reflecting on fieldwork

I have just about 1 scheduled week left in my first research site and I'm feeling a bit frantic as I try to arrange interviews with both staff and students before the end of term and ensure I have sat in on each lecturers' class at least twice. I wonder if my fieldwork strategy has been successful -i.e. if it has enabled me to gain as much insight into the daily practices of this department as possible. I realised it was going to be difficult to spread myself across all the cohort levels over the 7 week period I was in the department and that moving from class to class meant I wasn't able to develop and maintain more lasting relationships with any particular cohort/student. You need to be present in a particular class everyday to build relations with those students - and if they are dashing from class to class and from level to level you lose out on that interpersonal closeness. You have to make compromises - and now I'm wondering about those compromises. Today I was asked why I'm not staying in the department for a longer time - why I've split my activities between two research sites / departments? I've wonder this myself. My justification for working with two departments was really about building a better case for generalisating across a specific departmental context and saying something more broadly about multimodal academic literacy practices within vocational higher education. Focusing on one department would mean I could only say something about that particularly course, possibly drawing some inferences for other courses like it at other institutions. I wanted to say less about the specifics of a particular course and more about the nature of multimodal literacy practices at vocational higher education - hence I needed to consider more than one case. And so the compromises started.

My timing is completely messed up (I'm using a far more descriptive phrase in my head) I've run out of time to do interviews - many of them will have to happen when I'm officially suppose to be in the new research site. I feel now I should have 'pulled' out of the class observations earlier, spent more time considering my data analytically, rather than simply collecting 'stuff' to be subjected to some analytical process when back on the small island, identified core assignments I wanted to explore earlier in my fieldwork period and so concentrate on those - possibly using these core assignment to drive my observation activities rather than the level or cohort structures imposed by the course. I will need to rethink my strategies for the new research site which exist on multiple campuses and have more complex staffing considerations to take into account.

But on a more personal note - I'm actually sad that I have to leave my current research site - I'm just beginning to 'fit' in and become valuable to staff thus becoming both visible and invisible in my presence. I've also attached to certain students - and would love to see their continued development as they progress through the course and go make a living in the real world - big big *sigh*