Having now graduated from University, both Laura and I have been busy moving down the M1 to our new abodes in London... but still with the final evaluation of ttpo# to complete. Now that the dust has settled we're entering the final stages of the project and have been putting together the final evaluation report and case study - drawing upon a focus group with participants held in June and a reflective interview of Laura and me from August. It was probably apt that the latter was conducted by Jamie over Skype, using the excellent plugin Callgraph to record the conversation for transcription.Although I can't say it was a conscious choice to take some time out before completing the project, it has been good to get some perspective and to be able to take a fresh look at what has (and hasn't) been achieved. Some of the things said by participants have been really insightful - interestingly many of them seemed to think that with a normal academic module (or with a "normal" theatre play) you get told what to do a lot more. Other comments were slightly more... philosophical... ("it was led by dreams").
What was good was that for most of the transcript the group doesn't mention either Laura or my name - we hope that this indicates that they really did feel ownership over the project, and didn't think of this as being somehow "ours". This said, there was one slightly worrying reference to us as "mummy and daddy".
I was particularly glad to see that most thought that, despite being incredibly time-intensive, it had not adversely impacted on their studies or exams. In fact some felt the opposite, and it certainly seems this way given some of the excellent results many of the graduates received. Most seem keen to want to continue their involvement with theatre, and there seems to be a consensus that it was a very worthwhile experience.
As a final note for this post, I'm also finally getting round to converting all the hours of video recordings to avi - ready to edit into the DVD we promised! We should also be able to upload the video to these here pages, so at this rate we may be finished by Christmas...
