Researcher: Paula Davies

Site: Prince George

For my methodology I chose to interview adults with little formal education to try to discover how they learn the things they want to know. I felt that I would be able to find people to interview by going through students currently in the upgrading department at the college where I work (the College of New Caledonia). Before actually conducting the interviews, I wanted to hear responses on how people learn from upgrading students who I already knew. While our research question was to look at how people with little formal education who are not in programs learned, I needed to familiarize myself with the research question and possible responses before I conducted the actual interviews. To do this, I worked with students who were currently in my English 030 classes (approximately at the Grade 10 level). The other students I worked with were in an upgrading English 020 class (approximately at the Grade 5-8 level).

With the two classes of English 030 students, I asked them to write a response to the prompt:

When I want to learn something new I…

I then read through these responses to see if there were common themes. In the English 020 class, I facilitated a class discussion around the question of what the students do when they want to learn something new.

While the project’s research question did not encompass a comparison between how our target group and others learn, I found myself needing to reflect on just how anybody learned anything in order to situate the responses I would get from the actual interviews. To this end, I asked myself how I thought each of my four children (ages 21, 19, 15, 15) learned things that they wanted to know. I wrote a description of the strategies I thought each of them would use.

Finally, several months prior to conducting the actual interviews, I did trial interviews using our research questions with several of my upgrading students. This process and the results of the mock interviews were discussed with Marina. She provided valuable suggestions to enhance the quality of my interviewing techniques. The suggestions mainly focused on the issue of probing interviewee responses to get more detail and depth from their answers.

I now felt ready to proceed with identifying participants for the research. I first presented a description of the research project to the instructors in the upgrading department where I teach. After the brief presentation, I requested permission to drop into the fundamental Math and English classes and explain the research project to the students. I would then ask these students if they had friends, acquaintances or family members who met the criteria. My colleagues welcomed me into their classrooms. Over the next week I visited several classes, made my presentation, left my request and then returned several days later to see if any of the students had been able to find willing participants for me to interview. The phone numbers of eight adults who met the criteria and were willing to be interviewed were provided. I was happy with this response and comfortable phoning each of these people because I knew that they had had the project described to them by someone they trusted and that they had already agreed to participate. I was offering a $20 honorarium to each person I interviewed and they knew this at the time they volunteered to participate.