Thoughts and update

Sometimes its good just to stop, collect your thoughts and review where you've been and where you're going next. Over the last couple of days I've been going back through the module handbook and the reader. I found this extremely helpful as it allows you to re-group and get back to the facts of what is needed and expected from your inquiry. I find that I tend to keep the mill ticking behind the scenes, but one of the main objectives of the course is to share. Share your learning process, discoveries, highs and lows of your inquiry. Fact: I don't blog or interact via my SIG enough. Though blogging is entirely off my own back SIG interaction only works if everyone does it! So lets aim to share and discover as much as we can over the next few weeks. I always try and keep up with other blogs, and comment where I feel I have knowledge to add, and am really interested to hear where everyones at with their inquiry, so keep blogging!! 

Something I've discovered is people are more willing to help than you might realise. When asked the question "So what have you been up to?" something I'm always keen to share is my BAPP studies and more specifically my topic of inquiry. This has often lead to interesting discussions, and also an enthusiastic offer to help. I'm not simply talking of professional peers, that for me are an integral part of my inquiry. For example I got into my BAPP discussion with my mums boss. This then lead to a package of lent books specifically on practitioner research and research projects. She had recently gained a degree through part time study in which she had to do a research project. She understood the style of study I was undertaking and has lent me a number of books she found most helpful when undertaking her inquiry. One book that has help immensely is by Judith Bell 'Doing Your Research Project' this book offers pointers on every stage of practitioner research including planning, ethics, data collecting, inquiry tools, interpreting evidence and writing it up. It’s a book that I’ve referred to many times and is specifically written for first-time researchers. 

My inquiry: In the early stages of my inquiry I was worried as from my written schedule I was very behind. Certain aspects were on track- diaries and literature, but I’d hit a bit of a bump with my interviews. In my plan I had hoped to interview four separate groups. A) Unemployed professionals, B) employed professionals, C) teachers who are still have professional performance jobs and D) teachers who have stopped working in the performance industry. Our industry changes so quickly and something, looking back, that I should have done is look at the contracts of group B- Employed professionals. Though employed at the time of my Inquiry plan, by the time of conducting my interview many had changed from employed to unemployed within the performance industry. This meant that I’ve had a lot more data from group A and hardly any from group B. For this reason I decided to cut group B and focus on group A. I also decided to combine groups C and D. As the majority of knowledge from both groups is looking back and not forward on their experience of the industry I decided it would be more helpful to review them one group. Though not quite on schedule with the interviews, all are now scheduled and will be finished by the end of next week. Because of the interviews being behind it’s meant that I’ve also had to push the focus group back. Though not ideal I’m continuing with literature research and the information I’m collecting from that combined with my interviews will only strengthen the purpose of my focus group. All in all it simply means that I have less time to actually write up my inquiry, for this reason I’ve written a stricter, more detailed plan for the last few weeks of my inquiry. 

So all in all things are starting to come together as I move through the analytical process. Lots to do, but have a clear direction on where things are going, and how to achieve them!