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Engaging with Previous Research in Your Doctoral Thesis
Paul Trowler
其他書名
Beyond the Literature Review
出版Independently Published, 2018
主題Education / Schools / Levels / Higher
ISBN19767781319781976778131
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=23ONswEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋***Now includes checklist for your draft reviews . See also the new video about the book on Paul Trowler's Amazon author's page ****** This short book is designed to be helpful for doctoral researchers, probably doing a PhD or an EdD, as well as those project researchers who are tasked with conducting a review of literature relevant to the project but who have limited experience of this task. Readers are invited to start at the beginning, to engage with the examples I have offered, and to continue to the end: unlike some this is a decidedly linear book.I have approached this topic in a way which is different from most texts about "writing literature reviews". It is not just a list of dos and don'ts, offering advice about process of writing a chapter. There is some of that, but the headline differences of this book to most of the others are these:* It acknowledges that pious advice of the normal sort is very difficult to follow, and explains why this is the case* It shows that switching the focus from the nature of a "literature review chapter" to you, the person doing the researching and writing, is more likely to be helpful to you* It depicts both helpful and dangerous orientations that researchers may have in approaching the literature and shows how a dynamic and protean approach in relation to 5 key helpful orientations is best* It gives examples of engagement with literature to illustrate the points being made in the book, but more importantly....* You are invited to consider some short examples and to consider the approach taken by their authors* This is designed to encourage you to surface your own perspective/s on the task of engaging with the literature * The book helps you to approach literature engagement in a more informed way, fully aware of sets of assumptions and understandings you previously held that may have been submerged* It explains why the usual term "literature review" is unhelpful. This is where I begin......The phrase "literature review" is not a helpful one, though it is almost universally used. It suggests that there is a clearly defined body of work, "the literature", which needs to be addressed. It also suggests that addressing it involves "reviewing" it as one might review a film or a book, pointing out its merits and its demerits. Therefore the phrase "literature review chapter" can lead to an image of a sequence of reviews of different parts of a self-evident the relevant literature. Writing such a chapter in that way has been referred to as the "narrative approach" (Aveyard, 2014) which can be dangerous for reasons I discuss more fully below. Rather than talking about "the literature review" it is more helpful to think in terms of "mobilising previous research to your advantage." The verb mobilising is used very deliberately here. It has military connotations, and these can be defensive or offensive. The same is true of the verb 'engaging' (as in 'engaging with the literature'). In this case the military analogy refers to a defensive purpose: defending your thesis. This involves deploying the literature and engaging with it in such a way as to set up your arguments in the thesis to give those arguments an easily defensible, solid basis. Just as importantly, for those countries in which there is an oral examination (a viva voce), a well-considered and appropriately constructed mobilisation of previous research gives the candidate an advantage in arguing their case in person to their examiners.