{"id":50681,"date":"2020-01-13T11:20:28","date_gmt":"2020-01-13T19:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=50681"},"modified":"2020-01-13T11:20:28","modified_gmt":"2020-01-13T19:20:28","slug":"getting-to-grips-with-new-literatures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/getting-to-grips-with-new-literatures\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting to grips with new literatures"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Over time all researchers build a knowledge base about their key interests. A large part of this knowledge is a core set of literatures. They\/we do need to keep up to date, but they\/we can rely on \u2013 and use \u2013 our incrementally expanding personal library of literatures. However, every so often, researchers have to deal with a completely new topic and brand new literatures.<\/p>\n

My colleague Lexi Earl and I are currently writing a book about school gardens. Learning gardens are pretty popular at the moment. They are promoted by celebrity chefs and by environmental scientists alike \u2013 and many schools believe gardens are a great place to learn about the processes and practices of cultivation and\/or to appreciate the natural world.<\/p>\n

Lexi and I have done some research, school garden case studies, and we now have plenty to say. But we thought that we needed to start our book, contracted to Routledge, \u00a0with some historical discussion about school gardens, because now is not the only time when they have been popular. We had a hunch that there might well be something to learn from what had happened before.<\/p>\n

So this meant that we had to find a load of new books and new articles \u2013 well, I mean new to us. And that meant \u2026. reading. And lots of it.<\/p>\n

We were pretty keen to find primary source material\u00a0as well as literatures from contemporary educational historians. And so there\u2019s been a fair bit of archival searching as well as the journal and book based searches we are used to doing.<\/p>\n

We are immensely grateful to the generations of librarians who have catalogued, conserved, digitised and weblogged the books and reports that we are using. The British historian Raphael Samuel often argued that doing history was a collective endeavour \u2013 the introductory thanks to the army of librarians that make writing histories possible are just too little recognition. \u00a0That\u2019s certainly our experience too.<\/p>\n

We have had to come to terms with this historical material fairly quickly. But this history chapter is mine to draft first of all so I have done most of \u00a0the primary source reading. Lexi is focussed on other reading about current school garden issues and so she is adding additional points into my draft.<\/p>\n

But i haven\u2019t just done any old kind of reading. I have been reading with a purpose \u2013 we already knew the key areas we were interested in from our case studies. Because we are taking a genealogical approach (Foucault), we are interested primarily in how gardening in schools is and has been understood and categorised. as well as practiced.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0approached the historical texts with five key questions<\/strong>:<\/p>\n