First-time Research Apprenticeship Experience
Over the course of the past few weeks, our COM520 class has been working on our research apprenticeship and it has had a lot of ups and downs throughout the process. We have had setbacks due to confusion, lack of communication, and missed classes. But we have also had many triumphs due to us coming together as one group having interesting discussions and getting our work done.
For me, the most interesting aspect of this research apprenticeship was the capacity our class had to do individual work and then come together to make it group work. When this research apprenticeship began and we were coding I truly had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. I coded the pretest solely on feel, I didn’t have a rhyme or reason at first. However, when we went back and created our code it dawned on me that I did have a reason for every score I gave to a response. Then our group had the opportunity to meet in person and go through our reasons for our own coding. Through discussion Beanie and I were able to cipher through our responses and gain consensus on scores and our reasonings. We both knew when there was a really good answer or a really bad answer, but we always debated the middle ground. It was really fun to hear her reasoning and then share my own. We had great conversations and had the opportunity to put our answers down in our group code. As a researcher once looking at the completed codes I was able to compare the pre and post-test and see the significant gain of knowledge these officers had. It was so interesting to see this growth of knowledge and to have proof that these individuals truly did learn something from their training. That this training will hopefully stick with them for the rest of their time as educators, and cause a chain reaction for future police training officers. It would be interesting to go to the Austin, Texas Police Academy and see one of the officers- from the training- current teaching methods, and observe their class. This for me would truly prove that this training was effective if they were able to implement what they learned.
We as researchers were able to experience this training firsthand. In class, we began our research by performing many of the activities the officer educators performed. First, we played the ‘walk the line game’ in which many of our classmates had similar viewpoints, which I am sure the officers also had. We were able to rationalize many of our positions on the line and discuss our viewpoints. We also watched and created our own response videos which were fun to make. This was our first taste of group work, as we worked in partnerships to create our multimedia video to describe the highlights of one of our week’s readings.
As a collaborative process, I enjoyed getting together with my small group and coding, as we were able to get our work done together. However, once we got together as a class and started to do work, I was very overwhelmed. I was unsure as to what our google document was doing, it was always so cluttered, and people were typing on it haphazardly. Until class, on November 29 I was very lost. Before this, I felt like we lost the direction of the purpose of this apprenticeship, especially after we lost a class meeting due to election day. On the 29th we gained a purpose and all really worked together to finish sections of the paper that needed to be done and talk out some of the frustrations and questions we were having. During this class time, I was able to complete the context of the intervention section, and talk out some of the issues I was having with Chloe. Chloe and I also had the opportunity to work on ANOVA together which we both struggled with. I had to refresh my knowledge of standard deviation, chi-square, and T-tests. However, after I refreshed my knowledge of these topics I realized I did not need to truly understand how these numbers were found but I had to understand how to compare the data pre and post-test. This was much simpler and after I discussed it with my peers and professor it was not too tricky to complete.
Being in a research team allows for complete collaboration of work. It permits different points of view and different ideas to be considered. It has the potential to create a much larger amount of work to be distributed to the world due to the collaboration of groups doing the research. However, it also allowed for group members to take on more or less of the research apprenticeship as some could depend on one another. I personally took lead on the coding and the context of the intervention as I understood these aspects deeply. While the post-test was something I did not have a great grasp on, thus my literary review would not have been as successful as other researchers would have been. This allows for the researcher with the most amount of knowledge on a topic to focus on that topic and explain it the best for the world to consume. This research apprenticeship taught me how to divide up the work and attempt to conquer the work. Our approach to the project was successful due to our excellent collaboration in class. While out of class we struggled with organized collaboration, our in-class work was focused and goal-oriented. I believe this was our greatest strength but also our greatest weakness as a team. When together we were productive and communicative when separated out of class we struggled heavily in this department. This made completing a cohesive final project difficult, and why splitting up the work was so important in class.
In conclusion, I had mixed emotions about this project. It taught me how large group projects are as this is the biggest group project I have ever completed. It also taught me how important it is to get group work done in a timely manner, as everyone in your group is depending on your completion of the work. This leads to my statement that the collaboration of this project was both our greatest strength and also our greatest weakness of the research apprenticeship.
