It is not only a brand new year, but a brand new phase of the project; the field trials are here.
2019 was a year of planning. It ended with a training symposium in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where the research instruments were presented and discussed. Now, the data management plan has been finalized, everyone has been trained in using the data exchange service, the server where the international data will be stored has been set up and a bunch of new colleagues has joined the project as fieldworkers. The Listiac team is ready.
Listiac is an action research project; the point is not to conduct research on the teachers, teachers-to-be or the teacher educators, but with them. During the field trials, the fieldworkers and the researchers therefore keep a personal logbook. If they want to, participants (e.g. teacher educators) can also keep one about their research-related activities. The logbook is one of the main sources of information about the fieldwork. It is kept on a weekly basis during the entire fieldwork phase, including preparation and follow-up, and it includes both descriptions and personal reflections of events.
The research instruments also include an interview protocol (to be piloted), observation protocol, an online survey, good practices, and staff and student reflections, both accompanied by a colorful dialogue mat. The purpose of the dialogue mat is to encourage and intensify group discussions about linguistically sensitive teaching, and to spice it up, the Listiac dialogue mat even ends with a creative drawing task. The dialogue mat has been piloted with a group of teachers in Lithuania, and next week, it will be spread out in front of approximately 40 Finnish teacher educators during the first round of staff reflections at Åbo Akademi University.
In between the data collections, there are of course articles to write, meetings to hold and conferences to participate in. Needless to say, this will be an equally exciting and intense spring for the Listiac team.
