Our initial research plan is to cultivate a comprehensive program with specific guidelines that will enable and assist SD27 in a survey used to assess the student demographic needs and experiences annually. One of the potential means of conducting the survey could be creating an online survey link, either through Google or other online surveying sites. By doing so, we would be able to create an online platform where information from student surveys can be collected each year. The school will also be able to see ongoing trends and long run changes in order to make necessary adjustments to cater best to the needs of these students. However, we would still need to think of a way to organize all the data and make it visually presentable for each year. Nonetheless, we plan on exploring and expanding on existing scholarship that has produced and conducted surveys to acquire satisfaction of students in their school experience.
In order to do this, it is critical for us to inquire more with our community partner, in particular the Principal of Skyline Alternate to understand the diversity of students, such as their geographic location, ethnicity and culture, age, gender, sexuality, dis/ability or social issues faced. This would enable us to garner a better understanding of our positionality in regards to the students. For example, we discovered that some of the students at Skyline are currently in complex living situations, as they are forced to live with host families during the weekdays because their own family and homes are too far away. We learned that as a result of this temporary displacement, many students feel more comfortable attending Skyline for the smaller class size alone.
In addition, we plan to conduct semi-structured interviews or focus groups with the students attending Skyline Alternate. As we will be conducting research on minors, we must obtain ethics permission for interviewing and publishing the resulting data. We will consult with UBC’s Office of Research Ethics, and our course instructor, Siobhàn McPhee, to clarify the process for obtaining ethics permission.
Photo Taken By: Therise Lee
Sources:
http://growskyline.weebly.com/