Page 70 - Getting of the fence

Chapter 3
take all the time they needed to express their views, thereby respecting individual differences (i.e. inclusive divergence).
3.2.2.2 Unguided focus group
In the next stage, we created a situation in which students would be able to construct a shared understanding (Lodge, 2005): the students’ own written interpretations of the underlying elements served as input for an unguided focus group. Since our aim was to elicit the students’ viewpoints and have them arrive at a shared understanding of the underlying practical elements (Berg & Lune, 2012) without influencing their thinking, the focus group was unguided, meaning that the researcher(s) were in the same room as the students but did not interfere in the process. Furthermore, similar to the written reflective accounts, we were not interested in the process but in the outcome of the focus group, so we asked the students to write down their group understanding of the elements and did not record the discussions that led to this group understanding. In contrast to the written accounts, we consider the nature of the dialogue established within the focus groups to be convergent and inclusive (Burbules, 1993).
3.2.2.3 Single open question survey
According to Cook-Sather (2002), it is the “collective student voice, constituted by the many situated, partial, individual voices that we are missing” (p. 12). In order to include this collective voice, at different stages of this study we asked three groups of Dutch secondary school students to answer the following open question: What do you think are the benefits of EFL literature lessons? The students wrote their answers individually and anonymously in bullet points on an A4 piece of paper. Our aim with this open question was to move the dialogue back again to a more inclusive and divergent situation (Burbules, 1993).
3.2.4 Data collection: procedure and data analysis
The data collection took place in three consecutive and partially iterative rounds and each school was engaged in one round. Figure 3.1 shows the activities and the interaction between the students of each school and the research team, which consisted of the researcher together with the class teachers. As part of the research team, the class teachers were actively involved in the dialogical procedure described in Figure 3.1.
68