Interviews where I'm at.....

I have just finished conducting my interviews with both of my focus groups cast members and teachers. As advised by Adesola due to limited time I arranged a couple of lengthier interviews with teachers in advance. This approach was to ensure I could collect sufficient and valuable data, if I hadn't booked a slot prior to our theatre companies visit it would have proved difficult with the teachers time constraints. I was lucky enough to obtain an interview with a teacher that gave up an hour of her own time to speak to me and help me answer my burning questions, she was keen to express her thoughts and gave me so much important material regarding the National Curriculum and it's expectations in conjunction with Drama and the Arts. I learnt a great deal on the preparation the school goes through prior to a companies visit, and the type of follow up work the children do post performance. I was particularly interested in how the drama cross references to other academic subjects such as History, English Literature, Art and Music. Another teacher I interviewed gave me some really useful insights to the Drama Level Descriptors and Drama objectives taken from literacy framework. I will be reviewing and analysing all the material I have been given and use the data to aid my inquiry. When interviewing my other cast members I asked questions about what could be developed and improved upon when taking a show to a school and whether they thought it is an important part of education incorporating theatre into learning and a number of other focused questions. Overall I'm really happy with the response I've had from the interviewees and thankful for their eagerness to participate. I'm feeling positive and excited to move forward with the inquiry. I feel I am already developing a better sense of how my inquiry links to my existing work and fits into the next steps in my chosen career path.
  

Module 3 Campus session 1st March

On attending the campus session for module 3 I had managed to gather my thoughts in order of where to move forward in the module, and what time scale I had to undertake to ensure all parts were completed in time for the May submission. Paula ran the session and we had a very useful and in depth discussion about where I currently was in the process, how my inquiry related to my inquiry plan, deadlines for drafts and the importance of blogging and receiving feedback from my peers about my inquiry process.
  
We then went on to an exercise writing down keywords of our inquiry in bold on a large piece of paper, this exercise was valuable as it forced us to notice the important words and put down our thoughts in our head down onto paper which sometimes proves a difficult thing to connect. After we had completed the keyword exercise we presented our inquiry title to the other members of the course and spoke about the focus groups and our professional networks, for example Middlesex university would be a significant one for all of us. This part of the morning really help me as I felt by explaining and answering questions on your own inquiry, made it easier for you yourself to fully understand and maybe go away and tweak things that weren't made so clear for others.
  
In the final hour we got to grips with the understanding of the Professional Artefact and went on to explore possible Artefacts such as power points, videos,  posters, books and many more. The Artefact is a product that relates to what you have found from doing your inquiry. To help us decide on the Artefact that would be most suited to our inquiry we answered a few important questions such as:

• Who will be taking part in the Inquiry?
• Who will the Artefact be aimed at and why?
• Who will it benefit most?
• How will you share or demonstrate your Artefact?
• What might you show that can benefit your career progression and make others aware and give a better understanding of what you do in your professional practise?

We finished off the campus session by discussing the draft/writing up process about structuring what we have found out in our inquiry and the use of critical thinking. I left the campus session feeling excited and clearer about moving forward in module 3, the campus session was a positive experience all round!