ARP: Data collection tools

PgCert Interview Questions:

1. How long have you been teaching for? And in what capacity?
2. Throughout the years, what kind of teacher training have you received or had ready access to?
3. I was wondering if you could reflect on some difficult moments within your teaching – if you could describe some challenging scenarios in which you have not been certain of how to proceed.
4. Have you noticed any shifting patterns since when you first began teaching versus now?
5. Are there specific societal/political concerns that have emerged in the classroom?
6. How do you moderate difficult emotions or conversations in your classroom?
7. What are your thoughts/knowledge about free speech in the classroom?
8. How do you consider your own positionality in relation to the classroom and its practices?
9. How do you negotiate cultural differences in conversational topics and discussions?
10. Are you familiar with decolonial pedagogies? If so, what is your understanding, and how, if any, techniques do you employ in the classroom? 
11. Are you familiar with non-violent communication? If so, what is your understanding, and how, if any, techniques do you employ in the classroom?
12. Are you familiar with brave space theory? If so, what is your understanding, and how, if any techniques do you employ in the classroom?
13. Do you know about ‘Chatham House Rules’? If so, what is your understanding?
14. Are there any emerging trends in the classroom that are noticeable in your seminar discussions?
15. Have you had any training with the aforementioned pedagogical approaches? If so, what worked and what would you have wanted more of?
16. Are there any areas of training or support that you wish you had more access to?
17. How do you move forward after difficult moments in the classroom?

My semi-structured interviews were gathered by initially recruiting from an open email to seminar-based instructors inviting participants to volunteer for my ARP, which I outlined in the email and through a Participant Information Sheet. Alongside this, I also sent out Consent Forms to comply with ethical practices of interviewing subjects.

The questions I asked sought to initially explore how the classroom dynamics have shifted throughout their years of teaching. Most of my participants had been teaching for at least 8 years, so would have experienced the shift into an online teaching space under COVID and its aftermath. While not my intention, one of my participants likened the questions to a job interview, but it was my hope that the improvisational script would have allowed for informality. That is, I did go off script, if I felt that there was more information to be gathered. I think one of my biggest problems was trying to find in-person space for the interviews to unfold. There is limited space within CSM, and I observed that some of my participants were reluctant to share information. Moreover, interviews conducted on Teams were recorded, so this obviously adds a layered of surveillance. I wondered whether providing an intimate space to converse and more time would have helped to encourage the discussion. That said, I learned a lot from the process, and should I continue to develop the project, I would try to snowball the sampling, which means to gather more research subjects from the initial subject pool (Lewis-Beck et. al, 2004), and also to engage with the participants for at least two interviews, perhaps after implementing an intervention from their suggested training needs.

Works Cited

See blog post of reference list