Thoughts on Module Three in week three:

Consent forms: Make sure your consent form has been approved by your advisor (Helen or me). If you had changes suggested to you for your consent form as part of the feedback from Module Two make sure you have made the changes. It is important the consent form makes it clear how people can contact your advisor if they had questions or comments they want to ask about the project.

Planning: Also a point that is often mentioned in feedback for Module Two is your timetable for your inquiry (the Gant chart). Now you might see why this is so important to keep you on a good track. At this point (Week 3) you might either feel like you have found it hard to get things off the ground, hard to get interviews or trips you have planned confirmed or maybe the opposite you feel like there is so much data you are collecting and you still have so much to go. Either way you can see how time runs away with you. If you think about it, we have completed 1/4 of the term already. Having your timetable, that you planned to follow regardless of the crazy of getting into the inquiry is really useful. I strongly recommend that you see the module in three equal parts

1) data collection (including literature and reflection),

2) analysis (literature and reflection also continues),

3) communicating what you have learnt – writing-up the inquiry reflective report and the artefact and getting feedback on your draft. 

So that is about four weeks for each thing. Remember collecting data is just getting the stuff together you are going to think about, it is not the whole inquiry. The meat (tofu) and potatoes is the analysis – what you do with the data – how you make it meaningful.

Capturing process: Just like in Module One (and Two), you are on the journey of a module and you need to capture your process in order to reflect on it at the end of the module. It is very easy in Module Three to stop posting blogs, not talk on linked-in, and not use your reflective diary as much. But you need to capture moments of the process just as much as you need to in the the other Modules. The inquiry is about the journey you take when you decide to find out more about the area/question/ idea that is your inquiry topic. It is not about you coming up with a definitive answer to something at the end. The process of finding out is inquiry. The inquiry is ‘when you go down the rabbit hole of your question what happens?’ You need to capture moments in the journey to refer to later and to share with other for feedback and comment and a new perspective.

Lastly thinking about starting itself. In a ‘good’ inquiry there are lots of starts...! Firstly when you got your feedback from Module Two your response to the feedback was not “work done before you start the inquiry”, it was the start of the inquiry- It was the beginning of you thinking more about the question/area of the inquiry. Similarly, if you started doing something and realized you needed to change something, that is not ‘starting over’ it is also part of the process of understanding better, of knowing more about the question and knowing more about how to go about looking into it. All the ‘force starts’, ‘mistakes’, ‘changes’ that you come across are part of you opening your ideas and knowing more about the field so they are the inquiry. This is why capturing your process is so important each bend in the road is a part of how you are coming to know more about this topic and you need to make sure you notice the changes in yourself and capture that moment before you move on. Otherwise, just like a physical journey, when you look back at what you have done you will only be able to see as far as the last bend in the road, but you know the whole journey was much longer than that.

Remember it is not about ‘discovering’ a solution to a problem – the inquiry is about you finding out more and in order to do so things are going to change. Think about different ways of capturing the moments of your inquiry. Your blogs, reflections etc.. do not all have to be words. The way you capture an idea reflects your relationship with the idea itself (remember that for when we talk about/think about the Professional Artefact).   

OK keep going…
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Adesola