Module Two: Critical Reflection on Professional Practitioner Inquiry

Critical Reflection on Professional Practitioner Inquiry

Developed Professional Questions:

The journey to finding a line of inquiry that checks all of the boxes on my list has certainly been challenging one, with many twists and turns along the way.  My initial thoughts led me towards trying to simply gel together the two key areas of my career over the years; Performing Arts and Teaching.  This led me to my initial question, ‘Is there a core educational need for Performing Arts based subjects within the National Curriculum Framework’? However, after a long discussion with my lecturer, I began to realise that this area was too broad and would lead me into exploring cultural and social theories, which I did not feel would be of great interest to me (see ‘comments’ section in appendix A). 

As government is highly influential upon the National Curriculum, I also created a ‘Delicious’ profile (see appendix B) and collected several Education and/or Government related articles using both this platform and my SIG (see appendix C), a ‘Google Community’ that I created.

During this time, I was also in contact with the Head of a Secondary school Performing Arts department in Derby.  Conversation with her not only sparked new ideas for inquiry topics, but also led me to thinking about the need to create an appropriate title that would be of sufficient subject matter, in order to make me a suitable candidate for a PGCE in Drama course, in order to gain QTS as I wish, upon completion of the BAPP degree (see appendix D).

After liaising with colleagues within my workplace and peers involved in my SIG, I found new clarity and direction for my inquiry; Drama to Inform Emotional Literacy and Learning to Learn (a working title), which checked all my boxes.

Ethical Considerations:

Although I was able to understand the principles of ethics and explore the current ethical considerations/literature guidelines within my workplace (see appendix E and appendix F), before I had a working inquiry title, I was unable to apply these theories in practice and in turn, to plan for the inquiry project itself.  Once I had clarity on the inquiry area however, it then took a conversation with my lecturer to understand how ethical implications need to be thought of in the abstract when planning research; not all ethical considerations for every inquiry situation are in the handbook (see appendix G).

Liaising with my SIG also helped to bring forward additional ethical implications and by learning where other people were running into problems (see ‘comments’ section in appendix H), I learnt where I too, could potentially fall down when conducting my own research.

Evaluation of Tools:

Due to an overly busy schedule, I was only able to conduct one pilot telephone interview with one of the members of my SIG (Sinead Mcmenemy).   We also discussed afterwards how this tool would benefit both of our inquiries, especially the semi-structured questioning format.

Being at work so much had its own benefits however, as it allowed me the opportunity to discuss my thoughts on the ideas in the handbook, as to which tools would best suit this inquiry with two of my colleagues, who have also been involved in conducting their own practitioner research.  They agreed with my thoughts and also gave me ideas on how best to approach the ethical side of the research for example, helping me change questions to make them non biased or open ended to allow for the best data collection (see appendix I).

Conclusion:

I feel Module Two has allowed me the opportunity to explore in detail where my interests lie and to gain clarity on these areas of interest, whilst affording me the time frame in which to begin developing these ideas in preparation for the final Module.