Media and digital literacies in Canadian teacher educators’ open educational practices: A post-intentional phenomenology

Interview Design

In my P-IP research preparation I confronted the myth that unstructured interviews are wide-open events without boundaries or parameters (Vagle, 2018). Having a “clear sense of the phenomenon under investigation” (Vagle, 2018, p. 86) and orienting the interview toward that phenomenon were essential considerations. For this reason, I structured the interview protocol carefully. As part of the research ethics approval, I piloted and adjusted the interview protocol prior to using it with research participants. The semi-structured questions and conversation prompts developed for the interview protocol were adjusted for each participant depending on data gatherings done between the time the interview was booked and when it was conducted. In this way, I was able to make and remake the data gathering from interviews in a pragmatic, adaptive and agile manner (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2020). 

          The prepared questions, provocations, and points of conversation not only provided detail for research ethics approval, but supported me during the interviews since interviewing is a new research practice for me. The questions and provocations helped me probe and explore the lived experiences and stories relevant to the intersection between MDL and OEPr (see Appendix D). 

          Interviews lasted approximately sixty minutes, with some going longer with participant permission. During the interview I made notes to capture points of interest or items which required further probing. I structured the interview in five sections. First, after a general ice-breaking question, I shared details of the research and my ethical commitments before asking participants to give verbal or thumbs up signal as approval for recording of the interview. Second, I probed their background stories of becoming a teacher educator. This led into the third part of the conversation where prompts about their OEPr followed with some questions about MDL as evident in their OEPr. These sections of the conversation ended with a prompt to identify ‘non-negotiable and perceived essential elements’ of OEPr and MDL. In the fourth section I probed into issues and barriers to MDL within their OEPr. This was followed by an opportunity for participants to ask me any questions. At the end of the interview, the next steps and creative artifact production details were reviewed. Upon completion of the interview, the recording and audio file was captured on my laptop for immediate review.

          The interviews were engaging, collegial, and responsive events. As evident in the transcriptions, most of the participants knew of me or had awareness of my academic and scholarly work, so they were not strangers in the truest sense. Although I had no previous contact with most of the participants prior to this research, some were active within similar networks and one participant had a deeper scholarly connection. Some of the interviews followed the protocol closely and some participants referenced the prompts on their copy of the protocol. Other interviews diverged significantly from the scripted protocol. During these conversations I referenced the protocol I had displayed on a second monitor as a way to ensure the key foci were covered. The recording for a few of the interviews was paused as needed for participants to attend to matters in their home or office contexts. Some participants shared their screens in order to showcase digital artifacts they referenced in the interview. The uniform resource locator (URL) links were shared in the Zoom chat so I was able to follow-up with a closer exploration after the interview concluded, adding to the data gathering. After the interviews was completed I took time to collect the data moments and record impressions and observations in my research journal page for each participant. 
 

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