Everything has been progressing well with my research and it’s been great to have regular touch points with my group for tutorials. Our final tutorial of the term was with Tim Stephens who has been fantastic at providing thorough and actionable feedback throughout my PgCert experience. Tim listened to my presentation of my findings so far (this was limited even in early December!) and one of the points that he mentioned was to do with being an insider in the institution that you are researching in. It was an interesting point following a previous session about insider and outsider research on a Wednesday afternoon last term. 

This comment derived from my mentioning of the struggle to get staff involved in my interviews as they were unsure about sharing their experiences re. the difficulties of SSPs. Most of the staff I approach declined the interview either due to lack of time or that they were unsure about sharing, I can only presume that this was due to the fact they felt like they were doing something wrong with their current SSP process?  

So this led me to look back at the purpose and approach of action research and made me think back to the great session that we’d had from Dr Duna Sabri on researching in your own institution. Much of the session’s discussion focused on why or why not research at your own institution. In the breakout room that I attended we talked about some of the issues which included – lack of neutrality, issues surrounding relationships, social connections and job limitations as some of the issues with researching your own institution. When exploring the impact that this has on my own work I looked the the benefits of being an insider which included an understanding of language and norms (Brannick and Coghlan, 2007) and participants being more confident in the researchers ability to represent their story which would make them more willing to share, providing richer data (Berger, 2013).

I also looked back at McAteer’s approach to ‘objectivity’ within action research which featured heavily with her Action Research in Education book. I was drawn to the concept of ‘declaring your hand’ which was introduced in McAteer’s writing from Crotty (1998) and the use of a constructionist view of knowledge that is adopted by a practitioner-researcher. I thought that the idea that one cannot lose the ‘self’ within their action research and what impact this has on the context. Put simply by Cain (2011) who ‘talks of the importance of the particular way in which teachers are positioned in the classroom affects their research methods’ (McAteer).

I feel that the main draw back that I was tackling was struggling with my role as a team member within the IP Education team that works closely with the Business and Innovation team and my role as a researcher. And it was perhaps this that was inhibiting my participants to get involved as discussed in Brannick and Coghlan, 2007 and Corbin, Dwyer and Buckle, 2009).

It forced me to consider what my perspective was within this piece of research, and I wrote the following as a reflection so far: 

  • My background = Working as both an IP Educator for UAL and an Associate Lecturer for LCF.  
  • My experience = I have a background in law specifically intellectual property as well as lots of experience working with students and early stage designers in fashion who have recently graduated.  
  • My perspective = After hearing more about the examples of current SSPs at LCF I was drawn to exploring more about how we could support students and ensuring that they were fairly represented and valued.  
  • My drive = Much of the language surrounding SSP focuses on ease of administration and reducing the time it takes to organising SSPs which has meant that there are many examples where students and their work are not being fairly valued. 

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