Transitions, Assumptions and Analysis - Get on with it!

Were are we at as the daffodils start to come into their own? Spring is a time for visible transitions.

Its Easter holidays soon and I know that often ‘holidays’ give people some extra time to do their work!!! – artists!!!

So I am just thinking that:

If you are on Module One now would be a good time to have a list of AOL’s  areas, (and to have contacted you advisor to talk them through if you want to). 
Then over Easter is about making the transition from having AOL ideas to writing one for feedback.

If you are in Module Two start to think about your question in terms of the assumptions you are making. See my blog post below – assumptions in the question/area itself. But also assumptions in what you know. This is what the pilots are for. It is not to pilot (do a mini-version of the research) it is to play with and get to know YOU in the research role. To pilot an interview get with a friend do not ask them about your question necessarily. The pilot is for you to experience interviewing in a formal setting, in a coffee shop. What its like to use a dicta phone or try to write notes, how people react – (I have had friends I consider quite confident and laid-back get really nervous when I ‘interview’ them). What are you in the interview situation? Like do you interrupt a lot!!! Same with observation how will you write an observation, when? Try out different ways. You can observe anything going to the supermarket.

Over Easter make the transition from planning something you might never have done before to proposing something you have a little experience in – both from the perspective of the question AND the perspective of a researcher.

If you are in Module Three, I would urge you to stop collecting data!!! It’s time to think about it all and start your analysis.

Over Easter make the transition from looking out there to looking inside and making sense of what you have seen, read, felt through reflection and analysis– this is how you make the research yours and meaningful.

What do you think?

Adesola

Conversations about Ethics and Questions

More informal notes from conversations with Module Twos & Threes in BAPP and MAPP

We were talking about Planning Ethical Practice in terms of Module two and allowing for developments in your plan during Module Three.

First point we made was to look at what is ethics: I have described ethics as reflecting on what you are experience as. Thinking about what is the effect, affect, feeling, event that is created by your actions. This is not to say that you can control how people have a ‘good time’ with you because you can’t know what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ for them. But you can think about what impact you are having on the people and things around you and reflect on whether the impact you are having is the same as your intension for doing things.

Ethics: Impact on others

So having established that when thinking about ethics we are looking at our place, effect, impact on people: what do you think of doing a research project which will result in giving advise to people about a topic. – bearing in mind you have about 3 months, you are at MA level, and some people have been looking at the field you are looking at all their lives. Alan was just saying to me he was listening to a TED lecture where the person said for the first 30 years of the research we thought X but know we have come to see it in terms of Y today!!!!!

So what do you think of you doing a research project that will give people the answer to something? What are the ethics (impact of you) in this?? I would not want to try to do that. It seems a little rude to people who already study the area to think I can come up with the ‘answer’ in 3 months when they might have been looking at it for years and years. And what is the ‘answer’ in terms of them, the answer is really just my thing, my issues?  Who am I?

NOTE: Module One is about asking yourself who am I – through looking at your networks, your presence on-line your reflections. I am the experiences I have. Through your AOLs – unique experiences because only ‘I’ live MY life.

Who am I – after Module One – I am someone with unique experiences and (and therefore) my ideas and thoughts matter because only ‘I’ have my perspective.

So I am someone who does not have to feel I am going to save the world in three months and come up with the ‘answer’ to this important question. But I am also someone with a unique set of experiences and what I think matters ….so  (ethically I could say) my inquiry is about finding out more about my question and giving some informed comments and ideas about what I think of what I found out.

NOTE: This what you do in Module Three – a reflective report and some ‘thing’ people in my industry can relate to (see blog post On-line Campus Three session below for ‘thing’ reference)

OK so what does this ethical perspective do to our inquiry questions? Remember:

1)    We don’t have to ‘find’ and answer to the question (and possibly can’t) we need to find out more

2)    We don’t have to assume we need to save the world and that nobody else thought of saving the world before us and just didn’t try

3)    The goal is to ask better more informed questions

We looked at our questions and reworded them. For example

Save the world version:

What are the different methods for developing performance skills for excellence in performers, so I can teach this to my students?

Find out more version:

What do different people consider excellence in performance is (asking dancers, director, choreographers and audience members)

Or

I feel Pat Smith, Blair Teller and Fran Jones are excellent performers so I will talk to each of them to find out what in their training helped them in their performance work.

Save the world version:

Blindness and Dance: why is their so much training lacking? I’ve noticed there is no training for dance teachers in this.

Find out more version:

What is out there in terms of dance projects that involve blind children. (world wide and locally)

Or

What do parents of blind children feel is a benefit from doing dance class and are these benefits to do with they way the classes are taught?

Or

How are the arts positioned in training for working with blind children? Looking at training programmes in general and seeing how much of this involves arts educational training.

Save the world version:

Culture in dance: what are opportunities for people to study musical theatre in India (but I don’t live in India).

Find out more version:

Is musical theatre a culture in itself (as it could be argued ballet is) having its own language, and expectation for behaviour?

Or

Starting to mapping musical theatre training from different places by comparing the narratives of three performers who have trained in different countries.

Ethics –  Questioning Assumptions

We noticed the find out more versions allowed us to notice our assumptions and question them.

Noticing the assumptions we are making is like taking a step back to look get a wider look at what we are thinking about. Very often the assumptions we make are the best place to start inquiring into. Why we make that assumption and what other ways are there to look at things. In the performance skills inquiry area there are assumptions in the original save the world questions that need to be noticed and in fact could be the inquiry its self.

For example: What are the different methods for developing performance skills for excellence in performers, so I can teach this to my students?

This has the following assumptions and possible inquiry areas:

Assumption	Inquiry
Everyone thinks the same things are performance skills and excellence	What do different people think makes excellence in performance (get opinions from different people in different roles to do with performance)
Performance skills remain the same regardless of the performance setting	Find out if people who perform if different performance events and venues seem to access the same skills each time (Watch great performance in different setting, what do I think? What has been written about this.)
It is possible to teacher people to be better performers its just nobody does it	Talk to people I think are great performers and find out what they do and think.
There are methods to get people to perform it can be broken down in to steps or stages or points and then learnt in the classroom.	Talk to teachers/director/dance captains I have had, who I respect, and find out what they do and think and why.

You can see that all the example inquiry questions that are raised from my assumptions can all still be useful in my end goal of being better at teaching performance skills to my students.

The conclusion we came to is:

We help people (save the world) by being better informed, inspired etc… ourselves. Not by going out and ‘helping’ people. Being better yourself helps other people.

Joke: Old lady (much like myself!) standing at the edge of the road you help her across. And on the other side she says she didn’t want to cross the road and now she has missed her bus!!! (The irony was you wanted that bus too but you sacrificed missing it to ‘help’ her.)

The practice under ethics of looking at your assumptions is really valuable. In the session we all looked at the assumptions in our questions so far. This is about how looking at ethics will help you shape your inquiry. (Its not about a right /wrong question). You can see from my example table above that the inquiry questions that come out of looking at my assumptions also indicate inquiry tools – like I would need to interview people, or observe performances. So looking at my questions through a focus on ethics gives me ideas about the focus of the questions, the tools I would need and where informative information about the question might be.

Ethics – Nuts and Bolts

In a session about ethics we cannot miss out having a quick look at ethics 101. Make sure you don’t hurt people.  As the handbook points out some research has been at the cost of harm to people mentally or physically.

Some of the assumptions we make can be offensive and hurtful to people. Assuming I need help across the road is pretty annoying when I can ask if I do! In the summer I was standing next to someone much older than me waiting to cross the road in Liverpool street station and as the light changed for us to walk across she took my arm. When we got to the other side she let go and realised I was me. She said sorry. I said it was really nice to walk across the road together like that I haven’t done that since I was child. For a moment I was what she needed (some remembered friend or relative) and then I was not.

Nuts and bolts

1)    Plan to use pseudonyms for people you interview. Yes, so they have some anonymity but beyond that because (see Pips blog post from last week – my skype chat post below) because it is hard to really explain what you will be doing in your inquiry as in some ways you don’t know where it will take you either.

2)    Same with informed consent and the ability to drop out of the research at anytime. You can’t really say what will happen minute by minute in your inquiry or where it will go so let people know they can get off the ride when ever they want to. But this is more than just the rhetoric of the consent form you give them. It is about planning an inquiry that understands not all the data is coming from people you interview. What if they all dropped out??? The data is also the literature, and your feelings and thoughts (see recent on-line ‘Campus’ session Module Three blog post below).

3)    The power of the researcher – you think you are stressed about your project! The people you approach also have stress about the idea of research and they are not in control of the project like you are. Think about the impact of being asked to be interviewed or not being one of the people asked to be interviewed will have on people. Think about the relationship you already have with people involved in the inquiry. There is not a right person to ask. You just need to have thought about the impact you will have and maybe tried to make sure it is as gentle as possible. Where possible ask yourself do I really need to involved people they way I am planning, would it be more gentle to change how I engage with them. Like changing planning to interview your students to observing your students. Knowing the power relationship between student (them) and teacher (you) is quite stressful and can be manipulated.

…what do you think?

Adesola

Thoughts from talking to BAPPS !!

I just wrote this post for an on-line session I did with the BAPPs in Module Three. I thought it might be interesting. What do you think?

Today we had the second on-line ‘campus’ session for Module Three.  The title for the session was ‘Organising and analysing data’ 

We began by challenging ourselves to think about – “What is data?”.

The problem we can have with data is recognising it. Data is NOT someone giving you the answer to your inquiry question. I think often that is what we expect. That the field data collection period is to go out and look for someone who can answer the inquiry question like an Easter egg hunt – going out in the feild and coming back with exactly what you wanted. Then coming home with the answers(eggs) and write them down - the end research done!!

Firstly, the data collected in the field does not give us the answer. (See the Module two overview post also – we are not looking for answers but looking to better understand our question. We are looking to be able to ask better more informed questions).

The data collected in the field is only part of the ‘answer’, your feelings and thoughts and impressions are also part of it, the literature you read is part of it. You mix these all together and see what you think of them all – that is the analysis. Then you write-up what you think having done the analysis, along with explaining what you did so we can see the journey you took to get to what you think. Analysis can be thought of as triangulation. A triangle linking and mixing together: your experiences and reflections, with what other people think (the literature) and what the people you saw in the field were doing (field data). 

So if at some level you have been thinking of the data as – the ‘answer’, and you have not found the answer you might think you have not collected any data yet. In other words you might have quite a lot of data and not realised it is data because you are only looking for something that will be the direct answer to your inquiry. So we asked ourselves “What is data?”.

I am suggesting it is everything that happens between two points in time – when the module started in February to late March when you stop collecting data and start analysing. Everything that happens – not just the parts you planned or expected people to say.

For example you might be looking at Motivation in the students you teach and have plans to interview six of them… but you haven’t yet. This doesn’t mean you haven’t started the research yet because it is March (!) and the module started in February (!). It just means its not going the way you expected. But the very things that have delayed you or are making you hesitate are data. We talked about this – maybe it’s because you are so busy. So ‘being so busy’ is like a theme. You have got to this theme through your experiences and reflections more than through the field data activity but you can see if this theme happens in the field data too. For instance you could observe if the students who you want to learn more about motivating also see themselves as very busy (busy with relationships, busy thinking about after school events etc… not having time for your class).

So if data is everything that happens between February when the module started and end of March-ish then how do we organise it?

I suggested you use themes (as the example above showed). Notice what is jumping out at you as a theme. Are there some things that keep coming up (even if they are negative things)? Start to notice them and group them together. In the end you can take all the experiences and reflection you have, all the field data (interviews and observations etc…) and all the literature and almost colour code every time one your of themes appears in them. You would be organising the data into themes.

Now to analyse you look at all the bits under one theme and think about what they have in common how you see them relating to each other. Ask yourself what story do they tell to you.

So to summarise the steps

1. Come to turns with it:  the research has started and it might not be doing or saying what you expected (great you what to learn something new and to do that you have to encounter something new – something unfamiliar)

2. Reflect on what is reoccurring – are you seeing themes yet. You can do this now as you collect data or look for themes once you stop collecting data.

3. If you have a theme start to see what its relationship is with all the data – field work, literature and your feelings/reflections.

4. Know you will STOP collecting data at a point in time and start looking at it and the relationships there are between all the ideas.

Comments and questions we talked about:

As we talked people said that a few things jumped out at them, they were:

You might be afraid you will not know what to do with data that is unexpected. But this is like saying you want to control what you will find and if so then why bother to do research – you could just tell us what you want to find.

The process of research that you worked out in Module Two will stop you from getting too lost. The research project itself is like a path if you follow it even when you are not sure what you are doing you’ll get somewhere.

The Professional Artefact, what is that???

We said replace the word artefact with the word ‘thing’. It is a professional ‘thing’ explaining or sharing your research. You can’t know what the ‘thing’ is yet because you haven’t done all the research so how can you know what ‘thing’ will explain it.

The research doesn’t have to be what you expected in Module Two as you planned it. The process is the more important thing.

Last thoughts – the data is not to tell you the ‘answer’. I hope after reading this post that makes sense.

Della and Pip are both writing blog posts on the on-line ‘campus’ session too. Please have a look at what they say.

 http://dellaestlin.blogspot.co.uk/

http://pipspalton.blogspot.co.uk

 What do you think? Does this make sense? Please comment below

Adesola

Courage

We had two chats yesterday.

In the morning we talked about the AOLs 

We talked a lot about how the AOLs are capturing your experiences. The experiences that you feel are learning (responsibility) at MA level. Because of this one persons AOL might be a completely different topic from another persons. In fact it is not the topic that makes it at MA level it is the depth of analysis, understanding sensitivity that you have of the topic that makes it MA.

Across the years I have heard people say they don’t understand (don’t want to bother with) all the theory (particularly introduced in Module Two).  We talked about this in the evening chat. But we are not working with theory as something different from practice. The reason your AOL is at MA level because of what you make it not because of the topic itself is because this whole course has a non-positivist approach. In other words there is not a secret cave of MA level AOLs that you can discover and mine. There is no existing AOL that is at MA level. It is what you do with the AOL that makes it.

I feel as people finish Module One they have this but Module One is not a closed event. Thinking about what you did and why- how things worked out for you is thinking about the theory that you meet in Module Two.

Sometimes we doubt ourselves even when we are in the middle of something but I feel that to some extent one has to be brave enough to not waste too much time on this.  We talked about this in the evening session also. Rilke writes so well about this in ‘Letters to a Young Poet.’

‘…I want to beg you, as much as I can dear sir, to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers , which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.’ p. 35

They ‘cannot be given’ you is not that they cannot be given because someone has them and will not hand them over. They ‘cannot be given’ because you already have them – they are already in you.

‘…Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; whether it be remembering your own childhood or yearning toward your own future – only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.’ p.46

It is a kind of love that allows you to both not spend too much time considering yourself and doubting but also not too much time assuming you have a full grasp of everything.

As always we are not static in one defined thing we are in movement. We are not the AOL we are how we do the AOL - Going back to the ‘theory’ the perspective here is one is not looking for certainty because that impossible task has no grounding in lived experience , which is about change.

‘…consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation , discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights.’ p.29

The grace in this is when you consider your self ‘right’ do not consider yourself better. Just as you do not indulge in feeling less when someone does something that leads to a realisation and growth in you.  If we spend too much time on organising ourselves and others into being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ we are stealing the movement of growth from the situation and statically switching from this (right) to that (wrong) instead of finding the artistry of change.

The dance is in the inbetweeness.

What do you think?

Adesola