Narrowing Down the Data

When I first opened the data folder that Adam Howard shared with our class, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I knew I was going to be researching the Croft School in Chile: an extremely elite school that I had been told accepts no applications from prospective students without a connection to the school and which avoids all forms of publicity despite its prominence as one of the top private schools in Chile. Honestly, I was terrified; having just declared the Educational Studies major, I had never read data before, so I had no idea what to look for, how to find themes across interviews, or — most regrettably, I would soon find — how much time to give myself to read them. Adam gave us almost two weeks to go through all of our country’s interview transcripts. As a fairly average college student, I first opened the folder with about five days left, read one interview (which took like three hours), and resolved that I was in for one long weekend.

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And I wasn’t wrong: I got through all of the data successfully having gained some degree of understanding about the students and teachers. That said, (and I’m writing this a week after finishing this first reading) my brain is toast. It’s not that the interviews were boring, or that I’m not excited for this project (because I really am, it’s the first time I’ve done actual work with data of this caliber before), but OMG is there a lot of data. Last year I worked with Herring Gut Learning Center in another one of Adam’s classes, and those interviews were nothing compared to this. I guess I just need to learn how to budget my time better, especially if I’m looking at pursuing a career doing something like this.

The saving grace of my data-infused weekend from hell was that finding a theme in the mountain of transcripts was easier than expected. In these interviews everything was laid out in perfect order, so when going through my notes I found it easy to pick out specific themes. Ultimately, the Croft Spirit, highlighted by the school’s six pillars, stood out most to me. It’s kind of funny: all the students and teachers knew of the pillars, and knew that there were 6, but not one of the interviewees could name more than like three (and everyone seemed to remember fair play, which I also found interesting, even though that’s not what my group is researching). When I brought this up to my group, we talked through potential topics, and landed on community service as our focus because of the huge differences in perspectives on it from students and teachers. While both groups thought service was important, almost all of the students said that the school basically does nothing (worthwhile) to promote in its students the value of this service, while the teachers believed wholeheartedly in the Croft School’s commitment to it as a key pillar of the school. Our research is going to look at the difference in these opinions and how that impacts both the quality and quantity of work being done, and also how eliteness is perpetuated in the school’s failure to make students more engaged in service. I might be biased, but it sounds pretty interesting to me.

https://goo.gl/images/UtJbxr