EDU621: Research Objective and Interview Questions

EDU621 A5

A5a Research Objective

My research objective is to “identify the effect documentation of project material usage has on 9th grade technology classes”. In order to complete this objective I will interview four teachers and a supervisor at A1 Regional High School District (a pseudonym) in a suburban town in New Jersey. One of the teachers is Ms. A.(all names are pseudonyms) a 9th-12th grade Engineering and Technology teacher with fifteen years of experience. The other teacher is Ms. B. who teachers 9th grade technology classes and has three years experience. I will also interview Mr. C who is a 9th-12th grade woodshop instructor and has fifteen years of experience. The last teacher I will interview is Mr. D., a 10th-12th grade technology instructor, who has 40 years experience as a teacher and supervisor and helped write technology standards for NJ in the mid 1990s. And finally I will interview Mr. E. who is the Technology Department Supervisor for A1 Regional and has 15 years of experience in schools, 8 of them in a supervisory role. My initial reasoning for interviewing the teachers is to begin to generate a narrative for how they may or may not integrate student reflection on material usage into their projects. I will also be utilizing these connections in the classroom to observe and collect data on material usage and conscientious student thought on sustainable prototyping. I am interviewing Mr. D and Mr. E. to begin to understand how material consumption has been viewed at a supervisory role and to understand any outside influence on material consumption in classes.

A5b Protocols

Interview Protocol for Classroom Teachers

• Can you summarize your professional experiences and your primary job responsibilities?
• Briefly summarize how sustainability relates to the Technology Department.
• Do you put a limit on consumable materials for your student projects? How so?
• When the students are heavily into prototyping, does that limit change? How?
• How do you believe material constraints affect student performance? Please explain.
• As a teacher, how do you manage materials within the class or project?
• Do you engage your students in work to think about their material consumption in class?
• Do your students calculate how much material they use in a project? If so, how?
• Have you ever run a project that had a focus on material constraints or sustainability? Expand please.
• How do you define waste or scrap?
• What do you do with your waste material?
• What project do you see as the most wasteful?
• How do you deal with students wasting materials?
• Have standards or curriculum ever driven material constraints or sustainable usage of material in your projects? Expand.
• Do you reduce, reuse, or recycle at home, what and how?
• Do you have a project related to sustainability that you’d like to implement?

Interview Protocol for Technology Supervisor

• Can you summarize your professional experiences and your primary job responsibilities?
• Briefly summarize how sustainability relates to the Technology Department.
• How is a materials budget established for the Technology Department?
• How do you budget materials for each teacher in the department? How do you differentiate?
• How do you believe material constraints affect student performance? Please explain.
• Have you ever implemented any sustainable design units with focus on materials? Why or why not?
• Do you engage in conversation with the department focusing on material usage?
• Has the Technology department ever made a conscious effort to recycle or reuse scrap or waste materials in a project?
• What happens with waste material from the Technology Department?
• Do you keep track of material usage from year to year? How and where?
• How do you define waste or scrap?
• How do you deal with students wasting materials?
• Have standards or curriculum ever driven material constraints or sustainable usage of material in your projects? Expand.
• Do you know of any other schools that recycle their materials? How do they do it?
• Would you consider pushing teachers and students to recycle material and scrap? How so?
• Would you consider pushing teachers and students to reduce the amount of materials the use in projects? How so?

Extra tool 1: Weighing the scrap buckets or sorting and weighing scrap materials from each class at the end of each day during projects.

Extra tool 2: Have students submit their files for digital fabrication via a form so that we can document the estimated material consumption for each print, as well as iteration number, and basic usage statistics for each student, class, and project.