Book ideas...

So, I'm driving home and I'm thinking about my research and my dissertation project. Just starting to draft this article for TETYC has already been a useful way to reflect on the work. I understand the project so much more now and I think that drafting the article will help me to conceptualize it better than I have, perhaps, previously.

As I was driving home, I began thinking about a structure for a book. I've done this several times now. One thing I knew all along is that I don't think the chapters are sufficient the way they are. Although, I get the impression that Tom has always thought that they were. I have never thought that they were. The thing that I have grappled with, as I wrote about in an earlier post, is the limitations of the study. I interviewed the students, but did not follow them through coursework and did not talk to their teachers. I'm not sure I would even call this project ethnographic. Case studies. I come back to that.

In any event, yesterday afternoon I sat down to try to nail down the key implications of the study and to organize them and to think about the order in which I want to present them in this new article. Doing so brought me back to the realization that the two most interesting parts of the study, for me, are:

1. The students' school and literacy histories.
   
2. Learning about the role that writing plays in the students' professional lives.
   

And as I was driving home today, it hit me that this might be a way to organize the book--a chapter on each of these. I'm not sure how this will flesh out until I get more into the work of drafting the article. But, I can easily see these two items filling up two meaty chapters. And there is research that I already know or own that could be brought to bear on each of these two chapters. The question, then, is what about a third chapter--because it seems that these things are often five chapters. I feel like one chapter could be an overview of research on adult education. I feel like stepping away from comp and drafting an entire chapter summarizing current research on adult education (andragogy?) might be useful. And I still feel like I'd like GSC to somehow be a part of this book--to think about GSC as a participant in the study. A thick description of the school itself. I'm not sure where this fits. 

So, anyway, I feel as though I may be discovering a new structure for a book, based on this process of drafting the new article. This is good. I've always thought I would be organizing the chapters around participants, as Sohn did. But then, I don't know, I've always second guessed that, too. And I've definitely come to the conclusion that there is a richness to the project which is lost if I just focus on three students. 

The project continues to evolve...