flo’s pg cert blog

Action Research Project by Florence Meredith

Contents and links to pages:

35. Initial Action Research Project Ideas

36. Exploring Research Methods: Interviews

37. Exploring Research Methods: Art-based Action Research

38. Exploring Research Subjects: Procrastination

39. Ethical Action Plan: Draft 1

40. Tutorial Reflections: Shifting and Developing Research Ideas

41. Exploring Action Research Ethics

42. Ethical Action Plan: Tutor Feedback, Tutorial Feedback, Second Draft

43. Exploring Research Methods: Asking Questions – Interviews, Focus Groups, Questionnaires

44. Researching the Subject Matter: Climate Justice, Social Justice, and Sustainability in Costume Practice

45. Exploring Research Methods: Discussion with Saffie Pluck

46. Action Research Cycle Design and Schedule

47. Exploring Existing Research: Sustainable Practice Within Theatre and Costume Pedagogy in HE

48. Evaluating Existing Practices: What Are We Already Doing?

49. Intervention Designs: Initial Ideas

5o. Intervention Designs and Resources (links)

51. Focus Group: Planning and Documentation

52. Exploring Research Methods: Workshop Data Collection

53. Interview 1: Planning and Documentation (discarded data)

54. Exploring Data Processing and Interpretation

55. Focus Group: Data and Dissemination

56. Interview 2 : Planning and Documention (discarded data)

57. Workshops: Planning and Documentation

58. Interview 1 & 2: Discarding Data

59. Workshops: Data and Dissemination

60. Poster Display: Planning, Sourcing Additional Data Sets

61. Openly Accessible Costume Resources: Data and Dissemination

62. Comparing Data Sets: Active Interactions with with Resources

63. Findings and Reflections

64. Moving Forwards

65. Presentation Plan and Slides

66. Bibliography

67. How can we support students towards more sustainable costume realisation practices?

Alvesson, M (2011) Views on Interviews: A Skeptical Review. In: Interpreting Interviews. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. pp. 9-42 Available at: (Accessed 6 Oct 2024).

Ball, L. Christensen, B. and Halskov, K. (2021) ‘Sticky notes as a kind of design material: How sticky notes support design cognition and design collaboration’ in Design Studies, 76, pp. 1 – 31 Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142694X21000454 (Accessed 20 November 2024)

Banks, J (2009) ‘Gender Below-the-line: Defining feminist production studies’ in Banks M.J., Caldwell J.T. and Mayer V. (eds.) Production Studies: Cultural studies of media industries. New York: Routledge. pp. 87-98.

Beer, T (2021) Ecoscenography : An Introduction to Ecological Design for Performance, Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central (Accessed on: 24 October 2024)

Cleary, V (2024) Thinking through making: What kinds of learning take place when HE students engage with creative arts technicians?’ in Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1386/adch_00087_1 (Accessed on: 22 October 2024)

Curtis, B. and Curtis, C. (2011) In-Depth Interviewing – the Interactive Base. In: Social Research: A Practical Introduction. 55 City Road, London: SAGE Publications, Inc. pp. 27-54 Available at: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526435415 (Accessed: 06 December 2024)

Garrett, I (2021) ‘The Ethical Turn in Sustainable Technical Theatre Production Pedagogy’ in Theatre Topics 31 (2), pp. 179-186

Gray, C, & Malins, J (2007) ‘Interpreting the map: methods of evaluation and analysis’ in Visualizing Research : A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design. Taylor & Francis Group, Abingdon, Oxon. pp.1349 – 158. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. (Accessed: 05 December 2024)

Helm, M (2024) Fashion for the Earth: Beneath the Seams: The Human Toll of Fast Fashion. Available at: https://www.earthday.org/beneath-the-seams-the-human-toll-of-fast-fashion (Accessed 20 October 2024)

Irvine, A., Drew, P., and Sainsbury, R. (2013) ‘Am I not answering your questions properly?’ Clarification, adequacy and responsiveness in semi-structured telephone and face-to-face interviews in Qualitative Research, 13(1), pp. 87 – 106

Jean, M (2021) ‘The Tools at Hand’ in Survey Questions, SAGE Publications, pp. 48 – 75

Kara, H (2015) ‘Analysing Data’ in Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences : A Practical Guide‘, Policy Press, Bristol. pp.99 – 119. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. (Accessed: 18 September 2024)

Katy Downton (2024) ‘Putting the Theatre Green Book into practice: sustainability, pedagogy and the Conservatoire’ in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 15 (3), pp. 429-444

Pantouvaki, S., Fossheim, I. and Suurla, S. (2021) Thinking with costume and material: A critical approach to (new) costume ecologies, in Theatre and performance design, 7 (3-4), pp.199-219. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23322551.2021.2002056 (Accessed: 20 September 2024)

Renew Culture (2021) Theatre Green Book. Available at: https://theatregreenbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/TGB_v2.pdf (Accessed: 30 October 2024)

Shreya Rathi and Dr. Vishva Chaudhary (2024) “UNDERSTANDING THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PROCRASTINATION: CAUSES AND SOLUTIONS”, in International Journal of Linguistics Applied Psychology and Technology (IJLAPT) , 1(2(June), pp. 1–24. Available at: http://ijlapt.strjournals.com/index.php/ijlapt/article/view/45 (Accessed: 8 October 2024).

Taherdoost, H. (2022) ‘How to Conduct an Effective Interview; A Guide to Interview Design in Research Study’ in International Journal of Academic Research in Management, 11(1), pp. 39-51. Available at: https://elvedit.com/journals/IJARM/wp-content/uploads/How-to-Conduct-an-Effective-Interview-A-Guide-to-Interview-Design, (Accessed 4 November 2024)

Unspecified (2024) ‘Research participant information and consent’ [City University of London] Available at: https://www.city.ac.uk/research/support/integrity-and-ethics/guidance-and-resources/participants#:~:text=The%20consent%20form%20should%20include%20the%20following%20statements%3A&text=I%20understand%20that%20my%20participation,take%20part%20in%20this%20study (Accessed 24 October 2024)

Vaughn, S. Schumm, J, S. Sinagub, J. (2013) Focus Group Interviews in Education Phycology in Sage Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, Inc

Zezulka, K. (2024) ‘Sustainability in technical theatre pedagogy and practice’, in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 15(3), pp. 415–428

This week I was also approached and asked to:

• collaborate with a colleague on a community mending workshop/ darning

• have a conversation about an existing mending and fixing collective at UAL

• hold staff workshops at UAL by other, interested staff members

• discuss my being trained as a carbon literacy trainer, as part of carbon literacy being embedded into the curriculum, spanning my role as technician and AL.

The latter brought me to Document Preview – Climate Action Case study- Taking environmental action in our workshops.

Had I come across LEAF sooner, I would have contacted:

Laura Baker (Technical Co-ordinator at CSM)

Andreas Land (CSM Climate Advocate)

Findings – the headlines

Focus Group – Reported

• Students reported to prefer visual sustainable suppliers posters or displays that they can take photos of, over physical handouts or digital downloads of sustainable suppliers lists via Moodle.
• Students reported to lack of confidence in their own skills and abilities, which may prevent them from entering the space, and/or accessing technical support in sustainable costume realisation processes
• Students reported interest in and enthusiasm for practical sustainability skills workshops
• Students reported a lack of interested in visual poster displays of sustainable costume realisation processes

Poster Display of Sustainable Suppliers – Evidenced

• Students actively interacted with poster displays of sustainable suppliers more readily than physical handouts or digital downloads of sustainable suppliers lists via Moodle.

Workshops – Evidenced

• Student attendance/active interaction with sustainable practices workshops was poor
• Students who did attended the workshops expressed positive engagement with the content of the workshop, and sustainable costuming practices

Combined Findings

1. Students are more likely to engage with a sustainable suppliers poster or display than physical handouts or digital downloads of sustainable suppliers lists.
2. Students reported interest in and enthusiasm for practical sustainability skills workshops
3. Students who attended sustainable practices workshops expressed positive engagement with sustainable costuming practices
4. Students reported a lack of confidence in their own skills and abilities, which may prevent them from entering the space, and/or accessing technical support in sustainable costume realisation processes

Reflections

• The reported preferences of the students for a poster display of sustainable suppliers was evidenced in later data collection.

• Displaying the interactive poster, and collecting data on the provision of physcial handouts for a longer period – ideally a whole term, would have produced better quality data, which could have been collected cumulatively, and cross referenced with curricular activity.
• the students who stuck green dots of the interactive display poster are likely to have looked at the resource multiple times since first photographing it, but I have not collected data on this – nor have I collected data on the number of times a student has used a handout. This would be a useful next step.
• Very small resulting qualitative data sets
• Different workshops could be trialled at different time, on different days, at different points in the academic term. Different ways of advertising them (different wording, etc, use of images, placement of posters, could be trialled to improve engagement,
• Discarding of data
• Use of qualitative and quantitive data

In order to better contextualise the failure of the workshops, below I have compared the poster display interaction data to the workshop attendance data:

Active interaction with display poster: 8

Active interaction with workshops: 2

Visualisations of this data, isolated from the rest of the ‘data garden’:

Evaluation

The salient, and perhaps predictable data comparison shows that there were more active interactions with the poster display.

Analysis

These pieces of data are not really comparable, as there are to many differences between the ways in which they were executed, and the data was collected. The poster required less active action from students, less commitment, and less time thank the workshops, which were scheduled near the end of term, outside of university hours. The poster display was always available during open access hours (Monday to Friday, 10:00 – 17:00).

There is also an assumption here that each student that interacted with the poster stuck two stickers on it – one in answer to each question. However, it is entirely plausible that some students stuck multiple sticker on, or looked at it, took a photo, and didn’t use the stickers to record it. In this, the workshop data is more accurate and reliable.

However, there is a clear indication here that is worth reflecting on, which is to say, that the display poster is easier to access for students – always available, and does not require and planning.

Perhaps this can be taken forwards, and different times, days, and lengths of workshops could be trialled – ones that during university hours, and different point sin the academic term, and attendance data could be collected from these.

Poster Display Data

Shown below is a photo of the poster display at the end of the one week period of display (9th December to 13th December – the last week of the autumn term 2024), in J107 (the costume studio).

8 students interacted with the poster across one week, all of them, as far as is possible to tell, answering both parts of the display. The poster shows the interactions listed below:

1. Did you take a photo of this suppliers poster?: 8
2. What do you prefer?:

• Printed leaflets: 2
• Downloadable documents: 0
• Posters: 6

Digital Resources Traffic Data

Data on the traffic to the relevant costume technical moodle pages (Costume: Materials and Equipment Moodle page, which switched part way through the term to a Padlet) shows that across the Autumn term 2024 (30 September to 13th December), 48 visits were made by 19 viewers to these resources.

If we divide this by the number of weeks the data reflects (11), it can be compared to the data taken across one week at the end of term. More specific data on the week in question was not possible to access, although this would have been a more accurate comparison with the other two data sets.

19 viewers across 11 weeks = 1.7 users per week 

79 viewers across 11 weeks = 7.1 views per week 

It is perhaps best to use the number of ‘users’ here, on the assumption that the viewing of a resource would happen once. Similarly, the students who stuck green dots of the interactive display poster are likely to have looked at the resource multiple times since first photographing it, but I have not collected data on this – nor have I collected data on the number of times a student has used a handout. This would be a useful next step.

Physical Handout Data

No Costume technicians, including myself, reported handing out any suppliers lists during this period of time, including sustainable suppliers.

Handouts provided: 0

Evaluation

I will use a similar visualisation as I did for my focus group to compare this data, isolating the qualitative element that data was collected on (active engagement). I rounded the numbers to whole numbers to simplify the visualiation:

Analysis

However, when taken in conjunction with the qualitative data from my focus group, the conclusion here is clear – that the primary way of encouraging students to utilise sustainable resources, and consequently move towards more sustainable practices, is to create things to interact with in the space, rather than hand-outs, or downloadable documents.

Realising the Resource

The results of the focus group gleaned that the resource would need to be photograph friendly. So, I kept the same colour coding system, and populated each area with real information (charity shops in north, north east, east, south east, south and south west London, that are located close together). I displayed this on the wall, as large as was practically possible, given the stress the students placed on this feature.

Although the walls of the studio are populated with safety signage, costume images, and equipment manuals, this was the first time I had created a visual display of a learning resource I have designed for this space.

Data Collection Method

Since the initial designing of the poster display, I had been considering ways to collect the data on it’s use. I was inspired by something I saw in passing at CSM, pictured below:

I decided to utilise this interactive, participatory, anonymous data collection method within the costume studio, on a blank wall, below the display:

In direct response to the feedback from student participants, who reported during a focus group that they would take a photo, I have asked the question ‘did you take a photo of this suppliers poster?’.

Data from the focus group showed that there is a distinction between the different forms this resource could take, to in order to gain further insight into this, I also asked the question, what do you prefer?’ with three options; printed leaflets, downloadable documents, or posters – these being the three possible forms of this map explored in the focus group. Of course, it must be acknowledged that some students may have looked at it and taken a photo, but not interacted with it.

I placed a participant information sheet alongside this, linked here, to inform participants of the project and what their involvement means:

Information Sheet – Poster.docx

I displayed this poster for one week, from the 9th December to 13th December – the last week of the autumn term 2024. Ideally, this would have spanned a much longer period of time.

Below is an image of the poster in situ:

Data Integration

Knowing that this data would be almost meaningless without some other data to contextualise or compare it to, I sought additional data sets. So, also following the topics discussed in the focus group, I contacted the CSM technical moodle manager to ask for data on ‘digital footfall’ of our equivalent online resources, where ‘downloadable documents’ can be found of suppliers lists, including sustainable suppliers. I also used observation to collect data on the number of ‘handouts’ given out to students that week, in the form of a tally.

By comparing the data sets for these different types of openly accessible resource, I should be able to glean some understanding of how useful this kind of resource might be in engaging students in more sustainable costume practices through “mixed-methods analysis” (Kara, 2015) by comparing the ‘downloadable documents’ data, and ‘handouts’ data to my interactive poster data.

However, it must be noted that the comparison and integration of these sets of data is flawed, in that one data set spans a much longer period than the other two, making their comparison questionable. The digital footfall can only be taken over a term as a whole – when students accessed it is unknown within this long period.

Ideally, all three sets of data would span the whole term. This would produce much more accurate, reliable data. However, within the limitations of this action research project, I will use what I have to glean what I can.

References

Kara, H (2015) ‘Analysing Data’ in Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences : A Practical Guide‘, Policy Press, Bristol. pp.99 – 119. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [05 December 2024].

With no data to work with from workshop one, I only have workshop two’s data to use (other than the lack of attendance itself). The validity of this data could be called into question, as there were only two participants in attendance at the second workshop. However, useful information for future research be drawn from the lack of participants n this research, and some speculations could be made in it’s analysis.

Filtering the Data: Sieves

I used the same type of coding for this part of the research cycle, eventually equating different elements of the garden analogy to this data set. However, as this is now not just speculative, it is in response to the intervention itself, I am going to add additional codes, and note the number of student interactions with this intervention (in this case, attendance):

• Additional: Engagement with concepts of sustainable practice – Green
• Additional: Student interaction (numerical data)
• Positive remark – Yellow
• Negative remark – Pink
• Idea or suggestion – Blue
• Underlying issues or challenges – Grey

Resulting coded data

Synthesising the Data: Spectacles

I have then visualised this, below, using image and text together. The ground represents the underlying understanding of sustainable practices (underlying issues) relating to question 3, The sun represents the positive responses towards the intervention, the air-bourne pollutants represent the negative responses (to questions 4, 5, and 6). The plants represent the student population. A ‘healthy’ environment will have plenty of sunshine, no pollutants, and plenty of rainclouds to make rain from, and develop the idea further.

I have created a key, below, which will allow me to use my data to reveal an overall ‘garden’ landscape of responses to each intervention design, in order to evaluate and disseminate it. I will be able to utilise this design to synthesise and combine data revealing students’ actual engagement with these interventions later on.

FLOWERS (Numerical)

An additional data image, these represent students’ active interaction with an intervention

LEAVES (Green)

An additional data image, these represent student’s positive engagement with an intervention

SUN (yellow)

The sun represents positive responses. Each ray equates to one positive student response.

POLLUTING PARTICLES (Pink)

The polluting particles represent negative responses or barriers to the intervention designs.

SLUGS (Grey)

These represent responses which indicate underlying issues which may create barriers to students engagement with an intervention. They are part of the ecosystem, but must be addressed and managed in order to students to flourish towards sustainable practices.

CLOUDS (Blue)

These represent ideas or suggestions generated by the students, which could be used to further develop the intervention design.

A ‘healthy’ environment will have plenty of sunshine rays and clouds, no pollutants, plenty of flowers and leaves, and few or no slugs.

Evaluation

Here are the intervention data gardens, below:

Salient Data

Absence of Data

Synthesis of Themes

• This intervention may be deemed entirely as unsuccessful in meeting its aims, as attendance was so low. Finding ways to improve attendance, or investigating why students do not attend could be a next step, and/or improving the design of this intervention.
• Attendees began to engage in and connect with sustainable practices within workshop two
• Attendees were interested in more workshops
• Response to the workshop was very positive

References

I initially planned to use interviews within my research, in addition to the focus group, workshops, and interactive poster. However, this resulted in an overwhelming amount of data to process. Therefore, part way through the project, at the evaluation stage, I decided to disregard the data.

Of all the data I had collected, these made the most sense to disregard. Although interviews provide rich qualitative data my question, my question focusses on student behaviour, so the data collected from students and their behaviour is more pertinent. It could be that in another round of action research, this data could be presented to staff to reflect on, as co-collaborators rather than participants. The re-design of micro interventions could then also be done collaboratively, and further data collected on student interactions and enagagment.

Of course I cannot avoid the fact that I have already experienced those interviews, and they surely must have in some way, affected my thinking. However, both interviews were with close colleagues, with whom I already regularly discuss the issues at play. None of this information was knew, but it would have provided another dataset to compare the student’s views, interactions and engagement to.