Adapting voice-centred relational method to understand students’ experiences of synchronous online tuition

Abstract

This article presents the methodological approach taken to investigate students’ experiences of synchronous online tuition in health and social care at a large, distance learning university in the UK. Seeing the students as the ‘privileged knowers’ on the topic of their tutorial experiences, this study took an experience-centred narrative approach and used voice-centred relational method to analyse the data. This paper will explain and then discuss the two ways in which voice-centred relational method was adapted for the purposes of this research: firstly, the particular approach taken to the construction of the I poems in the second stage of the analysis and secondly, the addition of an extra listening, adding a deductive lens to seek out evidence of the different types of presence from the Community of Inquiry framework within the students’ narratives. These adaptations provided additional insights into students’ experiences and made aspects of these experiences more visible to educators.