Amendment needed to be made, mainly on Methodology Chapter.
Comments for improvement are highlighted (Methodology Chapter). 1. the ordering of that material isn’t clear or logical enough at the moment 2. that you don’t go into sufficient detail when you explain your philosophical positioning, for example, or when you are justifying the choices you have made; these need to be connected much more closely to your topic and to your research questions 3. you don’t refer to enough methodological literature yet. You don’t need to read again from scracth; however you do need to revise work you did on UER and use that of those notes and readings to help you.
Can I suggest that you begin by making a 1,000 word outline for the chapter. In that outline you should indicate (using bulleted lists f it helps) the points you intend to make under the following headings 1. The interpretive perspective on education research 2. A qualitative approach to researching education 3. The value of case study 4. Methods used in qualitative case studies: their pros and cons These are issues with the methodology framing if the dissertation too.
The deference of the ‘critical’ paradigm as a research perspective is insufficiently well justified. More needed to be said about the interpretive methodology adopted, how its inevitable limitations might be overcome as well as its relevance to the study undertaken. While interviews were covered adequately, the use of the journals was identified as a research method on one hand but not discussed as such in the methodology chapter. As a result, the analysis of the issues themselves lacked depth and coherence.
It wasn’t clear to me how the themes identified connected to value education, hence why the artistic activities, however valuable, were contributing to value education in anything more than a very general and everyday sense. The dissertation is reasonably well written.
However, if the aim of the dissertation was critical exploration, it wasn’t clear enough what the criteria were against which judgments were being made, making critically difficult to attain. The finding, particularly the art work did suggest a very clear link between value education and the visual arts and demonstrated the skills of the candidate as an educator but not a researcher, nor is it clear how the reflections on the work represent new knowledge in the field, given the weak theoretical framing of the thesis altogether.
For methods and methodology adopted for the thesis, the project aimed to support students to produce reflective journals, which mainly involved text and graphics and the content of the reflective journals described on p.18 and on p.52-3 was too brief to show what was actually involved in the teaching and learning process. The use of short film “Heaven’s Lunch” was helpful, see
but required further analysis in order to elucidate the extent to which the artistic activities genuinely promoted in the pupils concerned a genuine change in their values -explain why hasn’t included researcher’s observation of class sessions, observation can strengthen case study? -Weak on the robustness of the themes that had been identified through data collection or how they connected to earlier writing in the thesis about value education -Description for Figure 1.3, and the final conceptual framework of the research on p.41 and were not persuaded by the account that was given.
With a stronger theoretical framework for the study from the outset and a clearer focus based on a more substantive literature review, it would be possible to include significantly more analysis and discussion based on the fieldwork already taken -Has potential to contribute new knowledge to the field but unfortunately, this potential has not yet been fully realized
To revise the Methodology chapter so that there is greater clarity between the Methodology and Methods being deployed; the activities undertaken to collect data need to be described in more detail and justified -To review the findings of the study, and to develop the section focused on its implications and conclusions, drawing on the strengthened theoretical framing of the study