I'm still in a not good limbo on writing methodology. I took a look at Theo's master thesis and realised I do not really need to write I am researching from a humanistic perspective, adopting feminist perspectives and methodology... scaffoldings Brenda said are important but not necessarily needed to be seen.
Tracey's words were "discuss more of the methodological approaches as well as methods" as a "starting point".
Theo totally subsumed the methods into the literature review where the literature review goes into the research aims, conceptual framework and methodology (the last one was only 1 page long??).
Okay, how do I practically put all these metaphors into actual writing practices?
Reading conceptual themes from WGSG book 1997, I think I'm reading it a second time since my feminist geography module from eons ago.
Decided to rephrase Willis to get some kick start.
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I seriously considered a number of factors when deciding on my research method. I am a part time student, full time teacher, limited time and funding (I pay for my own photocopying and computers etc) but with access to a good resource of students aka young people who are very capable of doing this research with me, especially some of the Geography major students in my school. I mean, they can do interviews and are sensitive to the ways of interviewing, not judging their interviewees openly. They possess the positionality to get information that matters and their friends are usually more at ease responding to them. This was why I decided to adopt a youth-to-youth interviewing strategy as I was running out of time to put into getting a big pool of youths for interviews. Of course, I worked with my three wonderful assistants who were very interested to look at the research and earn some holiday dollars while doing this. The main student roped in the rest, but they indicated that it made them think a lot about this and they wanted to be interviewed too, which I think I did while getting the feedback from them, getting to know some of their frustrations at hearing certain responses and that they felt some teenagers really don't care about citizenship much. There are of course some who care a lot, and some did not consider it and sat on the fence..
Conducting a survey gives me a big picture fast enough and it gave me a big picture view of things. Also, some pre-determined variables were important - like loyalty, which has pre-existing data with MOE, which I get to see in my official capacity as a teacher co-ordinating National Education (NE) programs but I'm not sure if I can make reference to them as it is "confidential" and "restricted" documents. How do I work around this?
Participation observation is something I practically do everyday, where I see the reactions of my colleagues, teachers from MOE, hear about the difficulties teachers face when implementing NE, how they are running out of creative juices as students tend to not buy into "for the sake of carrying it out" kind of programs. This method is inherently my own lived experience. I am living it. So, how do I document this as method? Hmm... There must be some readings somewhere that can help me with this.
Frankly, my positionality is giving me a big headache. Sometimes, it works for me, sometimes it doesn't.
Subject teacher, part time master student, NE Co-ordinator, student leadership teacher, research projects teacher, wife, boarding advisor, church youth group leader, daughter to frail parents (my dad almost died in the midst of my coursework in 2007), aunt.
I think I should interview my niece. Haahaa. She's 17-18 now. Cool. I think I shall just be honest and say this is convenience sampling, aka snowballing.
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