It was really great to hear everyone’s ideas and where they were going with their action research. I found it really inspiring. The variety of subjects and approaches to them were great insights. I think sometimes you can get a bit of tunnel vision with what you are doing, because you don’t often get to see what goes on in other departments. In my group there are topics around care and slowing down practice, and how ‘digital immigrants’ learn digital skills.

I had many questions about moving forward and some things were cleared up for me.

I can be the moderator of the focus group if I do know the students, I will just need to be clear about my positionality and make explicit my practitioner/researcher role.

It is ok to use incentives- a £10 voucher is the norm for the university.

I need to be clear about the elicitation of my methods. What am I doing and why am I doing it? What do I want to find out? I want to understand different experiences of a topic, so its about finding out the most suitable way for me to do that and the reasons why its the most suitable. Its still a bit of a jumble at the moment I can see benefits of different ways…am I biting off more than I can chew? Its hard to focus such a big topic down.

I realised that if I asking should technicians be involved in the marking process- I need to be clear about what that involvement may look like. This is stumping me a bit though because I also want to know what other people might think technical involvement in the marking process might look like, and if I define what I think it might look like will that steer the process too much?

One of my colleagues talked about using a scale to chart where people think they sit on it. Maybe I could create an involvement scale in a more general way. I’m interested in knowing what technicians feel they could bring to the process and what they would be comfortable doing.

I am also interested in the idea of transparency as I think there is a lack of it between technicians and academics because of the hierarchy and the separate way the departments are run. I was thinking that if I do create separate questionnaires for both techs and academics that they would have access to both, so they could see what both parties were being asked.

I asked about relevant material around marking as there’s so much out there and I have spent a lot of time looking for articles that speak to what I’m thinking but not finding much. Vikki suggested un-grading which I will look into.

Post Session Research

https://www.jessestommel.com/ungrading-an-faq/

http://www.susanblum.com/blog/ungrading

https://www.seanmichaelmorris.com/when-we-talk-about-grading-we-are-talking-about-people/