Maintaining Direction

My literature review is getting quite messy and quite large in a not-so-useful way.  It’s packed full of information, but some of the information has no clear direction or transition from one topic to the next.  This “messiness” has been my major concern for the past week, and today in class we organized our ideas and sources visually in hopes of making connections that are sound, as well as identifying where gaps exist in the literature or concepts we’ve studied thus far.  I found as I created my visual that there were probably far too many gaps than I want.  I’m still not sure at what point in the literature I should stop searching, and which things should or shouldn’t be included in my final literature review, but at least I’m in the mindset of cleaning up my mess.  

My greatest concerns lie in the fact that there is so little concrete information about a variety of huge, yet essential, topics related to my study:

• Education in Tibet vs. education in India
• Education for Tibetan refugees in India
• Tibetans and Indians appear to go to both Tibetan and Indian schools…
• Educational learning expectations of special educators
• Quality and quantity of special educators and special education/services
• Understanding of diagnoses of individuals with disabilities in India
• Disability law in Tibet and India
• General public’s view on disability vs. professionals’ and practitioners’
• View on disability in general

This is just a small list of topics that are extremely underdeveloped, but also underlie some of the major themes of my project.  It’s hard to have a solid foundation as a literature review when the literature reviewed is so flimsy due to the fact that it's so few.  Nevertheless, this activity was extremely helpful for me to determine which aspects of the literature still need reviewing, and specific search words I can use.