The literature review

During the January 2003 meeting, we had an intense discussion about a "literature review." Marina referred to Dancing in the Dark (Niks et al., 2003). In it the authors wrote quite eloquently about their engagement with the literature in a chapter titled, "The Literature Review We Didn't Do" with playful, yet revealing, subtitles: "Dancing with the Literature: We Waltzed but we did not Tango," "Two Left Feet," "No Literature Available," and "Lack of Energy, Time and Money." They wrote about their struggle to find meaning in the activity of engaging in the literature, challenged the value of such an activity for the topic they were examining and ultimately the lack of meaningful literature to which they could even enter into conversations with. For some, there seemed to be an underlying assumption that practitioners engaging in research didn't have to do literature reviews, that this was an activity for academics to engage in, for their purposes, but not for practitioners. Marina challenged this unarticulated assumption and pushed the group to think about what value engaging in the literature would have for our research project.

Our discussions of doing a literature review were not fluid and linear discussions. It was a complex issue, compounded in difficulty by the fact that few of us had experience with academic literature on ABE/Literacy issues and less experience doing research on our practice and writing research reports. Many of us had written dozens of reports during our professional lives, but not research reports. Most of our debates and discussion about the literature review centred on the idea of what it meant to us. We all knew we were embarking upon new territory, an area of research that didn't have firm rules carved out for it yet. We were fully aware that there were people watching us from the sidelines, funders and other ABE/Literacy practitioners who have engaged in research, and we wanted their support if not their approval. Ultimately, because of time constraints and personal esteem, whatever we decided, we wanted to be clear in our choice. We didn't want to just reject the idea because we were practitioners and didn't feel that was part of our world. We didn't want to read material just so we could toss it in to sound like we were "in the know." We wanted the material to resonate with us, to speak to us, to engage us. With Marina's persistence, Jan's commitment to her ethics committee, Leora's desire to do the best job we could do with this, Judy's push that this did make sense, Evelyn's critical perspective, my optimism and Betsy's hard work, we did locate, read and integrate literature into our project.