Reflections On Doing Qualitative Research

Abstract

A ZBTE article on the methodology used for research into mentoring and the professional development of student teachers at Masvingo Teachers' College, Zimbabwe.In this paper, I reflect on the methodology I used for a research into mentoring and the professional development of student teachers of Masvingo Teachers College. This was a case study of the mentoring programme. Masvingo Teachers' College and six of the schools to which it deploys student teachers provided the context for the programme. I adopted the Constructivist interpretive research paradigm in order to obtain the perceptions of the three groups of participants involved in the programme on a regular basis, i.e. lecturers, student teachers and mentors. I used such ethnographic techniques as personal accounts, observations, interviews and documents to collect data. Qualitative data analysis procedures were adopted for analysing, interpreting and presenting the data. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these techniques in this paper. The paper also presents a summary of the major findings of this study