One of the most useful activities we completed occurred
on Day 3 when we conducted a model focus group in class. In completing the
model focus group, I followed some basic guidelines for conducting
discussion, supplemented with observations I have made of videotaped focus
groups. These techniques include asking several individuals the same
question, asking follow ups such as why or “can you explain that further?”
or similar questions, bringing in props to provide a common basis for
discussion, reading short passages of text and asking for reactions, and so
forth.
For the model group, I began by having us sit in a
circle. I explained that we would be considering questions about the
relationships between appearance and professionalism.
I then distributed several unlabeled individual
portraits I had gathered from the Internet based on searches for various
jobs: a lawyer, a garbage collector, a hair replacement clinic director, a
veterinarian, and a college professor, all white males. I asked students
what jobs each individual held, how they made that judgment, and so forth.
In each instance, I chose images that, while not always confirming
stereotypes, nonetheless did not go against them. I had included a question
on my protocol where I asked students to identify which individual was a
college professor, but they managed to spot him easily before I even asked.
I probed them carefully when it came to this image specifically, asking what
subject the individual taught, what the image “said” about professors, and
so forth.
In the next segment of the focus group, I passed out
nine images, again unlabeled, of college professors who taught a variety of
subjects, this time a mixed-gender and multi-ethnic group. I told the
students these were all images of college professors, and then asked them
several questions, such as what each professor taught, whose class they
would most like to take, who was the hardest grader, and in whose class they
would learn the most.
I had also brought with me excerpts from two
publications. The first was a wry and self-deprecating feature article,
written by a college professor, on professors’ general sartorial ineptitude.
The quotations dealt generally with professors’ “look,” the fact that
students do not generally notice our clothes, and also the greater amount of
critical attention students pay to female professors’ wardrobes. I read the
extracts and we discussed the issues they raised in turn. The other article
was a piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting on a
study that found a correlation between high attractiveness ratings on
pictures of professors and their student evaluation scores. This study found
a stronger correlation between beauty and evaluation scores for male than
for female professors, a fact that allowed us to revisit questions of
gender.
When the focus group concluded, I commented that while
I had begun saying that I was interested in questions related to appearance
and professionalism, I was (obviously) more interested in those questions as
they related specifically to students attitudes towards professors’
appearance.
[Note: Were I asking students to revise the focus
group paper by adding another method, I would revise the discussion to make
sure I led into that properly. For example, if I wanted students to add an
artifact analysis, revising the focus group by conducting an analysis of the
object their focus groups discussed, I would avoid such nebulous
categories as “appearance and professionalism.” Instead, I will explain very
specifically that the concern is with clothes. What clothes do people
wear, in what ways are those clothes an expression of self, in what ways do
they express membership in a group, and, especially, how are students’
values in terms of clothes reflected in the judgments they make about
professors? That way, I could make sure their focus group research focused
on an artifact, thus leading effectively into the next phase of work.]
After I explained the purpose of the focus group, we
discussed various techniques I used, how they compared with some of the
techniques Lowe apparently used, and thought carefully about how they would
conduct their own focus groups based on what they had learned. After the
model focus groups, most students felt much more comfortable with the idea
of leading their own and began developing their plans for how they would
pursue their theoretical questions through the specific activities they
completed in the focus group.
In my class, I followed a similar procedure, except
that I had a student conducting the model focus group, using questions he
had designed for his own paper and using several other students in the class
as members of the focus group. Remaining students were to take notes—on both
what was said and how well the focus group achieved its purpose. There were
plenty of mistakes made by all, including the instructor, but the mistakes
were clearly part of the learning that occurred during the lesson. Even
silences and digressions helped observers understand how a focus group might
work in real life, what the timing might feel like, how conversation might
ebb and flow. Having a student conduct the focus group took the pressure off
me to conduct the perfect focus group and allowed the activity to be a
sort-of group practice session. Also, some of the results of the model focus
group were not what the leader had anticipated. This led to an important
discussion of how a writer should write the paper around the evidence rather
than bending the evidence to fit the paper, and gave us all a concrete
example around which to understand this principle.
