interviewed in the first week of May, just over a week before the end of the semester, so that they were able to reflect more fully on their experiences of teaching the course. The interviews were recorded with an audio- recorder with the lecturers’ informed consent, and these tapes were transcribed into MSWord documents, which were then uploaded into Nvivo10® and analysed.
4.5 Additional data sources
In addition to the lecture observations, course and other documentary evidence and interviews, I also exchanged emails with the lecturers throughout the semester, and occasionally had casual conversations after lectures where they would ask questions about how I thought the lectures
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were going, and whether they were making sense, or talking too fast and so on. Some of these exchanges were interesting and felt important or noteworthy, and became additional sources of data as I captured my impressions and their questions or comments as field notes and included some of this in the data analysis process where relevant.
4.6. Exclusion of tutorials as a data source
In terms of the data that has been chosen to be gathered and included in this study, tutorials in both Law and Political Studies have been excluded, mainly for logistical reasons. Simply put, there were three lectures per week per course, with an additional three lectures per week in Law because there are two different lecturers co-teaching the course. In Law there were 590+ students taking the course, and they were split into three lecture groups, two with one lecturer and the third with the second lecturer. This added up to a large number of tutorial groups and additional hours per week of observations. In Political Studies the situation was similar, with 480+ students and several tutors running more than 10 tutorials per week among them. Thus, there was no time to observe both the lectures and the tutorials. Even though it is acknowledged that tutors in both Political Studies and Law do enact pedagogy in their tutorials, their voices and approaches have necessarily been excluded from this research due to these logistical reasons.
A further reason for drawing this particular boundary and for only including interviews with and observations of the lecturers is that the lecturers influence the way the curriculum is designed, and have the most significant impact on the way in which it is taught. Even though the study was not looking explicitly or directly at curriculum design, it was more useful to speak with and observe lecturers who could make adaptations and changes to the curriculum as they progressed through the course and engaged in pedagogic relationships with the students in their courses. This added an interesting and valuable element to considerations regarding the shifting of semantic gravity and semantic density, for example, as will be discussed in more detail in Chapters Four and Five.
The following section considers the pertinent issues pertaining to locating myself in the study as a member of staff in the university within which this research took place, as well as a colleague to the members of staff I have worked with. It further considers ethical issues arising from doing research with colleagues in one’s own university.