ABSTRACT
The 'rivers of reading' activity that originated with that study proved valuable as one of four research methods. To make their rivers of reading, the students created collages of their personal reading histories, thereby generating data that made a significant contribution to the rich descriptions of diverse readers developing out of the project. The rivers of reading were, in initial project, loosely designed as critical incident collages. However, at that time, understanding of the critical incident technique as a research method was confined to what knew about it from colleagues working on image-based methods with students as researchers. Before embarking on research had already gained experience of using the critical incident technique with teachers who were mentoring student-teachers within the Cambridge Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE). For them, the task was to plot onto the winding river critical moments in the student-teachers' PGCE year when mentors needed to support them through particularly challenging experiences.
