Heads up: This post is 12 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
After months of secondary research, using Systems Thinking to better understand our perspectives on the situation, creating Network Pyramid Diagrams to find our network of influence, characteristic spectrum of different types of parents, coming up with hypothesis, objectives and topics… we are now in the process of honing in on the parent profiles. Today, we revisited our “topics journey” and reflect on how we successful / unsuccessful we’ve been using it to interview parents so far.
We had a special guest mentor today, Narayan Silva from Brazil. Narayan had travelled to Northern Europe to research on the world’s most famous transformative schools, he later came across people recommending him to check out the YES Network in Hong Kong. He came to Hong Kong and learned of the details of what YES Network does from Thousand Lim. Turns out what YES Network is doing IS transformative learning, and so we are students of transformative learning! Awesome! :)
After creating the “topics journey” and using it to interview a few parents, we found the process to be more difficult than we had anticipated. Partly may be because we’re new to this type of interviews, it was hard to get past people’s guards, to gain the rapport in order to dive deeply into what they really think. Narayan helpfully mentioned that he had the same experience, and that a good way is to first interview “experts”. So for example, we want to find out more about parents, instead of interviewing many different types of parents directly, we can first identify the experts who deal with lots of parents, hence can give us a much better understand much quicker!
It was easy to see that Narayan’s way is better. We spent some time to revise our questions for the experts, then we looked at the parents characteristic spectrum to identify experts in the four different quadrants. Action steps for tonight, contact the experts to arrange for interviews.
If you know someone who works with parents of young children (0-6), can you contact me? You can send mail directly to 100village.org. My name is nick. Thanks!