In The Field

Dear me. Can it really be six months since I have posted here? That is an unpleasant side effect of doctoral study: how quickly time seems to pass. And now I have had half a year of being 'part-time' and 'in the field' (though the reality is that I have had to be paid to be working in school for at least one Friday a month, if not more) and having relinquished the head of department role but exchanged it for an international one.

A quick sketch of where I have got to, then, in terms of the shape of my research and the state of my data collection:

The academic year 2016-2017 was spent in collecting data from six twilight sessions, or 'Study Group Research Interviews' as I termed them for the Qualitative Methods paper I had to write.

From September I was really down to four teachers (and me) in the collaborative research group: one left the school entirely and another has such a reduced timetable as to make it impractical to include her.

The Autumn Term is really the reading-teaching term, and this is where the bulk of the intervention will have taken place; it certainly did for my own practice. Near the start of the term, participating classes should have undertaken an Attitudes Towards Reading survey. At the end of December, then, I began individual semi-structured interviews with the remaining teachers. The last of them took place at Entebbe airport, on the way home from a school trip to Uganda at half term, so I have four of those, three now transcribed, to add to the six transcriptions of the Study Group Research Interviews from the previous academic year. 

Next steps are that I need to conduct three observations of each teacher in the next six weeks, and select three case study students per class. Following this there needs to be a follow-up interview with each teacher, and the final student survey. My data sets should then be completed by July. Exciting!

This afternoon I attended a Qualitative Data Analysis seminar. Scary to think that I will really need this stuff in the very near future. In fact, for next month's supervision my main supervisor and I will blind-code two of the round one interviews for a compare and contrast exercise. It will be good to have a practical session for a change. The day finished with a supervision with both supervisors which lasted for nearly two hours, but I have come home with both their sketches and visualisations of the research which is always helpful.

I'm yet to have 'NVivo' training, and it seems that this is going to be crucial for managing my data. Courses at the university seem to be infrequent and over-subscribed. One of our number has resorted to paying for an external course.

One thing that has buoyed me in the last few weeks is receiving 'highly commended' in a Reading for Pleasure Research award. I was spurred to submit to the award after participating in Women in Leadership training at school and feeling somehow 'guilty' that I was no longer in leadership! I'm also putting together an application for a research grant for a different but connected piece of research, so some interesting things are happening as a result of my studies to date.