Contribución de los Protocolos a los objetivos del Convenio sobre Diversidad Biológica

Interviewing is useful for collecting data concerning what participants think they do in practice but it is important to triangulate data from different sources to increase the trustworthiness of the data collected by using different data collection methods. Particularly in case studies, documents are perceived to be significant in corroborating and augmenting evidence from other sources (Yin, 2003). Hence in the present study, teacher and learner diaries were also utilised. These documents provided valuable data while at the same time serving as stimulus for interviews (Burton & Bartlett, 2005, p. 162).

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Diaries are significant with their potential to generate in-depth data for the issue being explored and the diaries utilised in the study required participants to provide life narratives (Bouma & Ling, 2004). Life narratives are helpful in collecting data about the experiential realities due to the fact that they give the participants the opportunity to narrate their stories in their own ways. This method is similar to interviews in what it aims, yet, because participants make their entries in their own time, without the presence of the researcher, they have the potential to represent the reality in a more open manner through identifying and prioritising their own focus. To this end, participants’ expression of their everyday roles, experiences and feelings in a free writing style in a diary where they feel free to take note of whatever they consider is worthy of attention is particularly helpful in understanding their frameworks (Yin, 2015).

Diaries are self-reports of particulars of life and diary method offers the possibility of ‘capturing life as it is lived’ (Bolger, Davis, & Rafaeli, 2003, p. 579). According to Bolger et al. (2003, p. 580), diaries involve the investigation of ‘social, psychological, and physiological processes, within everyday situations’, which is the aim of the study that aims to capture the experiential realities of the participants as they are lived in their natural contexts. It is important that self-reports in diaries are reflective in nature rather than providing mere descriptions as reflection on what is going on has the capacity to enhance consciousness and development. To this end, in the present study, TEs were asked to reflect on their perceptions of teacher support they provided with reference to how their support is influenced by different factors, while ST gave examples of autonomous experiences as they are lived in their everyday lives. Thus, with every entry they made in their diaries, they were expected to demonstrate both their understanding of LA together with how they experience/support it in the learning process.

Diaries can be designed as structured or unstructured (Gibson & Brown, 2009). An unstructured design without prompts provided can be perceived as more revealing with participants focusing on what they consider deserves attention. It also gives the researcher the chance to identify themes that may have been overlooked in advance (Gibson & Brown, 2009; Oxbrow, 1999). Yet, I consider when it is left completely open, it is possible that the data collected may not meet

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the research interests or it may end up with mere descriptions of experiences. Hence, I provided prompts/reflective guiding questions to enable participants to record data relevant to the research focus and to reflect on the actual lived episodes, yielding data that is more meaningful for both the participants and the researcher (Burton & Bartlett, 2005). Giving prompts also enhances the chances of maintaining consistency among data collected from different participants (Gibson & Brown, 2009). Hence, after considering the drawbacks of both structured and unstructured approaches, I decided to design the diaries as semi- structured. That is, it should guide the participants in the selection of data to be recorded but at the same time give them the freedom to record anything they think is significant and related to the research study, allowing new understandings to open up new paths to emerge naturally. The semi-structured diary keeping guidelines with reflective questions I designed served this purpose. To avoid leading questions that would affect learner entries I provided general questions.

TEs and STs were asked to record in their diaries their actual experiences and required the act of reflection on experience, aimed to be attained through the reflective questions provided. Thus, the outcomes of this reflective exercise were not only thick descriptions of actual practice but as was observed later, they also gave the participants the chance to ponder about what was actually taking place and therefore served for raising awareness. In the present study, the fact that diary keeping is a demanding process that requires commitment and dedication was considered when designing this data collection method and the researcher tried to design the instrument in a way that it did not take too much time and that it was straightforward. Hence, the questions provided served as prompts with which participants were guided in identifying relevant information and so limiting the risk of omitting relevant examples (Bolger et al., 2003). Participants were provided with special notebooks with the reflective questions on the first page so that they could easily refer to them every time they made an entry. Acknowledging diary keeping as a demanding and time-consuming process, I contacted the participants after they started keeping their diaries. I realised from contacting both TEs and STs that they were really happy to be contacted and to be told that they could contact me whenever a need arises.

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Teacher Educator Diaries (Appendix 4: Diary Keeping (TEs))

TEs were asked to keep diaries on their perceptions of support they provided to their learners in the process of developing and implementing autonomy and so teacher diaries were self-reports of teachers’ perceptions of instructional behaviours. TEs kept their diaries for two months with only one group of students they were teaching depending on their preference.

Although it was not intended to put pressure on TEs by giving a fixed timing schedule, they were requested to write in their diaries on the same day they taught the specific group in order not to miss the details. Therefore, the reflective diaries utilised in this study were retrospective self-reporting diaries where the aim was to arrive at ‘reliable person-level information’ (Bolger et al., 2003, p. 581). These were retrospective diaries in the sense that they were kept after the lesson rather than during the lesson, yet not long after the lesson which runs the risk of forgetting details and generating faulty responses with bias.

Some of the TEs had three hours on the same day with their class, so they wrote in their diaries once a week reflecting on the three teaching hours. Some others had two hours on one day and one hour on another day, so they made entries in their diaries twice a week, again reflecting on three teaching hours.

I provided notebooks for TEs with the Teacher Support Model (generated using the responses of the TEs and whose constitutive elements I aligned with an existing model as one of the checks I used in the process of selecting/discarding statements to help ensure their integrity (Cooker, 2012) (Appendix 1: Teacher Support Model) on the very first page and the Teacher Diary Keeping guidelines (Appendix 4: Diary Keeping (TEs)) on the next page to ensure they had the opportunity to have a look at them when/if necessary.

Student Teacher Diaries (Appendix 3: Diary Keeping (STs))

Student diaries were also retrospective self-reports. Students were asked to record the autonomous behaviours they exhibited in their learning for two months. They were asked to make entries in their diaries three times a week, considering their autonomous experiences both inside and outside the classroom. They were asked to give details about their experiences and also explain why they consider these experiences to be autonomous with the intention of

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encouraging participants to use their stories to reflect on their experiences (Burton & Bartlett, 2005).

Approximately one week after they were supposed to start writing in their diaries, I contacted all on the phone to ask if they needed anything. I realised that the majority were concerned about whether they were doing the right thing or not. This was because in the first meeting I had told them I wanted them to be reflective in their diaries rather than descriptive. Some had questions to which I tried to provide explanations and clarification. Some wanted to share examples from their diaries to make sure they were on the right path. I paid attention not to lead them in these interactions. When they told me they were not sure whether what they were writing was what was expected from them, I asked them to give example experiences and rather than answering them as ‘You are doing the right thing’ or ‘No’, I asked them some questions (i.e. What makes you think this is an autonomous experience? etc.) that would help them reflect on their experiences and decide if their entries were on focus or not by themselves. At the beginning of the second and third group meetings I spared time to elicit autonomous behaviours learners displayed in their learning in the previous weeks before moving on to the contents of the present meeting. The intention behind these elicitation episodes was twofold: to check they were being reflective and to provide examples of reflective experiences to the ones who found reflecting difficult. What I realised from these episodes and from individual feedback from participants is that the majority found reflecting challenging. They had a tendency to describe experiences but could not easily reflect on them.

At the beginning 31 STs volunteered to participate in the study. However, a few weeks after the beginning of the diary keeping process, four participants informed me that they would like to drop out because ‘this diary keeping process is too demanding for them’.

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Data Collection – Teacher Educators

1st round of interviews with TEs February-March 2016

TE Diaries March –June 2016

2nd _{round of interviews with TEs June 2016}

Data Collection – Student Teachers

Group Meetings

1st group meeting 16 March 2016 17 March 2016 18 March 2016

2nd group meeting 28 march 2016 30 March 2016 1 April 2016

3rd group meeting 26 April 2016 29 April 2016 3 May 2016 ST Diaries March-June 2016

ST Interviews June 2016