Decisions and Conversations
In our first workshops, six weeks ago now, we were introduced to an Action Research Cycle (based on McNiff and Whitehead 2009), and the idea that there may be more than one revolution around the cycle. However, I seem to have found myself in a bit of a loop around the first step.
Following our most recent time together as a class, I took the opportunity to speak with my tutor and in our conversation an excellent sounding idea arose (not from me!) – it felt a little like a Eureka! moment. The idea was to see if the survey that all PSE students completed at the close of their course in August had any questions related to stress, anxiety, or similar ideas. If so, then I could extract this data for my research, and if not I could then design a few questions that could additionally be used so as to learn how students felt about these issues. It seemed like a win-win way forwards. [Edit: although it didn’t work out this way, the five questions I went on to design could be seen as doing the latter of these.]
What I did next was email a colleague who is part of the core PSE team with the intention of gaining access to the last course’s survey results. To cut a potentially long story short I didn’t receive this (complicated issues!), but my colleague did go through the results on my behalf to see if there were any data related to my research topic. No questions explicitly connected, but two individual students made a comment where they used the word ‘stress’. So there were insufficient data of use, and my colleague referred to the questions by number and one was, as he typed, “Q56 (!!! don’t ask)”; so he seemed to convey that there were already a lot of questions, and I concurred and thought it inappropriate to add further questions (I don’t actually know the total number, but I really hope that this was one of the last). I feel that this is not a feasible approach for this project, and thus am looping back to the beginning again.
Has it been a waste of time? I don’t believe so. Apart from causing me to reflect more on how to undertake such a project as this, particularly the early steps of determining a research question, the email correspondence I had with my senior colleague has also proved useful. One point he elaborates on is how much of a responsibility a tutor has for the mental health care of their students. Of course he sees pastoral care as a part of a tutor’s duty, but how much can a tutor be expected to do for an entire class, or students in multiple tutor groups? This is why we have personnel trained in these specialist areas that we can refer our concerns and our students to.
A further point my colleague comments on is my promotion of ‘down time’. He also sees this as standard good practice, but has been astonished at the reaction when mentioning it to his own tutees: it just doesn’t appear to be a part of the academic culture for much of our cohort, so encouraging this may be met with some resistance.
The final conversation I will mention here is one that took place within one of our workshop sessions. When I shared my intention of exploring the language tutors use with their students and the effect that this can have upon them, a course colleague spoke of his own experiences. He recalled, as an undergraduate, there were tutors who would set out requirements in a negative manner that left him with feelings of anxiety, but other tutors, now at postgraduate level, that gave the same communication but in a way that instilled confidence that the task can be executed well. This has reaffirmed in me that this is a topic worthy of inquiry.