4.4 Peer Critique

Following the field-based Structured Academic Controversy task, participants were assembled in school a few days’ later for the peer critique.  As described in Chapter Three , this part of the intervention was designed to give each group of participants an early opportunity to share their findings from the field with their peers, with a view to using the feedback obtained to refine their conclusions for eventual presentation as PowerPoint files.

During the briefing for the peer critique, participants were told that they would be provided with transcripts of their messaging exchange from the Structured Academic Controversy task.  Participants were instructed to cut out the individual messages and paste them onto large maps of the respective neighbourhoods, trying as far as possible to paste them at the very location which they believed they were at the time of sending the message or taking the photograph.  The rationale for this instruction was to try to contextualise the text- and picture-messages exchanged in space.

To a large extent, participants tried valiantly to follow this instruction.  However, given the sheer number of messages sent, and the fact that participants travelled on foot while in the field, it was almost inevitable that many of the cut-outs of the text- and picture-messages had to abut considerably over each other when pasted on the map.  This led to a rather “messy” appearance, to quote a few of the post-it notes pasted by their peers during the subsequent gallery walk.

In retrospect, the reason for the “mess” was not only because the cut-outs of the messages were so close to each other that they overlapped, but also because by requiring the participants to cut out the individual message cells from the larger transcript table, participants were also removing time index information (and thus temporal context), in the attempt to gain some spatial context instead.  Even if each of the individual message cells in the transcript tables had been each given a time-code (which they were not), it would still have been difficult for a casual observer who had not been a participant in that particular debating task to make good sense of what was transpiring once the message cells had been pasted on the map.

This is first because very often more than one message was sent within the same minute (given the fact most of the perspective tasks involved two teams of two pairs each), and second because the messages would have been sent from quite different locations within the neighbourhood, as participants were explicitly told during the pre-trip briefing that they were to split up in order to cover more ground (and thus gather more pictorial evidence).  It would therefore appear (as should be self-evident) that there remains no simple and cost-effective way to give adequate spatial context to multiple synchronous exchanges of messages in which the protagonists are not co-located.

This chapter has presented and discussed primarily the quantitative data obtained from the intervention.  Among other findings, the data indicates that for participants who had successfully completed the orienteering activity, there was a significant improvement in the matching of rendered objects between the pre- and post-tests – they also used certain discourse modes more frequently; the data also shows that the male participants scored consistently higher in the time-taken for this task than their female counterparts.  The following two chapters will present the narratives of three groups of students as they participated in each stage of the design.

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