Kara Wilson

My group’s next step in completing the research project was to create the outline.  For our analysis, Adam asked us to pick two themes that emerged from our coding analysis of the data.  This was the first challenge: to limit our list of 32 codes into two common themes. The themes we decided on were the differing understandings of the service conducted within the Croft School and the lack of personal commitment to service and how students only engage in service within the Croft School and not during their free time.  After deciding on our two themes we began to discuss how the data fit into each theme. During this discussion we ran into our second problem. Our two themes are pretty similar, which made separating the data to assign to each theme was difficult. For example, Anya had a quote she pulled from one of the interviews with a student, Angelo Muñoz, who said, “kids were not really supportive of the fundraisers. They were kind of against it, they’re um, they were fed up with the fundraisers…these kids didn’t really empathize with the cause. They didn’t care. They went to work with these younger kids at these vulnerable schools and they just went cause they had to. Not that they wanted to.” At first we thought that this would belong under our first theme, of how students viewed their service, but upon further discussion we realized that this quote showed a lack of personal commitment to the service.

(https://internationalschoolsreviewdiscuss.wordpress.com/2017/10/12/community-service-w-a-hidden-agenda/)

This realization led us to have another discussion about our definitions of each theme and how they differ from one another.  We decided that the first theme would include data from teachers, students and administration that explores their different viewpoints about the community service that students at the Croft School undertake.  We also would include data under this first theme that discusses how the administration, teachers and students have different views on the level of impact that their service has on the greater community. Differently, our second theme would analyze how students did not feel committed to engage in service.  When they did do community service, it was because the school required it. The students did not do service on their own outside of school in their free time. Even though most students did recognize that the service they did within the school had minimal impact, most did not take it upon themselves to do more service outside of school.  Overall, we recognized as a group that our data might support both our themes and it was ok to choose one theme, which it would support.

A lot of our data fits under both our themes and will help us study how studying community service within the Croft School will illuminate how elitism can be reproduced through artificial attempts by the school to promote service that ultimately fall short of instilling the value of service to others within students. However, something that came up in our class discussion was how to deal with data that does not fit our themes or data that goes against our themes.  It does not seem right to leave this data out of our analysis, so as a group we will have to decide how to work this into our paper.

My role for our final research paper is to write the literature review.  I have written one literature review before in my Government Research Methods class here at Colby.  I was pretty sure even before asking Adam how to formulate a literature review for an education paper, that it may look slightly different than the one I had written for my Government Class. Sure enough, the format was slightly different.  Adam told us that the purpose of a literature review is to come up with a thesis about the existing literature on your topic. The goal of the literature review is to ultimately inform your analysis. The focus of our literature review would focus on the role of community service in the elite school context.

(https://iupui.campusguides.com/literaturereview)

Luckily our group had already done the work of compiling relevant existing sources of research done on topics relating to our research question.  Our six topics of focus were: the reproduction of elites, the role of community service in elite schools, the impact of short-term/low-impact community service, the relationship between Elite Schools and Public Schools in Chile, and the Socioeconomic Gap in Chile.  We divided up the topics per person, assigning two topics per person and we were suppose to find a source for each. My topics were the relationship of elite schools and public schools in Chile and the Socioeconomic gap in Chile. Thus, when I went to write the literature review these were the only two sources I was familiar with.  I read through the other notes on the sources Anya, Nick and Julia compiled and somewhat understood what they were about. I guess this is one of the challenges in doing group work. It is hard to write an analysis including sources that you did not personally find. After reading through the sources I started to get a relatively good idea of how to combine all the sources into a smooth analysis in the form of a literature review.  

As instructed, we limited our literature review to six outside sources.  This is something that definitely feels contradictory as the purpose of the literature review is to gather all existing outside literature that is relevant to your research.  I found myself wondering if I had enough sources to make a convincing statement about existing literature on the role of community service in elite schools. Ultimately, I have to accept that for this particular project the literature review is not the focus and thus it is ok that it is limited in quantity.

As I was writing the literature review, another challenge that arose was the temptation to relate the literature findings to our own findings.  For example, if something in the outside literature contradicted our findings I found myself wanting to make note of that in the analysis. After questioning this with Adam, he reassured me that the literature review was not the place to discuss any of our own findings, that was the purpose of the discussion.  As a group we will write the discussion together, which I am sure will pose challenges as we are all only familiar with parts of the data. This is something that I have learned about group work from this project, you must rely and trust the work of others to inform your own role and work.

I looked over the list of 32 codes that my group has developed on a google doc. Our codes consist of words related to community service, our topic of focus. Words like donations, poor communities, fundraising and impact are all apart of our list. We created the list of codes following our initial scan of the data and our creation of our research topic. Now that we have divided up the data among the four members of our group, we are going back and reading the interviews more in-depth and assigning codes to certain sections.  

This research project is the first time I have ever coded data.  It was frustrating to only assign codes to parts of the data. For me, the interviews provided so many interesting comments on social class and elitism, that it was hard to skim over those sections and to not assign them a code.  I specifically looked at the interview transcripts for two students, Angelo and Alejandro. Both talked mostly about their relationships with their teachers, their social class status, friend groups at the Croft School, and school expectations.  The interviewers addressed the topic of Community Service in one or two questions directed towards each student, which brings up my original frustration of not being able to conduct my own interviews and ask students my own targeted questions that relate to our research topic of community service.  

Another issue I have run into while coding my data is the issue of overlapping codes.  Many sections of data fall under many of the codes. Some sections that I code social class, also discuss family, privilege, socio-economic gap, and money.  It seems awkward and redundant to list all of these codes next to a section of data. I find myself wanting to take notes in the margin that best describe the section of data, instead of just assigning a simplistic one-word code.  In addition, as a group, we all contributed independently to a list of codes on a google doc, which meant that we did not discuss each code and its meaning. I find myself questioning if other members of my group are using certain codes in the same way as me.  For example, I have found extensive data on school punishments for what they determine is bad behavior. I have coded these sections under “school’s definition of a good student.” To me, if the data outlines what the school thinks is bad behavior, they are also defining the opposite as the behavior of a good student.  However, I am not sure if other members of my group would use that code in the same way, and I think this will have to be something we will need to work through when we enter the next phase of our coding and research.

As I continue to code my own data, I want to make sure I avoid trying to make the data fit into what I want it to say.  Our research topic will explore the disconnect between what the school and what the students think of the community service they are doing.  I think our group has a preconceived idea that the school believes that the community service their students do is important and makes an impact on the greater Chilean community, while the students recognize they engage in minimal service with little impact.  I want to make sure that I am not finding data only to support my opinion or I am not skewing a student’s response to match my own thoughts about community service at the Croft School.

My research group has decided to study community service at the Croft School in Chile.  What we found most interesting after reading through all the interviews collected from students, teachers and alumni at the Croft School was that there seemed to be a discrepancy between what the school and teachers thought of community service and what community service was really being done.  Community Service is one of the four pillars of the Croft School. In order to be considered a pillar of the school, you would think the school would want their students heavily involved in service, however that is not what the data indicated. Instead, students talked about donating money or food once or twice a year, which would be sent by the school to less-fortunate schools.  Some students recalled helping build homes once a year. When teachers were asked about the community service that their students undertake, they generally seemed to think their students were very committed to service and it was a great thing. To me, if service is so emphasized by the school, I would have assumed students were completing some sort of service at least once a week.  

(http://www.ecsu.edu.et/content/community-service-directorate)

As we begin to comb through our data, I cannot help but be frustrated that we are limited to the data that other people have gathered about the school.  This is the first time that I have done research and have been limited by the data that is available to me. Furthermore, this is the first time that I have developed a research question after reading through a set of data.  In the past I have formulated a research question and then went and found data that supported or refuted my claim. For this project I have already found myself wishing I knew more about certain aspects of the school, or could ask different questions to inform my research project further.  

Something about not being directly involved in the interviews and data-collection of the research project you are conducting seems weird.  It is hard to imagine or fully-understand who the people are that you are reading about, without meeting them face-to-face. I did not attend an elite private school, so I can only apply what I know about elite schooling from my time at Colby.  I also know very little, if anything about Chilean schooling, or even Chilean culture. This is something that is especially intimidating when working with a group of students who have some experience researching elite schools and or the schooling system  of Chile.

When our group met last Monday night we discussed the need for caution when it comes to doing research and applying our western perspective when talking about another culture.  We noted that we must be careful in applying our ideals and notions of westernized schooling to the Chilean schools. I asked if we were judging the Croft School’s community service based on our western idea of what constitutes good or meaningful community service.  This concern caused us to shift our focus of research and make sure that we were measuring the school’s service based on the impact it had on the greater Chilean community. This brings me back to my original frustration. How can we measure the impact the student’s service made on their community without data to support this.  After all, we cannot call up the students and alumni and ask them this question. I am curious to see what other limitations our research runs into given that we are confined to the data that is provided to us.