Sheffield Hallam University

Presented by Rachel Stone.

Thursday 17th January 2019, 12:00-13:00,
Room 12.2.20, Charles Street Building, Sheffield Hallam University.

This presentation is about my EdD enquiry, which focuses on academic teaching staff, their narratives of ‘belongingness’ in the workplace and their practices as university educators. While some studies show that students who feel 'belongingness’ at university are more likely to engage (Thomas et al, 2017), lecturers themselves can sometimes be unseen and unvalued (Lynch et al, 2009), their pedagogical knowledge eclipsed by performative discourses of 'excellence' (Burke et al, 2015).

Drawing on my pilot study, I will be using a visual narrative approach to interviewing and analysis with seven members of academic teaching staff across a range of subject disciplines from three universities. Each participant will be asked to create a collage representing their professional journey as part of a process of reflection on belonging. The intention is to ‘make the familiar strange’ (Mannay 2016:27), while the collage provides a contextual metaphor enabling subtleties and emotional responses which are not as available through words alone (Forceville, 2008).

I will show how the words and images produced in the pilot were analysed using a combination of narrative and visual techniques (Bamberg, 2004; Pauwels, 2010). As part of this process I plan to develop a framework for the analysis of metaphors (Forceville, 2008) within the context of narrative enquiry.