The Use of Freehand Drawing as a Means of Teaching Research Methods in a Business School

This chapter discusses the results of educational action research designed in response to pedagogical challenges of teaching social science research methods to business students. The main aim of this research was to develop a more participative and engaging approach to the delivery of a research methods module to business students based on a ‘students as researchers’ pedagogy. This has been achieved by integrating the theme of ‘student satisfaction’ into the teaching content on a research methods module and by introducing a freehand drawing activity as a research tool to generate some useful data related to the understanding of students’ lived experience at the university. In this chapter, we show how collecting and analyzing students’ freehand drawings allows for illuminating the subtle, yet complex, phenomenon of student satisfaction from a student perspective. We propose that by exploring students’ lived experiences through the medium of freehand drawing, students and teaching professionals can enhance their critical understandings of what constitutes a satisfied student. Selected examples of students’ drawings are used to explain how the analysis of visual data can help both students and teachers explore issues related to student satisfaction in a novel and insightful way.