On Wednesday, Mar. 3, I found out that I had passed the third of my qualifying exams for my PhD. This means that I will be moving into the final phase of this process, the research and dissertation writing phase. I'm a little intimidated by this last step, and a little unsure of how I will feel going through it! I decided that as part of the journey, I would start a blog to track feelings, play with ideas, maybe get some feedback from kind supporters, and generally think out loud along the path. Instead of a written journal for some of my research ideas and notes, I'll add those here as well.
My plan for my research is to look at the representations of disability in children's literature. I'm planning to use a narrative research method--to see what the books tell me about the social construction of disability. Currently, I'm thinking that I'll lay the foundation with an overview of disability history--how different models of understanding disability have evolved over time, and how representations of disability in children's books have illustrated the contemporary model of the day. The real focus of the research will be on contemporary books...probably within the last 20 years or so, to get a picture of the current social construction of disability. I'm assuming that I'll be focusing on a small number of texts--most likely less than 10. I'll visit a variety of sources to identify the titles--the reading lists and award winners for the Schneider Family Book Award and the Dolly Gray Award will be good starting points. I suspect that selecting the final book titles will be a challenge--I need to choose books that I can work with and that I won't be sick of after repeated readings and analysis!
Some possible titles from recent readings:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Rules by Cynthia Lord
Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco Stork
The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd
More title possibilities to come...
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