Practicum: Interview Project on Public Education

Undergraduate / Graduate

This one-quarter practicum in qualitative methods aims to develop interview research skills, including instrument design, questioning, transcription, thematic analysis, and write-up, in the context of a mini-BA thesis trial run. The topic of this version of the practicum is public education. Students will engage in interviews with informants in different roles in education, potentially including teachers, administrators, policymakers, and education researchers. Meant to prepare Public Policy Studies students for the BA thesis process, each student, using interviews conducted by themselves and their classmates, will formulate a question related to public education and construct the component parts of their own research paper, which they will submit at the end of the quarter.