Data Analysis and Findings
A Diamond in the Rough
“Playing with participants, data, and representation creates opportunities for humane, profound, and pragmatic research processes” (Ellingson, 2013, p, 196)Within this research study, I explored the lived experiences of teacher educators in Canada with a focus on MDL within an OEPr. In this post-intentional phenomenology, fourteen participants revealed their stories of becoming media and digitally literate within an open educational practice in the field of teacher education. The focus here was on describing the facets of the lived experiences of participants – becoming a teacher educator, experiencing an open educational practice, modelling media and digital literacies - and how MDL influenced OEPr in a teacher educators’ teaching practice. As these facets of the participants’ stories are shared, it is important to note that this research is not framed as findings in the traditional research sense. This is framed as a generated narrative, excised from the data gatherings. This narrative is not the only possible narrative found within the participants’ lived experiences, but one story, created and crafted as a representation from the accounts and images of others.
In the research design section, I outlined the phases and sequence of data collection, coding and analysis. Over multiple episodes of listening and relistening to the narratives presented by the participants, I “pay attention to personal preferences and desires, what I care about and what excites me” (Ellingson, 2013, p. 201). Throughout this process, I struggled to make sense of the individual voices and images. At times, the participants’ meaningful moments coalesced together. Through the multiple and many layered listening moments, I paid attention to the outlines of what was important to each participant because these needed to meld into my research story. In order to stay true to the narratives shared and not become distracted while writing about the participants’ lived experiences, I held in mind a collage of images and echoes of our conversations.
As I recursively explored and experienced the video interviews, between bouts of reflective sense-making, these etches supported my struggle to find commonalities and to create a unifying story of the stories shared. Despite a deeper dive into reflective thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021; Braun & Clarke, 2022), the themes that I strived to find from the codes and keywords eluded me. As a result of this struggle to find the research story, I returned to reflect on my stated methodology of crystallization.
The decision to examine one facet at a time allowed me to focus my attention on singular components within the findings, just as a gemologist might take time to examine the façade, edges, colour, tone, and reflections found within the identified facet of a diamond in the rough. My decision to hold up and examine the words, sentences, and ideas expressed by the participants created a semi-cohesive way to uncover participants’ portrayals within the research findings. The answers to my research questions emerged from this diamond in the rough.