Student and Teacher Interviews

I conducted three interviews with all students: one in mid-October, one at the beginning of January, and a final interview in May (see Appendices A, B, and C). For the comfort level of all participants and in hopes that they would speak openly without feeling the watchful eye of a camera on them, all interviews were audio recorded and not video recorded.

I designed the interview questions to be open-ended and to give students an opportunity to talk about their reading and writing preferences along with some social aspects about their classroom community. Because I developed a brief protocol but left each interview open to

follow-up questions, the interviews were what Rubin and Rubin (2012) described as unstructured. I also included in the protocols for each of the three interviews an option to draw. In their discussion on ways that adults can approach the interview process with children, Tammivaara and Enright (1986) noted, “Young children generally find doing something with something and talking about that something to be easier, more comfortable, and more interesting than only talking about something that isn’t physically present” (p. 232, emphasis in original). Clark (2005) advocated for having children draw as part of obtaining interview data from children that lends itself to more fully understanding children’s perspectives on their experiences and the world around them. Even as an adult, given the choice, for example to describe the street where I grew up or to draw the street where I grew up and describe both the drawing and the street, I would be able to give a more concrete description of the street and my experiences living there through a drawing and description as opposed to description alone.

For the first interview, I wanted to get a sense of their social circle without explicitly asking them to tell me about it, so I asked students to draw who they play with during recess. For the second interview, I gave students two options of what to draw: either their favorite part of Morning Meeting, or a character or scene from a book that they really enjoy. For the third round of interviews, I developed questions with a much more focused approach to investigating the frameworks of my study as well as the routines, literacy practices and participation structures that I had determined to be significant through initial rounds of coding field notes. Thus, for the third student interview, I developed questions about Morning Meeting Share, Writing Mini- Lessons, Independent Writing Time, Sharing Writing, and Academic Choice Time. I selected two categories for each student since asking questions from all of these categories would have led to unrealistically long interviews. For each category, I continued the pattern of asking students to

draw something related to the given line of questions. For all three sets of student interviews, I consistently followed up on drawings by asking students to explain what they had drawn. I also gave students the option of not drawing if they did not want to, which only one or two students took each time but did so consistently across the two interviews. Finally, during the student interviews I positioned myself as a learner hoping to get students’ explanations and thoughts on aspects of the school day and on reading and writing. In this way, my goal was that students would talk candidly with me and not feel that there were right or wrong answers I was expecting them to give.

In designing the questions for the three rounds of interviews, I was cognizant of the goals that Mrs. Cooper told me she envisioned for the classroom community—one that avoids hierarchies or exclusion among peers. For this reason, I did not want to draw students’ attention to social circles in terms of inclusivity, exclusivity, or preference. I also wanted to get a sense of what kinds of literacy practices students valued, what material artifacts they used in support of those practices, and how they were able to talk about themselves as readers or writers. Developing questions that would be neither closed nor too abstract in nature was a difficult undertaking, and I also did not want students to perceive my questions as in any way evaluative. I wanted to continue to position myself as a curious learner. For the first round of student interviews, my goal was to get a better sense—from students’ own words—about their attitudes toward reading and writing and toward the school day in general. I was also interested in hearing how they described what they did during instructional reading and writing. The intent behind obtaining this kind of information for the first round of interviews was to triangulate students’ responses with what I had begun to note as trends in the classroom community’s participation structures and routines during literacy-related moments of instruction.

Prior to the second round of student interviews, I had begun to identify times during the school day (such as Morning Meeting) in which students had brought literacy into social spaces. They had brought books related to in-school topics, short articles related to out-of-school activities, and their own written stories to share with classmates. I had also noted times when students’ interest in particular texts: 1) had fostered social connections among participants, and 2) seemed related to student-authored texts. With this in mind, I designed the second round of student interviews to explore students’ talk about Morning Meeting and about what kinds of books interested them. Additionally, I included questions designed to get a sense of how students saw writing and reading in relation to one another. My goal was to triangulate this interview data with observational data in order to identify ways that student interactions with each other, with their teacher, and with texts were shaping the classroom culture around reading and writing.

For the third round of student interviews, I had been collecting and examining data throughout the duration of the school year. This interview protocol, thanks to feedback from my dissertation committee, was my most effectively developed. First, I identified categories of instructional time during the school day that I considered data-rich (in relation to my research questions) as a result of time spent on field notes, analytic memos, videos, previous interviews, and initial generation of codes and themes. These categories were Morning Meeting Share, Writing Mini-Lessons, Independent Writing Time, Sharing Writing, and Academic Choice Time. Next I identified five ideas that are central to the frameworks of figured worlds and positioning (identity, cultural tools and significance, agency, interaction, and situation). By identifying these ideas and then posing a question for each one about how that idea was evident in data I had collected, I then was able to interrogate myself on what I hoped the student interviews would help me to learn more about my instructional categories and the framework-related ideas.

Answering my questions positioned me to develop clear interview questions. Finally, I had to select what questions I would ask which students.

As with the first two rounds of student interviews, I interviewed all students. However, the third interview protocol was substantially longer than the other interview protocols and I could not realistically ask students all of the questions. This determination was not difficult, since my field notes and analytic memos helped me to identify those instructional categories in which different participants’ language and actions were most significant. For example, in my notes and memos Matthew’s participation had stood out during Morning Meeting Share and Academic Choice Time. Thus, I asked him the interview questions I had developed under these categories.

After the second round of student interviews, I conducted the first of two interviews with the teacher, Julia Cooper (see Appendix D). This one was also semi-structured with a protocol and space built in for additional questions that might come up over the course of the interview. For this interview, I wanted get Julia to talk about her path to becoming a teacher, her priorities as a teacher, her attitudes about teaching reading and writing, her feelings about and experiences with Walker’s curricular ideas, and her thoughts about the students. My goal was to triangulate her responses to my interview questions with the routines and participation structures she emphasized each day, with how she communicated with students, with how she approached writing and interacted with students as a writer, and with the texts that she selected and how she interacted with students as a reader. I conducted a second interview with Julia in May (see Appendix E), after having completed the third round of student interviews. As with the third interview protocol for students, I used the categories Morning Meeting Share, Writing Mini- Lessons, Independent Writing Time, Sharing Writing, and Academic Choice Time in order to

organize my questions. I also added the category Student Literacy Learning. By using a similarly organized interview protocol with Julia, but making it specific to her as the teacher, my goal was to have consistency in how I obtained a more complete picture of how all participants (student and teacher) contributed to shaping the classroom culture. In addition to triangulating the final student interviews and final teacher interview with other data sources, I could also triangulate the interview data between interviews in order to identify where students’ thoughts and perspectives aligned with their teacher’s and where their thoughts and perspectives differed from their teacher’s. Unlike the student interviews, I asked Julia all of the questions I had developed. Because there were six categories, with a total of 38 questions that averaged out to approximately ten per category, this final teacher interview was conducted over the course of three different meetings with Julia. The time and number of interviews was also impacted by the amount of thought and talk she put into answering each question.