Workshop notes: 20th November

Thanks very much for another fascinating discussion last night.

We fixed our next meeting for Tues 12th Feb 5-6.30 in Charles Street 12.4.03 (same room as this week’s meeting- on the 4th floor).

We agreed a focus of ‘creativity and literacy’ – which you could interpret in whatever way we liked… and also of course if you want to take a completely different focus that interests you (or want to do more than one postcard, that’s fine too).

There are three things  that Guy and I would like to add to this – to help us stay close to the initial research proposal!

1. Could you try and focus on something that you can count or measure…for example related to distance (e.g. distance travelled, distance apart), frequency (e.g. how often), or intensity (e.g. how much). You could also explore relations between things- e.g. how far is distance travelled related to levels of creativity? We realise that some things are hard to measure or count (e.g. feelings, ideas) but it doesn’t have to be scientific, and actually it would be really interesting to see what does happen when you try and measure/count these things. We really want to see if quantifying can be useful in ways other than its used at the moment.
2. Most postcards so far have involved collecting data on children . In thinking about how we’ll present a picture to others about what teaching literacy is like, do also consider collecting data on yourself (your own feelings, thoughts, movements) or on ‘things’ in the classroom (e.g. movements of objects).
3. If you do decide to focus on what children do, could you avoid collecting data that could be used to identify individual children- e.g. that involves differentiating between children on the basis of gender or ability? (You may well want to do this for your own purposes, but it would be great if you could avoid this in the postcard you share). This will ensure we stick to our ethical framework for the study.