(Hello it's been a while!)

After completing all of my peer interviews and gathering some findings I had the opportunity to meet with my supervisor and my fellow scholars on this research project (2 from Leeds and 1 from kings). We met up and discussed all of our individual parts of the research project and began piecing our findings together. Since all of us have dealt with different aspects being the students, staff, stakeholders and literature of the project it was amazing to start throwing our ideas together and seeing how each puzzle piece fits. We spent a few hours just brainstorming and scribbling down ideas, jumping in and adding to each other forming a plan of what themes we want to look for when analysing our transcripts. 

Ultimately we wanted to find relevant quotes to match with chapter themes of the project's book proposal, looking for themes of ‘transformative learning and liberation” and the feelings towards “the archive”. However, we also decided a chapter needed to be added due to finding so many students have referenced ideas of assessment in neoliberal universities and how this differed greatly to the ‘thinking inside the box project’. Realising structure and pressures from mark schemes have been internalised in students to the point where they haven't had the opportunity to express their creativity before the project. Additionally, finding students believed the project held much more value than modules they have completed due to acquiring relevant career skills and being able to collaborate with other individuals.

After this long discussion of ideas we formed an action plan delegating tasks to each individual, so over the past 2 weeks I have been anonymising everyone's transcripts and giving everyone participant codes to be identified with. Also going through my own transcripts and beginning to highlight relevant information containing implicit and explicit meaning that relates to each book chapter. Additionally we submitted a presentation proposal for the Student Success in Taught Student Education Conference 2023, and our application was successful! (more details on this will come closer to the time).

However, as a group we have decided to put the project on hold for a week before undertaking full analysis of the results. We found all of us have become very busy whether that was with work or travel. Instead of rushing the analysis of our results we thought a small break will allow us to come back refreshed and ready to complete the final stretch of our project. 

Sometimes we all need a pause :)