Learning Dairy entry 5 – Campus session 4

30th March 2010

I am so glad I was able to attend this campus session as I could not attend the last two. The campus session was used to explain and learn more about data analysis and ethic, two things I was a bit unsure about. From the slide shows and talks giving by Peter, Rosemary and Paula my understanding of these was made clearer, I decided to research into ethics more and found some very clear definitions and examples of good and bad ethics. Just Google ‘research ethics’ to find academic literature, there is hundreds of papers and websites – it really helped me to connect and think about ethics within my research project.

My thoughts of where I am in the process is that I feel a bit behind, I think I have neglected the guidance of deadlines e.g. by week 6 complete activity 7 and publish it on my blog. I started to feel at the begin of this week (week 7) my project was starting spin out of control as in I had not organised myself correctly and felt that time was not on my side. But through this session I was able to make an order of things I needed to do and fairly quickly;

• To design a survey on SurveyMonkey that I can test and analyze results – practice my data analysis. Cleaning, Summarising and Interpreting data.
• To write a letter to my place of work to get the ‘go ahead’ for my project.
• To write a document to present to research participants, along with any research instrument. Explaining the purpose of the research and about the project and myself, stating any confidential and privacy protection.
• To start my project draft proposal using Paula’s slideshow and pages 12 and 56 in the handbook for structuring my project proposal.

Chickenshed group learning set

Over the past couple of weeks myself and other members of chickenshed who is also on the work based learning course have arranged meetings and working times to work through the booklet and discuss any quires or concerns. From this learning set I have been able to narrow down on some research questions, some of these are;

• Can Inclusive theatre broaden a young person’s perceptions of sexual awareness?
• Should students have a say in sex education to how and what they are taught?
• Is theatre in education a good device to teach sexual awareness?
• Is it a good idea to explore young people’s experiences using workshops to create a piece of theatre to use within a T.I.E setting?
• Will inclusive theatre in education help explore and make young people aware of sexual awareness?
• Can developing a new area within Chickenshed’s outreach programme address sexual issues which are accessible to all young people in a T.I.E environment.
• Developing a new outreach programme within Chickenshed to address and educate young people on sexual awareness through an inclusive theatre performance workshop.
• Can T.I.E educate and help explore sexual awareness through an inclusive method?

I’m still not sure of what yet to defiantly choose as I feel that maybe I should develop more of a statement or hypothesis. I would appreciate any ideas or suggestions. I am defiantly in a much better place within my project now.
Working through the booklet at home made me realise that how some of the questions are written make it hard for me to understand or spark interest within the answers. So I rewrote the questions which freed up my head to be creative. I then brought these to the learning set which I received good fed back to how it helped people.

Literature

I keep finding pointless literature that does not really mean a lot to my project. I have been looking into Theatre in Education, Sex Education and Outreach. I know this will happen but it is just so frustrating and time consuming. I need to stay positive and keep searching hard.

My aims for this next week

• Find relevant literature
• Chose a research instrument design by professionals and critique it - Write up activity 7 – 500 words
• Write 500 words on Ethical research issues that may arise when conducting my project, e.g. working with teenagers.
• Analyse the data from my test survey
• Structure a pilot interview and survey which I will test on a teacher and a teenager within the age range I am going to research
• To keep on developing my draft proposal