Sunday, June 23, 2013
Narrowing My Search
After completing the first draft of my literature review, I'm feeling much more confident in my definition of "experiential education." My research helped me establish a theoretical understanding of my topic, but I'm still feeling like I am swimming in a sea of possibilities. I want to focus my thesis on literacy, but again this is huge topic. As I read new articles sometimes it helps to narrow my topic, and sometimes it just broadens what I could possibly focus on. I think that I'm leaning towards a focus on role play and reading comprehension, but then I feel like my topic is too specific. Ahh! I'm having trouble finding a balance between letting my reading guide my thesis, but not determine it completely. Hopefully the more reading I do will lead me to a more narrow topic.
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I feel like the struggle between narrow vs. broad is a legitimate concern for all of us to be continually considering. Perhaps it is one that will rectify itself through more reading on our topics. If you find a lot of research about role-playing specifically, then you can write a whole lit. review on that but if not, then broaden, right? But reading this made me realize that our kind of research is two-fold: You are looking for new great ways to bring experiential education into the classroom while at the same time, trying to find research that shows that this kind of learning is beneficial to students. Because of this, we don't want to be too narrow, or we won't learn any new things and we don't want to be too broad or it won't prove its worth!
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