"Beginner's Mind"

This week I began to delve into the book related to researching youth, Representing Youth. This piece of literature looks like it will present a clearer understanding of youth and how to best approach research when dealing with that age group. One key point I'd like to remember from the book is the idea of a 'beginner's mind' - "which involves suspending preconceived notions and recognizing different conceptual locations when we enter into the research relationship, to meet participants on their own terms and to understand their locations". Brilliant. Similar to a tabula rasa, with an added awareness of youth. The author included a variety of opinions and viewpoints in this first chapter, yet concluded with this 'beginners mind' concept which reminded me a little of the proposed set up for the upcoming integrated literature review assignment. I appreciated how both sides of the coin were discussed throughout the chapter, and one piece of advice I especially liked was the idea that certain perspectives on dealing with children should not be considered blueprints, rather as guidelines. Additionally, I noticed how the author specifically delineated teenagers as an integral youth sub-group worth consideration, however did not seem to focus on other youth sub-groups, such as toddlers, or tweens. Lastly, the teens materials class I took last semester came to mind, as I recalled the 'teen brain' where the brains are not as completely developed as adults in certain areas. Despite this potential handicap, I do believe that youth of all ages have different strengths that adults have lost over time. I hope that if I were to be working with youth in research in the future, pointers such as these will assist me greatly in 'representing youth'.

The Creswell reading on mixed methods research design was somewhat of an overview of qualitative and quantitative methods, with added facts of the integration of these designs. I was surprised to learn that this is a relatively new approach, and therefore many of these integrations have yet to be implemented, or at the very least, published in journals. One of my group members recently abstracted a "qualitative/quantitative" study. I thought perhaps this should be referred to as a mixed methods study, but she told me that this was how the authors dubbed the research. Perhaps this is because of the newness of the mixed methods design.

The literature review assignment is due in about a month. I've already saved many articles I've found on my subject of library summer reading programs. Based on this week's video lecture, it seems that this is essentially a research paper where a query is analyzed and discussed through peer-reviewed journal articles, or other scholarly literature works. My 200 class really prepared me well for finding these scholarly articles as it was part of the curriculum, and as this class progresses I'm finding myself more and more thankful for that early instruction. Also, I'm interested in discovering what "mind-mapping" is all about through the suggested site: http://www.mindmeister.com/

General Notes:
I just discovered that Joanne's dissertation topic was the same that I have chosen to abstract. This fills me with some trepidation as I hope to live up to high standards in a world with a plethora of information on any one topic.
Since the literature review due date is coming up, I must remember to put some books on loan that I've mined from some of my journal articles.
Other mined pieces that have older dates seem to be non-existent in the King Library database system. I'm hoping to either find them through Google Scholar or through my own LAPL databases. However, I've discovered that finding the correct database on a less academic system like LAPL, is not as simple as I initially thought.