Brainstorming Potential Framework to Focus Pathways

The past week has been a wild ride, working on putting together my annotated bibliography for my thesis framework. I felt that I really began to understand the many sources of literature that fell under my framework. Finding all of these scholarly sources was challenging, and I kept second guessing myself as to which ones would be appropriate. I have been struggling with the fact that I still am unsure about what I want to focus my research on, therefore it is hard to be confident in any of the work that I am doing at present. Presenting my progress and concept map in front of our theory class helped me to gain more confidence in myself and my work, having no problem talking about the research that I have done thus far. At this point I think that my next steps should be working towards finding a few options for my focused thesis research, as well as refining and finalizing my framework. A few very rough ideas that I have had about focused research are listed below. 

• Compiling a group of different curriculums from elementary school garden programs and doing a rhetorical analysis by comparing and contrasting different curriculums to find common themes and ideologies.  
• Putting together my own unit of curriculum based on research done about garden based education and climate change education, as well as an understanding of childhood development. 
• Creating a map and informational resource showing locations where garden education is happening in elementary schools and contrasting this data with other statistics such as income, access to fresh food and others. 

Thinking about all these options, it is clear that one or many of them may fit together into my final outcome. The problem that I am then grappling with is, what is the point that I am trying to make from all this research? I want to be able to contribute to an educational platform that is inclusive to all backgrounds, locations and has to potential to change the way that students think about where their food is coming. Students would learn through examples of problematic situations in our current food system and work on brainstorming solutions. As of now I think I need to work on identifying a few choice problematic situations, relating these back to theoretical frameworks and concrete examples. These types of curriculum would provoke questions such as, can students be a voice for change? Can problem solving with students create global models for change? Overall it is clear that I am still working though many aspects of my framework and focus questions and content, but writing it out and verbalizing it helps greatly with this process.