4.3.1 A qualitative case study design
Since the present study has its focus on the experiences and perceptions of teachers and students, a qualitative approach was chosen. Qualitative research is oriented towards the micro-level and the close-up view on a particular topic, relying primarily on human perception and understanding (Stake 2010). This approach supports the aims of the present study, which essentially tries to understand individual teachers’ and students’ perceptions. Moreover, in a qualitative study, the whole research
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design may be a reflexive process operating through all the stages of the project (Maxwell 2009: 214).
Consequently, the processes of collecting and analyzing data, gathering and compiling theory, and elaborating research questions may happen simultaneously throughout the study, thus influencing each other (Maxwell 2009: 214-215). This broader and less restrictive design allows, for instance, a data-driven research orientation, thus contributing to the eventual focus of the research questions.
As Stake (2010: 20) argues, the most common methods of qualitative research are observation, interviewing, and examination of artifacts, e.g. different documents. For this study, interviews were chosen to be the main data gathering method, alongside observations. According to Stake (2010: 95), one of the main purposes of interviews in qualitative research is to obtain “unique information or interpretation held by the person interviewed”, an approach suitable for the aim to examine the team period in a profound manner. More precisely, the interviews in question were semi-structured, used as a synonym for a theme interview by Tuomi and Sarajärvi (2009: 75), placed along a continuum between a structured and an unstructured one. In a semi-structured design, the interviewer prepares a set of predetermined questions for the interviewee(s), however, allowing the interview situation to be conversational and informal, thus providing more flexibility and room for open conversation (Longhurst 2016: 143-145). This setting offers participants a chance to openly discuss issues they consider important, and the actual interview questions may be covered in an undetermined order that best suits the situation (Longhurst 2016; Tuomi and Sarajärvi 2009). Moreover, the semi-structured design and the conversational nature of the interview allows the interviewer to ask further questions in order to cover issues not thought of originally, or correct misunderstandings (Tuomi and Sarajärvi 2009: 73). This design was preferred, since an open discussion could evoke important topics and findings that might not be covered in a strictly structured interview.
Conducting a qualitative study is argued to be a productive approach in examining the ways how people and organizations realize different things (Stake 2010: 2). The present study focuses on the team period and the teachers and students of one particular upper secondary school in Finland, and thus, it may be defined as a case study. The concept of case study has been defined in multiple ways by different authors, but the primary purpose for it remains the same, as it aims to explore the particularity of a single case, whether it refers to a person, an institution, or a system, for instance (Simons 2009: 3-4). According to Gomm (cited in Simons 2009), the aim of a case study is to understand the case itself, rather than to generalize findings to a larger part of society. Furthermore, as suggested by Simons (2009: 5), a qualitative case study is a particularly appropriate method in the field of educational practice. As the present study explores the implementation of the team period in
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one single school, the findings may not be easily generalizable to other settings beyond this specific educational experiment.
4.3.2 The interviewed participants
The participant group of the present study included both upper secondary school teachers and students. The interviewed teachers were given pseudonyms in order to maintain anonymity, and the students will be referred to as Student A, B, C etc. At the focal school, there were two EFL subject teachers who had taken part in the team period at least once during the four-year span of its implementation. In addition, a third teacher was interviewed for this study, as this person had worked as the team period’s responsible teacher since the beginning of the cross-curricular experiment.
Practically, this teacher was responsible for training new team period teachers for the study unit.
However, her comments were only used to form the introductory section 4.2, where team period as a phenomenon is presented. The background information collected from the EFL teachers is shown in the following table:
Table 1. The EFL teacher participants of the study
Participant (pseudonym)
Teaching experience Years at the school Experience in the team period
Niina 10 years 7 years 2 times planning and
teaching
Teija 16 years 9 years 2 times planning, once
teaching
The students, instead, were all first-year students of upper secondary school at the age of 15 or 16.
As the team period students were divided into two larger groups each with distinct subject combinations, all the interviewed students were chosen from the group that had studied EFL as one of their subjects. The present study and its aims were presented to all these students personally by the researcher to motivate and encourage them to participate. Thus, the eventual interviewees were not chosen arbitrarily, but instead, from a group of students who had expressed their willingness to take part in the study. In qualitative research this is not considered a problem, since the aim of the study is not to portray generalizable information, but indeed, the opposite (Tuomi and Sarajärvi 2009: 74).
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Essentially, the data gathering process consisted of three different frames of interview, each one with their distinct objectives. Firstly, one of the interviews was arranged to obtain basic information on the team period (Appendix 1). This interview was aimed at the responsible team period teacher, who could provide background information and motives for the implementation of cross-curricular work, as well as some experiences and feedback from the past years. This interview lasted 80 minutes.
Secondly, the interview question sheet for the two EFL subject teachers (Appendix 2) was compiled on the basis of background readings and previous studies with slightly similar topics. These EFL teacher interviews were conducted individually with each one of them. The first interview lasted 55 minutes, and the second one 40 minutes. Finally, the third interview (Appendix 3) was aimed at the upper secondary school students, and its structure was left the most open, with the intention of letting students report their perceptions and experiences as freely as possible. The interviewed students had a chance to decide whether to participate individually or in small groups of 3 students at most. In total, 7 student interviews were conducted, with a total of 11 participants. These interviews’ durations ranged from 9 to 27 minutes.
As can be seen, there were no time limits for any of the interviews, and the semi-structured design did not set restrictions concerning the order of questions or topics covered. However, the interviewer occasionally influenced the progress of the conversations by drawing attention to the questions prepared for each interview, so that essential topics could be discussed. The language of each interview was Finnish, as it was the mother tongue of all the participants. Therefore, the question sheets and interview extracts presented in the findings were also originally in Finnish, and only later translated into English for the purposes of this thesis. In the Finnish language, the word englanti, or more colloquially enkku, may refer to both the English language, as well as the EFL subject. When these terms occurred in the interview extracts, they were translated according to the context, referring to one of these two options. The teacher interview sheets were sent to the participants by e-mail beforehand, so that they could familiarize themselves with the topics, recall their experiences and prepare for the interviews. Effectively, this decision was made to obtain as much information as possible, which is indeed, the most important aim of an interview (Tuomi and Sarajärvi 2009: 73).
The students, on the contrary, did not get to read the planned questions beforehand, but they were informed about the main topics that were to be discussed in the interviews.
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