A fews weeks ago my class had group presentations and seeing how uncomfortable many of them were whilst presenting and considering how personal the feelings surrounding Imposter syndrome are – I now feel that I may need to find a different way of getting them to explain their drawings that involves less anxiety for them.
The strategy I was considering in my last post (of putting the students in pairs and asking them to explain their drawings to each other and then feedback on what the other student has told them to the rest of the group) is still flawed as they still need to speak to the group.
students have been known to be nervous when participating in research about ‘student experience’, often with familiar staff as the researcher, feeling obligated to give the ‘right’ answers “
(Tight 2012)
As a method, therefore, it allows individuals to share and explore things that matter to them without the worry of saying the wrong thing or being concerned about a researcher’s reaction.”
(Heron 219)
Vikki suggested a paper Friendship as method: reflections on a new approach to understanding student experiences in higher education by Emma Heron. This was really fascinating as the method taps into a pre existing relationship of trust and comfort which could pave the way for conversations with more “depth, flow and honesty”. This research also demonstrated what such conversations ‘sound’ like and show how such a methodology enables participants to speak freely and with meaning.
This method addresses the issue of the power balance of the researcher and the problem of students feeling as though they need to give the “right“ answer. I would love to try this method as it seems like such a pure way to capture the student voice. Unfortunately my students are yet to form their friendship groups and have been finding it difficult to socialise with one another – this could be a post-covid thing that probably warrants it‘s own research project. I think this method could really work well with third year students if I were to expand on the project further.
The method does not easily allow for understanding the voice of students who have no friends. There is a strong case for listening to this particular group of students as loneliness can lead to poor mental health and have adverse effects on learning (Lin and Huang 2012), which may well lead to attrition and a sense of isolation and disengagement. Listening to this group of students would require either relying on alternative methods or broadening the idea of friendship beyond the level or course, or even beyond university to include ‘home friends’, where conversations could still yield important insights.
(Heron 219)
Some other suggestions that came up in the tutorial were pairing up the students online and recording their conversations, again I think shyness will prevent them from speaking openly to each other and because of time constraints I think I’d prefer to have everything done in one session.
After my 1 to 1 face-to-face sessions with my students last week where I checked in on their workflow pages, I noticed that some students who are very shy in class had very detailed, expressive and reflective workflow pages. This got me thinking that perhaps getting them to explain their drawings by writing about them rather than speaking might be a good way to go about it.
Helen Kara includes this method in her book on Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences. She refers to it as the Draw and Write method – this method has been tried and tested on children but I’m curious to see how it could work with young adults. Especially in the case of many of my students where there is a language barrier or they suffer from crippling shyness.
In “A Pencil for Your Thoughts”: Participatory Drawing as a Visual Research Method with Children and Youth” Literat writes that a further advantage of this method is that, unlike in interviews or focus group sessions where an instantaneous response is expected, the research participants are given time to reflect on their responses, which encourages active conceptualization and contemplation (Gauntlett, 2007). This additional time for reflection also gives the participants an opportunity to craft a more complete depiction, which is more difficult to achieve linguistically in a brief interview or survey. Combining drawing with writing provides a two pronged approach which makes it less likely for the message to be misinterpreted.
Problems with the draw-and-write technique have also been registered (Brackett-Milburn & McKie, 1999).
One critique pertains to validity, that is, the degree to which the activity measures what it is meant to measure. Subjects may draw what is easy to depict; be affected by the proximity of others; and/or desire to please the researcher. There is evidence, too, that the drawing exercise may be experienced as unpleasant by a minority of subjects. The strongest objection to the draw-and-write technique concerns the analysis and interpretation of the resulting visual data, which can be time consuming (Umoquit, Tso, Burchett, & Dobrow, 2011). Mair and Kierans (2007) asserts that studies thus far have taken naive positivist or interpretivist analytical approaches. Finally, there are open questions about ethical protocols related to consent, privacy, and the use of the images during and after the study.
I feel it is unlikely that my participants will feel uncomfortable about drawing because they are illustration students and I have acquired permission to use the drawings in the research project. There is however, a potential issue with my relationship to the students – the focus group is taking place in the same classroom after our usual tutorial session so I need to find a way to remove myself from the equation.
Perhaps one approach could be to make the entire exercise anonymous. This way, students would be free to write and draw freely and it may produce a deeper more honest result as the work will have no connection to them after it is collected.