PM - Coming Together but Still Stirring...

Writing for me has always been a messy process.  I think I'm more akin to a sculptor when it comes to crafting prose and written thought--slinging ideas in rough, wet chunks to the paper, shaking it, twisiting it, tilting it, flipping it over, and eventually--harvesting what sticks.

My thesis process has been that way.  Although, oddly, slightly less messy than normal.  Perhaps the months of thought I have given to it has acted as an apron on my behalf.

To begin, with, my original question is it's raw April 2013 form is this:  MA Thesis Topic Question

However, as I have read more, attended more seminars and conferences and really shaoed for myself, "What does this mean?", I came to the relaization that I wanted to focus on a savory soup of these key words:  identity, race, culture, purpose, education, learning, democratic students, citizenship, autonomy, critical thinkers.  Add in a splash of Bloom's Taxonomy to taste.  The question is there; I just really have to do the magnetic poetry to make it a cohesive statement that makes more sense to more than just myself. 

Part of that depends on finding exactly what I am looking for.  I want to know how do educators instruct and/or create educational experiences that foster a sense of purpose, identity, awareness, autonomy and critical thinking in their students in order to catalyze caring, democratic citizens?  (A bit of a rough flight, but I sort of stuck the landing as far as where I am trying to go here.)  The other part is finding out how to "investigate" or "gather evidence" on the subject without it being too taxing, complex, and intrusive.  The cart and the horse are vying for position, and I am not sure which should come first!

It's hard to navigate the practicality of my topic, as I am unsure of the methods I will use to investigate it.  I have confidence in the literature.  I have chased down many links and captured them in RefWorks and burned up enough printer paper that I can safely, unequivocally pronounce that my topic is "searchable".  My topic will hold water.  My topic is indeed--peer-reviewed.  In fact, I think peers of those peers have reviewed it.  After all, I am not inventing fire.  My goal is just to re-awaken the topic and add fuel to the flame.

Alas, I am out of halogen fluid.  I am falling captive to the fallacy that I want to "test" it, and I wonder if that will be too much.  I'm 75% sure/afraid that I will completely build this glamorously-involved methods approach and will have to scrap it before even the preview run.  So then, if I have to rely on the literature, I feel as if I will be photocopying the obvious into a Cliff Notes of concepts and labelling it as a thesis. 

My fear is not even that this mimeographed monster, er, "opus" will be my final product, my manifesto, my result. 

My fear is that even after the toil and trouble, I will not have learned something.