Taking an Interpretive Leap with Crafted Stories
Updated: Dec 23, 2022
In this study, teachers' recognition and recounts of their own and students' experiences provide an opportunity to develop an understanding and gather thick descriptions of everyday encounters, in this case, with physical computing in schools (Benner, 1994; van Manen, 1990). Adopting guidance from Smythe (2011) and Crowther et al. (2017), the findings are presented as a selection of crafted stories from a total of forty-two written as a collection from the experiences of five teacher participants. Figure one shows the process and logical order outlined by Crowther et al. (Ibid, 2017) to craft stories as descriptions of the phenomenon using teachers' words from transcripts but staying close to the experience.
My thesis takes worked examples from a sample of the crafted stories to demonstrate how teachers' interviews verbatim became textual descriptions and finally crafted stories to share with others. Data analysis was iterative to examine the meaning of the first-hand accounts of physical computing with repeated listening of audio recordings from teacher interviews and reading transcripts individually and as a collection, enabling me to question the emerging meaning and discuss it with my supervisors. This became the ontic phase of fusing meaningful words from the transcripts and the ontological stage that required an interpretive leap, questioning the meaning of each story to uncover a more profound understanding that connects to the philosophical perspectives of hermeneutic phenomenology.
Figure 1: Collecting and Crafting Stories (Crowther et al., 2017)
Header image by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels
