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Transforming High Schools:
Field Research in Youth Development |
Interview with students
Interview with a Kate Jordan '04 (Communication and Culture major and Urban Development and Social Change concentrator; enrolled in fifth-year program) and Jennifer Smith (IDCE graduate student)
How is this course different from other classes you have taken at Clark?
Kate: It's really great. You can go to a class and you pass in a paper to your professor and you learn a lot from it. But it's just an exercise. But the work we're doing has a better significance in that we can see the results of what we're doing immediately. We can see that it's nice to talk to a student about his or her schooling, but it's even nicer to think about solutions to problems they have or ways to make their school better. It's great to be in Worcester schools and learn about the community.
Jennifer: Like Kate was saying, in a lot of classes it's an exercise. You write a paper and a professor reads it and it ends there. Often times, even your peers in your classes don't get an opportunity to read what you have written or hear about what you think. But in our class, we have on the Blackboard [Clark's virtual classroom through the University Web site] student-posted papers. We do reflection memos about our experiences in the schools with our interviews and that serves as the basis for our discussions in class. You can count on the fact that what you're doing is going to go further than it would in any traditional class. And that's not just for ourselves, but also within Worcester. This information is feeding back into each of the small learning communities and at the superintendent level. And it's really cool that on top of that, the other teaching assistant, who is coordinating the student researcher piece, was able to take the work we are doing in Worcester and share it with people from all over the country at a conference in Houston. So, we can take our work so much further than we would in any other class.
Do you still have more traditional reading assignments?
Kate: Yes. We are doing readings and writing papers, but they're beneficial to the whole research project. We start with a literature review at the beginning of the semester, and that was really to inform the research we were doing inside the schools. But instead of just passing our work into the teacher, we all posted them on Blackboard so everyone could read and discuss them.
Kate, what is your role in the project?
Kate: My project is with Doherty High School. I'm doing interviews at Doherty to look at the students' perception of their small learning community. It looks at academic achievement, perceptions, how they feel about working with their classmates and how they feel about working with their teachers. The one-on-one interview lasts about an hour. The interview tool was developed by last semester's class. I'm also working on focus groups with the Accelerated Learning Lab (ALL) School; the focus group guide was something that I developed with the other undergraduate student who was assigned to the ALL School. We looked at student-teacher relationships and some particular issues related to the ALL School like its internship program and its afterschool activities.
What happens to all the data you gather?
Kate: We take all the data we have from the interviews, focus groups and student researcher piece and use it to look at what students think about their learning communities.
As a graduate student and TA in the class, what about your role, Jennifer?
Jennifer: I've been involved in the project for the past two years. I started as a research assistant with Laurie Ross. Now I've moved into a teaching assistant and research assistant role, which means I participate in the classes and help coordinate a lot of the interviewing. There are 150 students in our cohort in the small learning communities in the eight different high schools in Worcester.
Have there been any unexpected developments in the project?
Jennifer: All the time. One example is what came out of the literature review this semester. We had a great conversation in our class about how we needed more information about the teachers' experience working with the small learning communities. We had been focused on the students in these communities, and this whole process forced us to look at the teacher's perspective. So, we decided we needed to do teacher interviews as our next step. The process is fluid and the project and the research are happening in real time. So having these kinds of conversations about how to make a bigger difference in the community and be more inclusive of everyone whose involved in this amazing transformation project in the Worcester Public Schools allows us to take the research to the next step and not just follow a set syllabus. It lets us really think about how we can make more of a difference.
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A better way to learn