Weekly Log 3

Getting our professor’s approval for the topic we pitched last week felt incredible. Anj, Harry, and I were excited about breaking a story about a highly overlooked issue. The last thing we could do was hit the brakes; we were oozing with enthusiasm. Following Hunter and his co-authors’ (2011) model of story-based inquiry, we plotted down our main point by using a hypothesis to establish the story’s structure. The examples from our professor and the textbook helped a lot because these reminded us to start with a simple, direct, and concise statement. From our story pitch, we already had an idea of what institution was involved, the issue we wanted to look at, the stakeholders, and the goal that motivated us to reform the given system. Navigating the problem, its causes, its implications, and the subsequent need to push for a resolution enabled us to conceptualize the hypothesis we needed to prove or disprove. As excited as we sounded, we faced hurdles while researching open sources. We browsed through the references from our preliminary research. One article would lead to another. We also visited other online platforms, including government, non-governmental, and academic sites, to skim through topics on gender equality, corruption, and gender biases in the education sector. We were dealing with legislation, reviews, and analyses, but these were primarily general provisions for managing the GAD budget of institutions. There were news articles on Commission on Audit (COA) reports of government units that misused these funds — but none on DepEd.

Click