TEL 780: Case Study Research Topic 4
Response 4-1:
The documentation I plan to incorporate into my study will be the design artifacts that emerge from the students’ Culminating Learning Demonstrations (CLD). In the final two weeks of the EDA 634 course I plan to conduct my study in in, students complete two CLD, which ask them to articulate their imagination of schools as if they could be otherwise, and then to find ways to incorporate that imagining within their existing parameters. Thus, the documents I would collect would include their sketches, notes, and final articulations for each of the CLD. I have chosen these documents because they are at the heart of the case study action research, and these articulations from the students will express their sense of imagination and transformative leadership, as well as the possibilities for their designs. I anticipate that these will provide an excellent source of triangulation with my interviews of the students, as well as my classroom observations.
Response 4-2
I plan to conduct semi-structured interviews with cohort member participants as a primary research method to address all three research questions. I also plan to conduct observations in this case study as another primary method of data collection to address all three research questions in the study, as well as the classroom documents and artifacts that cohort students produce from across the two semesters, including the LFL innovation programming, as well as my own planning documents in constructing the LFL programming itself.
I plan to triangulate these sources using a combination of analytic memoing and rounds of focused and axial coding. I will also continue to conduct reflection journaling during my data analysis process, and I would like to have participants support my data validity with member checking. This triangulation will be important, because it will help strengthen the validity of my findings, as well as reduce my likelihood of introducing researcher bias into my analysis.
Response 4-3:
I will construct my case study database in two primary forms. First, I will plan to use the existing Google Drive folder and file structure that I have established throughout the duration of my doctoral study. I will create a specific case study database subfolder, with subsequent subfolders for each data type – observation notes, student documents, my research journal, and interview transcripts. I will maintain a similar file naming convention that I have honed over the years, and I am reasonably confident that this will work well for my action research purposes.
With respect to a computer assisted transcription and coding database, I have not yet decided how I will approach that issue. I have toyed with several programs, and the one I like the most is called Dedoose. I may revisit that over the summer to become more familiar with it and its operations. At this point, the database portion is the one I’m least confident in.
