action research – Sebastian May

Project summary and reflections

As my action research project developed, several changes took place. At the beginning the project scope seemed fairly vast, and a lot of my initial work focused on narrowing the scope of the project to ensure that I would be able to deliver it within the boundaries of the course. Some of the exercises I undertook were useful and narrowed the project in a helpful way. At the same time, this opened opportunities for me to explore adjoining areas of research, for example I explored the idea of collective consciousness (Bache, 2008) and I explored a variety of research methods including embodied data analysis (Kara, 2022); although I ultimately discounted the latter due to the digital nature of my project.

Through some of the discussions I was able to have with peers, as well as some of the feedback I received, I made useful changes to the project. For example, I changed the central exercise from student partners writing complete stories to them being able to continue existing stories and being able to contribute smaller story elements to other students’ story elements; create a more collective approach and making the exercise itself more dynamic as well as more collective in nature. Some of the feedback around gathering and sharing storytelling elements and techniques, also led me to develop the Padlet activity to give students a more comprehensive insight into storytelling, supporting them better for the core activity on Miro, which asked them to develop a story more or less independently.

I believe the strength of my storytelling project was the design of the learning activity at its centre and me having developed it using storytelling insights and elements of play specifically with a creative cohort of students in mind. I think that the application of design thinking during the development of the exercise helped me develop something much more agile and much more interesting than taking any existing or previously used exercise and applying it to a new group of students.

My initial work in this area was inspired by a project by Sheffield Hallam University, where listening rooms (Sheffield Hallam University, 2003) had been set up to listen in on conversations between students, giving the university a better understanding of students’ experiences and allowing students, usually two at a time, to have discursive conversations with each other. (The Sheffield Hallam University project had been inspired by BBC Radio 4’s The Listening Project (BBC Radio 4, 2023)).

Thinking about the idea of listening rooms, I began to wonder what a project like this could look like online, i.e. without physical listening rooms or boxes on campus. I started to sketch out ideas of what this might look like in a virtual space, how information could be captured, and so on.

One aspect that was missing for me, however, was how such a project could more directly benefit students. It is obvious that there are huge benefits for me, as an academic, gaining a better understanding of my students through something like a listening project and then in turn being able to better support my students. Other academics, support services and some students might be interested in an analysis of relevant project findings, too.

Nevertheless, it bothered me that there was no immediate feedback or contribution to students from the activity itself. And a virtual listening rooms project also raised a question around why students would share their personal stories with the university without much in return. What would their incentive be, and would the project ultimately exclude some students over others?

Lastly, I thought that the idea of ‘someone’ listening in on a conversation clashed with my wish to create a safe and caring environment for my students. As Condorelli (2009, p.188) states, “As people involved in the making of culture, how do we want to go there and what with?” I wanted to ensure to create an environment and a community, but in a space that felt safe. I began to think about other ways to capture students’ stories.

I also decided that a brief for students to share a piece of themselves should be much more open, and that students shouldn’t need to answer a question that was too specific. I wanted to create an activity that places students at the center of it, gives them agency to decide, something that would connect students through the collective nature of the activity. I also wanted to see if by empowering my students I could remove at least some of my own biased influence, as an academic, from the activity. As more and more students would feed into the activity, and it became more of a collective experience would my own influence over their experience reduce? I began to wonder if this could then create more space for students to express their own identities and express themselves more freely, and the content creation aspect of the activity would be become more and more based on co-design, self-creation and a self-run, sustainable activity.

Lastly, I liked the idea of having an activity that would allow students to use different formats and that the activity could include more than two students at a time, something inherently more collective than two students having a private conversion with each other.

Screenshot of a mind map I used to refine some of my initial thinking and ideas, on Miro

One of the most interesting and possibly more positive elements of the storytelling project also became one of the biggest blockers, namely the asynchronous nature of the activity. There was a clear challenge of having to compete with student partners’ other responsibilities, such as other academic activities, and I had to put in additional efforts to follow up with students, collectively and individually, reflect on my communications, and stretch the boundaries of the project. For example, I extended my deadlines for students to contribute to the project by an entire month, giving me less time to analyse their data, but allowing for a larger number of contributors.

I’m very pleased with the difference the project has made so far in getting my department to reconsider the way students are able to contribute to their teaching and learning, incorporating storytelling at the core of some of our activities.

I’m excited to consider how this project can be embedded as a foundational exercise within the student partners group moving forward, e.g. as new student partners join us, and how this project might be used with other aspects of online education. It has been brilliant to look at how I can nurture a community of students and develop opportunities of connectedness among them.

I monitored and noted feedback received throughout the project, either implementing changes directly, or logging this for later use, for example within my research mind map, and a list of ideas and references to return to at another time.

I tried to be consequent and stick to my original plan, giving each stage of the project sufficient time, but also not allowing too much scope creep. I probably spent more time on running the actual activities, simply due to the fact that I tweaked activities and expanded on them, which required more time. I would have liked to explore other methodologies and areas of research further but was also conscious of sticking to my overall plan and needing to decide on one specific route through the project.

I was very inspired by the collective nature of the activity, which I hope to explore more in the future. I think that I gained new skills in terms of activity design, surveying students, and analysing data. The way that I drew raw data out of the activity and feedback, and then used thematic and narrative analysis tools to work through the raw data was new and exciting to me. I would also like to explore narrative analysis further.

Final project considerations

The learning activity I ultimately developed was a rich, three-hour long exercise that sat outside students’ curriculum. The flexibility to complete the exercise as and when students wanted, provided them with a more accessible way to engage with the activity as if it had been scheduled to take place live, also reducing some of the overall intensity of the work involved.

It is also worth noting that student partners’ participation in this project was entirely voluntary, prioritising students’ needs outside their roles of student partners. Their contributions could also be made anonymously. Both of these elements highlight my own values around the importance of embedding ethics of care into our work with students, looking to support students in a caring way, rather than students being in any way, even unintentionally, harmed. All contributing student partners were compensated for their time via Arts Temps.

Bibliography

Bache, C.M. (2008). The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness. Albany, USA: SUNY Press.

BBC Radio 4 (2023). BBC Radio 4 – The Listening Project. [online] The listening project: It’s surprising what you hear when you listen. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01cqx3b [Accessed 14 Dec. 2023].

Condorelli, C. and De Baere, B. (2009). Support for Culture. In: Support Structures. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp.187–201.

Kara, H. (2022). Embodied Data Analysis. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k79AWH59JpQ [Accessed 4 Dec. 2023].

Sheffield Hallam University (2003). Listening Rooms at Sheffield Hallam University. [online] Listening Rooms. Available at: https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/listeningrooms/ [Accessed 14 Dec. 2023].

Rationale

As Student Experience Lead at UAL Online, I continuously look at ways of improving the student experience, and a focus of my work is creating opportunities for student voice to support creative education online. For example, in 2023 I designed and launched UAL Online’s team of student partners, who support the co-design of online education at UAL and who have directly supported this action research project.

Therefore, part of the environment within which my research takes place is a specific online learning context that is aligned to the UAL Online Learning Framework (see below). It highlights six guiding values for the design, build and delivery of online learning and student experience, and forefronts flexibility, access and inclusion. It is important to recognise that I designed my research to align with this framework.

ual-online-learning-framework-short Download

In addition, the UAL Online model structures online learning into three distinct categories: guided (45%), independent (40%), and live (15%). The focus of guided learning within this model made it interesting for me to spotlight it within my own research, shining a light on structured, self-paced learning that students are required to complete; although my wider work touches on all three categories.

I am also interested in some of the opportunities provided by guided learning to scale an offer of online learning, such as providing access to a larger and more diverse global cohort of students; compared with some residential offers that rely on predominant live delivery of creative education.

The project also brings together my own background in communications, the creative arts, and storytelling. I am particularly interested in how storytelling supports communities of creative students and enhances their experience. Copeland and de Moor (2018), for example, say that “digital stories carry the currency of authentic voice across networks when brokered effectively”. I am interested and how I can enable students to use their authentic voice and lived experiences within their studies.

In the previous PgCert unit, I looked at developing opportunities for students to explore their personal identities within classroom activities. In a way, my action research project is a continuation of this work but also goes further. Whereas the previous activity (or artefact) that I had designed enabled students to better understand their identities, the activity that I developed as part of the action research project enables students to express themselves much more freely, engage with their learning in a much more creative and more personal way, which supports the idea that their personal identities truly sit at the heart of what they do.

McNiff and Whitehead (2010, p.59) state that “What action research stands for is the realisation of human needs towards autonomy, loving relationships and productive work; the urge towards freedom, creativity and self-recreation.” As I previously wrote, through empowering storytelling activities in the classroom, I can empower different voices and hand over the reins to our students in a more meaningful way.

This isn’t to say that my own positionality doesn’t have a direct impact on how activities are run and supported. As Maisha Islam (2023) rightly says, “positionality influences every decision when you conduct research.” Nevertheless, through giving students agency to direct their own learning, we can open up learning activities to be more inclusive and socially just.

Bibliography

Copeland, S. and de Moor, A. (2018). Community Digital Storytelling for Collective Intelligence: towards a Storytelling Cycle of Trust. AI & SOCIETY, [online] 33(1), pp.101–111. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s0014601707441.

Maisha Islam: Rethinking academic research culture and decolonial approaches to student-staff partnerships, (2023). [Podcast] Spotify: Pedagogies for Social Justice, Student Partnership. 23 Sep. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/show/1BhrbuKdFOIBmlzGYAZyui?si=0402efe096f14a1e [Accessed 16 Nov. 2023].

McNiff, J. and Whitehead, J. (2010). You and Your Action Research Project. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.

Ethical Enquiry

The preliminary feedback I received on my ethics form during a group tutorial was positive. Changes I made before submitting my final form included making my research question more reflective of my own agency as a practitioner. I also reviewed my preliminary set of questions and rephrased a number of questions to make the overall set more critical and less leading. For example, I rephrased one of the questions from how students might feel connected, to how they might feel disconnected during the exercise. By not presuming that student partners would feel connected and by flipping the question, this then gave me an opportunity to double-check students’ understanding of the question and their response. It also then allowed for students to give a more ‘negative’ response if they so wished. I reviewed the remaining questions with this in mind, making some further changes. I then added additional opportunities for student partners to expand on their responses to likert questions on page 2 of the questionnaire and made my request for open-ended responses at the end of the survey more explicit. In the instructions, I also highlighted to students to read questions carefully, as I did not want them to skim over questions and misunderstand them.

I have included here my signed off (via Moodle) Ethical Enquiry Form.

Ethical-Enquiry-Form-2023-Sebastian-May-V2-Final Download

Following on from the formal and final feedback I received on my ethical enquiry form, I revisited the order of questions once more and reviewed some of the phrasing of my questions to eliminate any ambiguity and clarify specific questions.

For example, I was asked about the notion of an activity ‘making’ someone feel a specific way, which made me think about the agency of my participants in the process. I rephrased my final set of questions to reflect this.

I also had a closer look at the idea of ‘trigger warnings’, which are commonly used but can also evoke negative feelings for students. The feedback I received made me reconsider the use of an explicit ‘trigger warning’, review project risks, and decide to take a softer approach. The final draft of my project information took this into account by explicitly talking about the possibly of strong feelings and emotions arising in the project, however I did no longer label these messages with a specific ‘trigger warning’. I also included a more explicit project etiquette and forms of support, including support with studying online, within the project invitation and documentation.

I wanted to make sure that the research would take place in a supportive environment, even though the learning activities themselves were designed to creatively challenge student partners. Macfarlane (2003, p.59) writes that while we want to make students into critical thinkers, “it is important to establish a clear, stable and supportive environment in which this enquiry can take place”.

Bibliography

Macfarlane, B. (2003). Teaching with Integrity : The Ethics of Higher Education Practice. [online] London: Taylor & Francis Group. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=182731.

Action Research Spiral

It’s been an incredibly useful exercise to think about my action research project as a spiral of continuous activity, rather than a project with a distinct start and finish. This has helped me position my work with the wider context of my work, considering how I came to investigate digital storytelling and how I might want to develop this further.

PgCert slide, Workshop 2, Group, Friday, October 2023

Looking at O’Leary’s cycles of action research specifically, and mapping different parts of my action research to this spiral, unearthed a range of additional elements or steps that are already part of my research and that are worth documentation. For example, noticing that digital storytelling might have an impact on students’ learning through activities of play and their link to connectedness can be grouped within the initial ‘observe’ stage of O’Leary’s cycle. Coupled with my research within this area, my personal reflections on the subject then form the following ‘reflect’ stage of the cycle.

Personal sketch, classroom exercise ‘Mapping your Project to the Action Research Cycle/Spiral’

The exercise also allowed me to reflect on additional ‘observe’, ‘reflect’, and ‘plan’ stages, which could include coming up with possible solutions, making recommendations, and planning next steps. In a way, there is a possibility for this spiral to continue, with new experiences, observations and research feeding into further stages as I develop my work in digital storytelling.