What I have learnt and how I recorded it – guide to my blog and ARP Unit journey
I start with the fact that this is the first time I have been working on an action research project (ARP).
I started by reading Action research by Patrick J. M. Costello to familiarise myself with the term ARP. The words such as observe, understand, reflect, evaluate and change were the most used in describing the process of ARP. Learning about what it means and that it is a never-ending, cyclic process that aims to improve educational practice was very inspiring. This book has also given me a starting point regarding my action plan.
I learnt a lot from reading about my research topic. I started with a more general Information Literacy (IL) subject and then once I narrowed down my research question, I moved onto learning about Critical (CIL) and Sustainable (SIL) Information Literacies. I recorded my journey in the series of blogs and documents available under Readings on my topic category.
To sum up, I mention only a few, most important findings here. First, IL can support social justice and critical pedagogy implementation. (Kurbanoğlu, Boustany, 2014; Shigwan, 2014). Secondly, academic students can struggle with identifying sources of information and their evaluation. (Faix, 2014), and that as librarians we have a role to play in teaching IL and critical thinking about resources. (Reale,2012)
Then, I needed to learn about research methods and chose techniques I wanted to use for my project. This was a long process and I think this was the part of the ARP project I spent the most time on. I found our workshops and tutorials very helpful, but I think the sheer amount of literature available on this subject could be overwhelming. I dealt with it by creating a Padlet with the resources I found most useful when researching the methods, and that way my reading felt more organised. Again, I recorded my readings and learning process in this blog, and it is available under the Research methods category. This is the biggest category in my ARP blog and it contains readings, reflection and actions I have taken during this project. It ahs blogs on designing the questionnaire and focus group, ways they both went and process of data analysis too.
I found the following books the most helpful in terms of finding the right research techniques and data analysis:
Bell, J. and Waters, S. (2018) Doing your research project: a guide for first-time researchers. London, England, New York, New York: McGraw-Hill Education.
Matthews, B., Ross, L. (2010) Research methods: a practical guide for the social sciences. Harlow: Longman, Pearson Education.
Both have a clean and accessible layout with lots of visual aids such as checklists, tables, charts and diagrams. I learnt about the questionnaire and focus group planning, design and data analysis mostly by coming back to these two positions every time I felt stuck or unsure of what comes next.
I decided to use thematic analysis, as it allowed me to analyse qualitative data that I gathered though the open questions in the questionnaire and the focus group conversation with the participants.
I learnt about different techniques of thematic analysis and data presentation and tried to use most of them. I used wordclouds, tables, charts and diagrams to present and interpret my data. The results of my work on data analysis are also recorded in the Research methods category of the blog.
Both, my secondary and primary research brought me answers to my research question.
I found out that as librarians we need to do more sessions on information sources, we need to keep on top of the changes happening to ways the research is carried out and what kind of resources formats are most used. Through my focus group I got lots of practical solutions to how make our teaching of resources better and how to include our students’ voices in it. Both, reading about critical information literacy and discussing it with my colleagues convinced me that this is one of the most important aspects of my professional role. This ARP provided me with tools I cannot wait to use in practice. I feel better equipped to run sessions using our Wimbledon library resources and teaching students to think critically about the information sources.