This was more of an initial dialogue about our research intentions and at what point we were at with it. I thought that the tutorial was cancelled at first as I was sat in the blackboard collaborate room on my own, but it turned out that the wrong Frances Ross was contacted with a MS Teams link – a common mistake.
Luckily I was invited into a meeting about half-way through, and I joined Catherine, Michael B and Leslie to have a quick discussion around our ideas on our Self-initiated Project.
Catherine reassured us that a conversation can be a method choice, as long as there can be some design structure of a conversation. If I were to choose to do a focus group, 5 participants would be plenty. It seemed that my assumption that the sample size needed to be large was incorrect, and I was told this is only a small scale enquiry and that smaller sample sizes were adequate for it.
We were reminded that we should be responsive in our evaluation, changing the research direction as we go, followed by an overall evaluation.
In response to my project idea around the transition stage for Insights UAL students to undergraduate degree and their sense of belonging, I was told to focus my question even more perhaps to just the phenomenon around belonging within a higher education context. It was suggested that perhaps I look at the dropout or retention rate of Insights students on undergraduate degrees. Or, perhaps I could look at how to improve the transition stage, and to investigate the readings around high dropout rates in the first term. Reaching out to students at this stage could be seen as a form of Insights aftercare, as I am suggesting a valuable connection is lost with overwhelming transition to university. The research action could be to design an intervention or a social event, or even a work-in-progress group crit or pastoral conversations. It was recommended that I read into belonging interventions.
My next steps are to:
- research what the current aftercare is for Insights students going onto UAL undergraduate degrees
- write a survey for Insights students who have joined UAL as an undergraduate to assess what they accessed and their feeling of belonging to the class, course, college and university
- research around belonging interventions.
- write up an interview plan for UAL staff – structured or semi-structured interview.