The analysis of lecture transcripts

The purpose of video-recording my lectures was so that I could present with evidence what happened in my lectures to my critical friends and to the relevant community. Video- recording my lectures also served to triangulate my data sources. The analysis of the video- recordings happened in four stages. I describe these stages next.

Stage one: Transfer of the video-recordings to other media devices for safe-keeping and for

back-up. The first stage involved me downloading the recording to my personal computer, to an external hard drive and to two compact discs (CD) for safety and backup and to free the video camera memory. One CD was for the transcriber and the other one for back-up storage purposes.

Stage two: Familiarisation with the data (Rabiee, 2004). Familiarisation was achieved by

watching the videos of my lectures soon after or as near as possible to the recorded lecture. I watched most of the videos on my own and on two occasions with a critical friend. Due to time constraints, my critical friend was only able to watch the shorter 1h video lectures. I want to acknowledge here that watching the videos with my critical friend was not an easy thing for me to do. I remember telling California how uncomfortable I was after inviting her to watch the videos of my teaching with me. California then said, I am not interested in what

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look at our own teaching. What is important is; what were the reasons behind what you did? What were you thinking when you did what you did?

Watching the videos allowed me to see if I had been able to follow through my thinking and planning as described in chapter four. In addition watching my own teaching helped me to evaluate the teaching and to make informed decisions on how to proceed in the following lectures in a way that would improve my teaching. I described one decision and change that I made in trigger incident four in chapter five where I had to rework on my response to a student’s question in a previous lecture by responding to the question again in the next lecture using some visual aids.

Stage three: Transcription. All videos of my lectures were transcribed by an independent

transcriber. The transcriber only transcribed the audio not the video. I watched the videos myself and noted important incidents. I would send the CDs with the recordings of the weekly lectures to the transcriber at the end of the week, Lectures on the following topics were recorded and transcribed: Genetics at molecular level, meiosis, genetic diseases and genetic inheritance. These topics were taught in four of the six weeks of the course. The topic of genetic testing and counselling involved mainly student activities such as group work, poster and oral presentations and was therefore not video-recorded as I had not sought consent for video-recording students. In total 12 hours of lectures were recorded and transcribed. The transcriber was not a biology person. Therefore, I supplied her with the PowerPoint presentations of every lecture so that she could familiarise herself with the vocabulary of the audio texts that she was transcribing. After receiving the transcripts back, I would go through each transcript and concurrently watch the video to fill in the gaps and to add screen shots to bring the transcripts to life.

Stage four: Coding of the lecture transcripts. To code the lecture transcripts, I started off

with what Berry and van Driel (2013) described as a priori system of codes or categories about teaching from the literature and from my conceptual framework. The codes and categories are shown in Table 5 below and are described in detail in chapter 6.

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Table 5: My initial coding scheme for analysing my teaching

Knowledge of context Knowledge of students General pedagogical knowledge

Content Knowledge

-My context-Anything in my teaching that points to my awareness of context e.g knowing that the university has e-learning or knowing the acoustics of big venues like a big lecture theatre.

-My students’ context- anything in my teaching that points to my awareness of my students’ future teaching contexts

-Any reference to

misunderstandings that students

are known to bring to class about genetic phenomena. -Any reference to misconceptions that my students and my students’ students are likely to bring to class

Evidence of awareness of students’ -learning styles -linguistic abilities -cultural backgrounds -schooling backgrounds -Teaching strategies (TS) -Teaching procedures (TP) -Teaching activities (TA) -Teaching and learning activities (TLA) e.g. drawing,

discussing -Teaching and Learning Aids (T/L aids) -Specialized content knowledge (SCK) -Common content knowledge (CCK)

I struggled to code the audio transcript because I found the audio transcripts to be too bulky. A whole page could be taken up by just one teaching and learning activity and therefore one code such as a question & answer (Q & A) discussion. Sometimes one aspect of my teaching was intermingled with other teaching aspects. For example, I had cases where within a Q & A discussion, I would explain a concept or show and describe an analogy. I therefore decided to reduce the bulkiness of the audio transcripts by doing a step by step description of my lectures using both the audio transcripts and the videos. Therefore, instead of having a whole page of a Q & A discussion, I would just have one sentence saying whole class Q & A discussion taking place. Below is a section of the processed and coded transcript of lecture one.

An example of processed and coded transcript data

1. Lecturer put up some questions on the screen at the beginning of the lecture. (Teaching Procedure-TP/TS) 2. Lecturer explains the purpose of the questions (TA)

3. Lecturer gives instructions to students to discuss the questions (TA) 4. Students discuss the questions (LA)

5. Lecturer puts up a picture on the screen- (T/L aid)

6. Lecturer invites students to look at the picture and asks them to say what they can see-(TLA/LSI) 7. Lecturer takes responses from students and writes them on the chalk board-(TLA/LSI)

8. Lecturer repeats the question and waits for more responses-(TLA/LSI)

9. Lecturer moves on when no more responses are forthcoming-she describes in detail what the picture is showing-reproduction, meiosis, mitosis etc (TA)

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10. Lecturer explains how what is happening in the picture including what students said is linked to the genetics that will be done in the course- (TA)

11. Lecturer introduces a concepts biological inheritance through a question that she puts up on the screen (TP) 12. Whole class Q and A discussion (TLA/LSI)

13. After the discussion, the lecturer explains the answer to the question (TA)

14. In her explanation, lecturer points out one of the things that makes genetics difficult to teach and to learn- terminology (SCK) and emphasises the importance of students as future teachers to understand that terminology- (Knowledge of context)

15. Lecturer spells out one of the aims of the lecture-TA

16. Lecturer puts up on the screen an outline of the structure of the science of inheritance TA

17. Lecturer goes through the slide explaining the structure of the science of inheritance (TA). In her explanation, she points out the content that was covered in the previous course that the students did, the content that will be covered in future courses and spells out the content that will be covered in the genetics course- (Curricular saliency-CS)

18. Lecturer introduces an analogy of loose string and a ball of similar string-T/L aids, TA

The lecture one transcript section above shows how I eventually processed and coded my video transcripts of the lectures. The processing of video data was a time consuming process. I finished the video-recording of my lectures at the end of April 2013 but eight months later (end of 2013), I was still processing the data. After video processing, I coded the transcripts. Although the coding was guided by the codes in Table 5 above, I was open to new codes making the coding process both deductive and inductive. As part of the validation process, I asked Georgia to read through the transcripts of two lectures and to comment. I gave her only two transcripts as my plan was that, I would ask her to look at more transcripts only if there were disagreements that required further checking. After she had coded and commented on my teaching of the two lectures, we then met and discussed her observations and the analysis.

3.12.3 Analysis of interview transcripts

As explained in section 3.9.5, what I received from Dorothy the research assistant who did the interviews were the audio transcripts of the interviews and the details of the interviewees excluding their real names. To analyse the interview transcripts, just as with the analysis of video transcripts, I started off my analysis of students’ interviews with a system of codes and categories that I had developed in chapter six from the analysis of my teaching transcripts. The codes and categories were however not aligned to the interview data. Therefore, I abandoned the codes and categories from chapter six and did inductive coding. Just as with the analysis of my teaching, I did the analysis of interviews in steps. The first step was familiarisation with the data. The second step was the coding process and formation of the categories. The last step was the interpretation and discussion of the findings. As part of the

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validation process, I asked California to also code the five interview transcripts. She managed to code only three of them due to time constraints. We then met and discussed our coding to iron out any difficulties. The detailed description of the analysis of students’ interviews and the presentation of the findings is in chapter seven.