Many of the questions developed for the questionnaire were developed from the work on Rochon, 2022 and Gundala, Singh and Cochran, 2018. Both pieces of research involved staff and student participation from those involved in experiential live brief projects within a higher education setting. Gundala et al., was a project more focused on staff perspectives which supported the development of my interview questions.  

There was work to be done in selecting my participants and I began this by reaching out to the Business and Innovation team at LCF as I had a close connection there. My contact was asked to contact all staff who have completed an SSP since January 2022 to ask whether they would like to be include in the interview sample for my ARP. The idea was that a selection of 5-8 course or unit leaders from London College of Fashion will be purposively sampled based on the response to the initial enquiry email and the following selection criteria. The staff participation selection criteria which was sent to the B&I team at LCF was based on the following criteria to ensure that the most relevant members of staff were recruited:  

  1. Has your course or unit carried out an SSP since January 2022?  
  1. Did your students sign a contract to agree to their involvement in the SSP?  
  1. Did this SSP contract involve assigning or licensing student intellectual property?  

Once I had sent this email to the B&I team I set about brainstorming some interview questions for staff which was mostly based on the research and reading I was doing to develop my literature review for the project. You can see an outline of my initial Miro board brainstorm in Figure 1:  

Figure 1: A screenshot from my ARP Miro board showing the brainstorm for interview questions 

Once I’d completed an initial draft I worked on organising these questions into a more specific order and I settled on thinking about before, during and after going through the process of organising and running an SSP. This seemed like a logical approach that would work for a staff member reflecting on their project and is the same approach used by Gundala et al in their staff facing project (2018). Once I had worked through these questions and organising them into an order I cut out some of the questions that were less relevant or slightly repetitive as I didn’t have a huge amount of time to gather data from the interviews. In the screenshot in Figure 2 I have shown a developed order and cut down version of the interview framework.  

Figure 2: A screenshot from my ARP development Miro board showing a more organised structure for the interview questions with the cut questions shown with red highlight.  

Reference list:

  • Alvesson, M. (2012) Views on Interviews: A Skeptical review. In Interpreting Interviews. London: Sage. 
  • Bradbury, H. (ed.) (2015) The SAGE handbook of action research [electronic resource], Los Angeles: SAGE.  
  • Gundala, R. R., Singh, M. and Cochran, T. K. (2018) ‘Perceptions of Integrated Experiential Learning of Graduate Marketing Students’, Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 18(2), pp. 74–89. 
  • Rochon, R. (2022) Live brief projects in higher education: a contextualised examination and staff perceptions of experiential learning. Doctoral thesis, Buckinghamshire New University. Available at: https://bucks.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/18506/ (Accessed on 3rd January 2022).