The focus group I facilitated was smaller than I had planned. Main reason was that it was December and many people in my team were taking leave at that time. It was similar case in the beginning of January. I decided to have the group on in the week that I could talk with two the most experienced members of my team.
I used the prompts that I established when planning my focus group (see this blog post), however, the way the conversation went meant that I did not managed to ask all the questions I wanted. This was something I knew that could happen, as I wanted at least a part of the group to be unstructured, so I could tap into the creative side of my team. What I did not plan for, was the group to focus on mostly one aspect of my research, which was what kind of sessions and themes we can run to improve our Information Literacy teaching. It was great that I got lots of ideas from my team that can definitely help to answer my research question, however, I feel we got very excited about working on the sessions together and got a bit carried away in the conversation. On my part I think I lost my facilitator role and became a participant myself at some point, as I loved the way my colleagues approached the subject of teaching. I wanted to add to the conversation and you can see in the transcript that I talked a bit too much at times.
However, I am very pleased with some data I gathered and I think the group was successful in creating time and space for us to discuss the teaching part of our jobs. The timing of it could not be better, as our library space had just been renovated and we gained a teaching room. It is the first time we actually have the space that we can invite our students too. One of the participants said the following in the focus group:
“You’re doing this at an ideal time because this is the time now we’ve got the space and these are the sessions that we’ve all sort of been dreaming of being able to do. It’s amazing that you’re doing the PGcert and this is what you’re focusing on.” (Focus group transcript, 2023, p.8)
I am including the transcript of the focus group here. I chose to use the version with the highlights and comments I made when analysing the data. It will be deleted once I will finish the course, as it was established in the consent forms that the participants had signed.
Process of analysis
I based my analysis mostly on the Thematic analysis chapter of Matthews, B. and Ross, L. (2010) Research methods: a practical guide for the social sciences. Harlow: Longman, Pearson Education. pp.372-385. I found this book very accessible and the examples of the charts, tables and diagrams very useful.
I started with reading the transcript a few times. I was already familiar with it, because I listened to the recording of the session a number of times already when working on transcript. I did remove some unnecessary words that we all use in speech such us ‘like’, ‘you know. ‘yeah’. I have also removed all the names of my colleagues to keep the transcript anonymous.
When reading the transcript I started adding notes (sticky notes you can do in Adobe Acrobat, first all in the same colour, just my thoughts, then colour coding them and highlighting the relevant text accordingly to establish the set of initial themes. The effects of this you can see in the transcript version I included in this blog.
The following image shows the colour-coded themes and their reflection in the transcript. Starting with simple comments, all in yellow and then adding the colours and highlights.
The above allowed me to create a chart with the quotes and their initial interpretation and creating categories. I am publishing the PDF version of my Excel file here. You can see that some of the initial themes such as ‘themes for sessions’ are not in the chart – it is because they became a part of the larger themes (Green colour – sessions in this case)
The above chart can be expressed as the following diagram:
Overarching themes that came out from the focus group:
- Teaching IL needs to be accessible and inclusive to be effective.
- Students perspective is necessary for our teaching to be relevant to them.
- Library resources are very varied and we should include all of them in teaching.
- Library offer to teach IL and especially evaluation of resources needs to be known to academics and students.
The focus group has definitely answered how we can improve our teaching of resources and include students voices parts of the research question. My participants had shown great understanding of critical pedagogy and need of our students perspective. The suggestion of asking the students what topics they would be the most interested in is a great example of this understanding.
The experience and knowledge of the local situation has shone through too. It is evident in many parts of the transcript when the participants bring examples of different courses and how we could tailor our teaching of IL to make it relatable to all of the students. This thinking about inclusivity is visible when they talk about students coming from different parts of the world, embracing students who do not want to take active part in the sessions, using various formats of library material to cater to different needs the students may have.
I found the FG findings inspiring and I have already started to plan a session that would put them in practice. The diagram I created as a part of the analysis is something I constantly refer to when planning in order to remind myself of the wide range of methods and themes that were mentioned in the group.
In the group we touched upon the subject of our teaching often depending on what we are asked to do by the tutors, which can be restrictive. One of the solutions we discussed was focusing on the library teaching offer in the course committees. This will be implemented as soon as possible. We are working on a number of sessions at the moment and once they are ready we will be discussing the best way of promoting them. We need to take into account when is the best time for different kinds of sessions too. When teaching evaluation of information sources would benefit the students most.