Making Sense of the Literature: Establishing Links, Broader Contexts and Emerging Questions

Over the last week I have been continuously searching for literature (both Arts-based research books and literature that directly links to my inquiry). As I have discussed in other blog posts, I have found it difficult to establish links and ‘logical orders’ of and between individual articles, books, videos and documents.

As a result I created a spider diagram using the individual literature I had reviewed for my inquiry question, ‘what are the teaching approaches that contribute to classroom engagement?’. Here I have used the Author and year as the ‘title’ and bullet pointed their main arguments underneath (based on the research ideas of Blaxter, Hughes and Tight (2001) Blog Link). I have sorted each text into a category, using colour but also shown where there are links and comparisons between the literature too. I found that this process helped me to understand the literature and just how many similarities there were between these pieces of research.

I have taken the advice of the BAPP students from the online session and researched the reasons why students engage in drama. I have found this a difficult process because I haven’t discovered any sources that directly research why students engage in drama. For me, this confirms my believe that my own assumptions that students engage more in drama compared to English was in fact just that ‘an assumption’. However, there are links in the literature to the topics that we discussed in the group Skype and reasons, which could suggest why drama can be used as an engagement approach. I then remembered the work we did in Task 5b: Ethics from Professional Sources on reviewing policies in our place of work. Therefore, I researched documents from the Gov. website created by OFSTED in addition to the Arts Council England Report for Drama in Schools. Again I have ‘mapped’ my ideas using a spider diagram.

Today, however, I found a really exciting ebook for my inquiry by Christenson, Reschly and Wylie (2012) ‘Handbook of Research on Student Engagement’. This book consists of 35 chapters by different authors all specialising in a variety of engagement topics. Reviewing this book and its individual chapters in detail has enabled me to ‘place’ my review in a broader context. I now understand in more detail the main theories of engagement, the main debates around the topic and the key authors in this topic area. It also allowed me to understand where my pervious research on teaching approaches (above) fit into the context of the current discussions.

Although this blog doesn’t contain in depth analysis of the research and theories I have discovered, I found that explaining this process was an important part of my inquiry. I have found that many of the theories presented have challenged my thinking. In particular, many of the texts and videos discuss the ‘pressures’ and ‘reality’ of teaching and how this impacts on teachers approached in their lessons. This is something that I would like to explore in more detail in my interviews. Although, I need to establish how I can do this ethically in a none-bias way.

I am hoping to write my literature review over the coming days and hope to post sections of this on my blog and SIG.

Reference List

Blaxter, L. Hughes, C. and Tight, M. (2001) How to Research (Second Edition), Buckingham: Open University Press.

Christenson, S. L., Reschly A. L. and Wylie, C. (2012) Handbook of Research on Student Engagement London: Springer