Stern and Evans

What is Stern's methodology?  what skills does she use?  How do the limitations of autobiography identified by Evans apply to Stern's essay? 

Stern's methodology is pragamatic. She is using the autobiographical research to find a solution. She has a few questions she is talking about in her essay. She talks about how she wants to find out it is that did this to her and how it shaped who she is now. In the preface, she first explains about her life and what her and her sister do now. In the chapter, Rape, Stern explains what happened to her and her sister the night they got raped. Since she does not remember exactly what happened that night, so she uses her police report to recall the events from that night. Even though she was in her teens when the rape happened, she becomes angry with herself that she did not do more. Overall, Stern's methodology gives us explicit details into what happened to her the night of her rape and the questions that she is trying to solve throughout the autobiography.

The skill that Stern talks about that she acquired has to do with the fact that she can do certain research that other people probably would not be able to do. In the preface, Stern discusses how what happened to her (the rape) gave her an ability to do research on things that are typically scary to the rest of the world. Because of her experience, she feels that she has this skill that many other people are not capable of.

Evans theory applies to Stern's autobiography when Evans discusses that autobiographys need to make you actually feel something for the person that you are reading about, instead of just collecting information on the person. Stern's autobiography does this by making you feel for her as a person. Even though Stern gives information in a timeline of what happened to her, she also gives you the emotions that she felt along the way of it. I know that when I was reading, I started to cringe at certain parts of this story, and it was mostly because Stern was giving such vivid details through her emotional recalling of what happened to her.

Overall, Stern's autobiography shows the person she has become because of the horrible incident that happened to her when she was younger. She explains that "My unusual reaction to fear turned out to be an asset in this work: I discovered that I could do things that other people find frightening...". This is definitely a skill she has acquired, from a horrible thing that happened to her.

More ideas for Research Paper

I think I have a pretty solid base for what I want to do my research project on. In my last blog post, I discussed that I would like to find out how children learn to read and write based on their learning styles. Since we are not allowed to do research on children, I am going to work with adults and talk to them about the different ways they learned to read and write.

Therefore, my research question will be "Does your learning style affect the way you learn to read and write?"

My plan is to select people to participate in my study, men, women, in ages ranging from 20-65. I am going to get a survey that I will have my participants take in order for me to find out what type of learning style they have. I will then ask all of my subjects the same questions about the way they believed they learned best and what their teachers did that helped them learn the best. I will also ask them about the different ways that they learned to read and write. Once I have collected my data, I will go over the information I have collected and compare it with the survey that the subjects originally took.

Some questions I will pose to my subjects are:
What way do you feel you learn best?
Are you a quick learner? if not, what do you think might have helped that?
What techniques did your teachers use to help you learn to read and write?
Do you remember when you learned how to read and write?

I believe that this will give me insight into the ways that people learn to read and write when they are younger. I believe that this information will help me to be a better teacher and also help me with my curiousity about english studies.

Ideas for my Research Project

In the previous class, we all discussed ideas we have for what we would like to do our research project on. In class, I explained that I would like to do a research project on the ways children learn to read and write. I know this statement is broad, so I was thinking that I could make it more specific by picking a few of the ways that children learn to read and write (for example: how a visual learner would learn to read and write). I believe this would be a topic for me to research not only for this class, but for my further schooling since my major is Elementary Education. As an education major, in my classes we have discussed the different ways people learn, but we never really went into much detail, especially in the research aspect. Therefore, I believe this would be a great topic for me to do my research project on.

While I am home on break during the summer and winter, I work at a preschool. Preschool is basically the main place where children learn to read and write. The preschool I work at goes from six months old to kindergarten. I think talking to the kindergarten teacher and watching the students while they are learning to read and write would give me great insight into my research project. I would like to ask the teacher if she notices the different ways that the students learn and then I would like to watch for the differences in the students ways of learning. As a hopeful teacher and a person who is interested in english studies, I believe this is one of the most important things for me to understand. Furthermore, I would love to research the different ways that students learn. I think it will be interesting to see the way a visual learner learns to read and write as opposed to a spatial learner, and so on.

Along with watching the students at the preschool, I think it will also be important to research different books on the different ways that people learn and how it affected the way children learned to read and write. A possible question could be: are logical learners better or worse at learning to write than spatial learners? Lastly, I am excited to get a start on this research project. I feel it will be me more insight into the head of a child and to help me understand how to become a better teacher.

Methods, Methodologies, and Skills

Methods- Research methods are concerned with how you carry out your research. The choice of the method will depend on the kind of research one wants to conduct.

Methodologies- Unlike research methods, methodologies are concerned with the perspectives you bring to bear on your work. Different people bring different perspectives on their analysis of a given text.

Skills- Research skills are techniques for handling material. For example, there are many different skills that one must acquire for postgraduate work in English.
Some of these skills are: 1. search skills in libraries 2. editorial skills 3. bibliographic skills 4. dissertation skills 5. IT skills 6. period-specific skills and lastly 7. professional skills

Overall, a person's methods, methodologies, and skills will probably be different for whatever type of research they will be conducting. The above factors will depend on the research they are conducting because they might have to tweak the way they conduct research depending on what they are researching. Also, the way a person researches can change if they are working with other people because no ones way of conducting research is the same.