I’ll be honest: I’ve been stressing about this paper since my acceptance letter came in the mail. I had no idea what I was going to write about, and since I assumed that we were each expected to come up with something novel and exciting (ground-breaking, even), I already felt overwhelmed by the time we did our orientation. So, when Dr. Milner handed us a list of potential topics the other night, my sigh of relief was probably audible to everyone at the dinner table. I felt even better when I was reading the chapter in our book on “Selecting a Research Topic” and the authors suggested that originality is not necessarily akin to greatness and that there is even a need for replication in educational research. Once I was halfway through the chapter, I was feeling exponentially better than I had during orientation dinner, and by the time I reached the list of resources they provided for helping student researchers find topics of interest, my confidence and determination were soaring to unprecedented heights: I would find something interesting to study!
Upon closer examination of Dr. Milner’s list, the first topic that jumped out to me was “Adolescent fiction’s effect on student engagement.” Having been a high school student myself once, I know how much high school students love to argue that the reason they don’t perform well or don’t participate in English class is because they aren’t being allowed to read what they want to read. I would be very interested in a study that demonstrated whether or not allowing students to read literature catered to their age group or even books of their own choosing (within reason, of course) had a significant effect on classroom participation or student attitudes. The problem with a study such as this, though (for our purposes at least), is that it is somewhat experimental in nature, and would be impossible to undertake if none of the teachers we observe are implementing this exact course of action in their classrooms. So…there goes that idea.
Having re-examined Dr. Milner’s list for more stand-out ideas, I’ve found that I’m very interested in studying the kinds of questions teachers ask (exploratory versus controlled) and who they question. I’m not sure yet whether I’d like to sub-divide the latter part of this question by gender, race, or some other variable, but I definitely feel like the idea at least has potential. Going into the classrooms with a spreadsheet set up for tally marks would be doable, and I, for one, would be interested to see the results. :)
5 comments:
...and I just realized I made a significant grammatical error in my editing by accidentally leaving both "is" and "because." Sorry. Pretend that I said "is that" or something. Sorry.
For what it's worth, Brianna, the content of your blog is good enough that even I, a grammar Nazi, hardly thought about it.
I realized that I have many of the same ideas you have, and even some of the same initial worries. Luckily, as English people, Dr. Milner gave us a head start. I think the questions asked in the classroom could show great results for our research. I look forward to seeing if our curiosities and research questions remain closely related.
Brianna,
Even though it might not be entirely plausable to do a study on the use of Young Adult (YA) Literature in the classroom, if you are interested (and any other English people as well) I would be happy to find my list of YA lit books that a professor at ASU gave my class. Most of the books on the list can be connected in some way with a theme or idea present in canonical literature.
Relax, Brianna. This is a do-able project. If you are interested in Adolescent Fiction, you might interview or survey teachers to see what choices of literature they make and how they feel it impacts their students. Or you could interview or survey students. You probably won't be able to change a classroom and observe the differences, but you can always ask about it. That would be interesting and useful...and maybe exciting!!
Brianna,
I think you should go with the "questions" topic because as Dr. Milner said, you will find more related literature there.
I think it would be interesting to focus the topic, perhaps on gender as we've discussed. However, I think it might be even more useful to watch this trend across class levels. If you have the chance to watch both an honors and regular English class, for example, see which kinds of questions the same teachers ask there. As we've read, students meet teachers' expectations and may think on more concrete levels even on EOCs because it is what is expected.
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