Author: Cathy Burnett

Our final meeting will be on Tuesday 9th July 5.00-6.30 in Charles Street Building 12.4.12.

Emily, Phil and Eleanor- it would be wonderful if you were able to stay afterwards – until 7- to share the postcards you weren’t able to bring along this week. No problem if not- we can try and find another opportunity. I’d be really grateful if you’d let me know.

Tuesday 9th will be  our last opportunity to share postcards, so we agreed that each person would focus on an aspect of their experience of literacy provision that they feel they want to communicate that hasn’t been covered yet. This could be anything at all, but would be chosen with the exhibition audience in mind- what would we like to communicate to them? What might they not know about? What could you count/measure?

We came up with some possible ideas at our meeting:

• what travels into, out of and across literacy classrooms (and how far)
• interruptions (how many of different types…perhaps linked to feelings)
• what is sacrificed (i.e. last week people logged what they did over a week connected with literacy teaching. What about what they didn’t do?)
• laughter (number of moments of different kinds of laughter logged against different kinds of activities/times in the day)
• week of being nice (e.g. number of times you were actively nice to pupils, colleagues)
• routines/managing resources (e.g. numbers of things used in different spaces, numbers of things at certain times of the day)
• common phrases (how often used)

Other ideas are  very welcome- but it’s worth bearing in mind that this is the last postcard sharing event- of course you could do more than one (!)

Whatever you decide, please could you focus on counting  or measuring something, and then finding a way to represent the amounts you have counted, thinking as creatively as you like about how to represent what you found (but which in some way helps to represent relative quantities counted- if that makes sense).

Thanks for yet another lovely meeting last week- as always it was fascinating to see the postcards and hear everyone’s perspectives. The next meeting will be on Tuesday 22nd May 4.30-6.00. We’ll be in Charles Street Rm 12.3.04 (3rd floor).

Do send me your car reg if you need a parking permit.

We said that this time, everyone would have the same focus: time spent as a teacher on different activities across a 7 day week (including weekends).

It might be helpful to think of this in 3 stages…

• Stage One  – decide how to collect data on how you spend your time (i.e. how to record what you do across the week – in a list/table or whatever)
• Stage Two – think about how you’re going to represent it to others (maybe thinking about metaphors or refer to Dear Data for ideas)
• Stage Three – do your postcard!

That’s it for now! If anything doesn’t make sense just let me know.

Very best and have a wonderful Easter holiday.

Cathy.

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.