This project has been a discovery of confidence, gaining support from colleagues in an area I thought was going to benefit the workshops and students. As you will see through my findings in this project, I have found that many, if not all, researchers and interviewees agree with the importance of gaining feedback for our spaces and how this information would be useful and helpful in developing workshop spaces.

I started by inviting 5 colleagues to interview about their opinions and perspectives on feedback that we receive in the workshop spaces. All colleagues are from different departments within my team that have varying roles including support technician, specialist technician, technical coordinator and technical resources manager. This variety in roles was to allow for all perspectives to be taken into consideration and see if the responses would differ depending on this. Unfortunately, I was not able to meet with my technical resources manager in time for the presentation so would schedule this for the future, as this view point will be valuable. It is very important to incorporate the ideas and views of students at LCC into this project too, so that another perspective can be given on the ideas surrounding feedback. Even though I have not had time to organise and facilitate a focus group with students it is definitely a very important step in the development of feedback. As mentioned in many of my readings and especially by Meighan, C. (no date) it is important to treat students as equals and experts in their own right, and developing feedback styles with students in a focus group is something I would like to do in the future.

The first thing I did when analysing the data I received from the interviews was to transcribe the conversations had. Reading through the qualitative data I was able to notice similarities between answers that were given for many questions as I was commenting inductive codes (Dye, T. no date) that I was using to analyse my data. After commenting through all transcripts I put all my chosen codes into a spreadsheet and was able to see the most popular ones and those that weren’t repeated.

I grouped these codes, seeing the topics that were spoken about most in the research. The most common type of feedback has been direct from students, but it also shows how more frequent feedback would be more useful. The top codes that were mentioned more than once are:

• Direct feedback with students
• Categories can be too broad and unhelpful (when talking about current forms of feedback)
• Academic lead feedback
• Value in positive and negative comments
• More frequent feedback would be useful
• Conversational feedback to understand points fully
• Complex layers of student network and representation
• Honesty is important to be able to help more
• Lack of regular feedback only pinpoints one view from one day
• Structured forms of feedback would help develop workshops

When grouping all of my codes together I managed to find these themes which I will take as my final analysis from this research:

• updating conversations
• value of all feedback
• difficult extra time
• regular & categorised feedback
• multiple feedback options
• community creates honesty
• understanding boundaries

These themes that have emerged focus on ways of thinking about feedback in the future, with all ideas improving current feedback systems. I will take these themes and research with me in future when designing multiple forms of feedback with students, thinking about how we can incorporate conversational practices with regularity, categorisation, community, understanding and value for all feedback that we can receive.

As I have been grouping together ideas that have been spoken about by other people and recognising codes and themes that I feel are emerging from the data, I feel it is important to talk about my positionality in this research. If other people were analysing this data would they be discovering different codes and themes? I would think that even from another perspective, this research can all point in a similar direction that i have concluded.

Meighan, C. (no date) Students as partners: Creating a collective responsibility for course evaluation and improvement. Available at: https://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/docs/ethemes/conference/h-fotheringham-and-c-meighan—students-as-partners-creating-a-collective-responsibility-for-course-evaluation-and-improvement.pdf?sfvrsn=d465cc81_4 (Accessed: 27/11/23).

Dye, T (no date) Qualitative Data Analysis: Step-by-Step Suide (Manual vs. Automatic). Available at: https://getthematic.com/insights/qualitative-data-analysis/ (Accessed: 4 Jan 2024).