Hannah Zapala: January 2013

Critical Reflection on Professional Practitioner Inquiry

I have done a lot of reflection throughout this module. Mainly reflecting on my prior experience interning. Developing the questions ‘is the experience worthwhile?’ ‘did I gain the necessary experience to help further my career?’. All of my previous work experience was in a completely contrasting industry – Musical Theatre, therefore I needed the unpaid internships, for me they were compulsory.

I wanted my awards title to be reflective of my current practice, and a subject I felt passionately about. I initially discussed the idea of further developing the ethical practices within retail buying, but I dismissed this topic soon after, due to the ethical issues that would potentially arise (Appendix A).

After further thought and many discussions with both my advisor and S.I.G groups, I decided on the following title, reflecting both my knowledge and learning,

"Interning as a platform for career development".

I am open to all viewpoints on the topic of internship, so am conscious that being biased will not be an issue. I am not looking for specific answers to my questions, the more variation the better, as no 2 internships are the same, and no 2 practitioners share the same experience. Hopefully these results will lead me to the truest data outcome possible.

After reading and working through the tasks in Reader 5, ‘Professional Ethics’ and discussing in sessions, we began looking in depth at ethical practice, focusing on ethics in a working environment (Appendix Bi & Bii), what the codes of practice are, and how we will link these to our inquiry.

I will be interviewing people and inviting attendees to my focus group from different career paths including from the world of retail, psychology, performance and HR.

I will not need to contact any companies in terms of ethical practices, as my ethical practices will lie alone with how I conduct myself (Appendix D).

Throughout Reader 6, ‘Tools of Professional Inquiry’, we discussed how to ethically gain the information and data needed to complete our inquiries. The tools available to use were focus groups, surveys, interviews and observation. After discussing each tool in detail uncovering the positives and negatives with relation to my own inquiry, I dismissed surveys and observation as not being quite suitable or practical for my inquiry, and piloted both focus groups and Interviews separately (Appendix C). On reflection, both tools worked perfectly for my inquiry, and in my opinion, using a combination of tools can ensure the analysis of data collected is reliable and can produce valid results, which is inevitably my objective.

I learnt a lot from my pilot’s including how to improve certain techniques used in holding the focus group mainly, which I will carry forward to Module 3.

My inquiry required qualitative data instead of quantitive. My aim is to un-cover attitudes and feelings towards Internship, using the more sympathetic tools - pushing my candidates further and helping un-cover the honest views behind interning.

My candidates will be kept anonymous, and gain a level of trust and understanding that I would not do anything detrimental to compromise their careers.

In summary, during this module I discovered the level of depth of information I could capture from my inquiry. Through many discussions with others, either in campus sessions, via S.IG.’s or email, I managed to choose the most relevant methods of tools for my inquiry. Completing tasks throughout the readers, enabled me to focus on a topic of huge importance to me resulting in my inquiry title.

References

Bell, J. (2005) Doing Your Research Project (4^th ed), Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

BAPP (Arts), Reader 4, Developing Lines Of Professional Inquiry, WBS 3630

Appendices

Appendix A

Sunday, 25 November 2012

http://hannahzapala.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/4d-it-has-taken-me-long-time-to-think.html

Appendix Bi

Tuesday, 6 November 2012

My first campus session – module 2

http://hannahzapala.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/my-campus-session-module-2-i-attended.html

Appendix Bii