As I was presenting my proposal to one of my committee members, I realized that I need to dig a little deeper in my experience. My research certainly does not start with choices. It starts with Agency. That word almost makes me sick now. But it's true, it has a lot to do with why I'm studying choices. I wanted to study choices because then I wouldn't have to define agency, but I could still talk about how a person affects their own learning. But in not including Agency, my study is simply a methodology, not a study for a specific purpose or grounded in a specific field of literature.
Now I am worried because I'm afraid I'm going backwards. I am going back to where I started. If I go back to the original topic, I may lost my methodology. I'm not sure I can rationalize my study from the point of view I'm taking. But maybe that's okay.
When my committee chair took me into his office, he wanted me to study Agency and Learning. But it was that broad, that optimistic. Enter second committee member, who had recently written a theory of learning based on another theory of agency. It sounded great, but when I used those terms to try to rationalize my study, other committee members got upset by how high-level and open my wording was. And since the wording was straight from the author's definition of agency, I figured the Agency was the rotten part. Now time to go back.
No comments:
Post a Comment