First goal

Now that comps are done with (THANK GOD!!!), my next task is to knock out this lil thing called a prospectus. Since Boot Camp is (primarily?) a place for setting goals and submitting drafts, i'll spare the details for my place. By this time next week i'd like to have completed my reading of Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff and Johnson's enormous follow-up work to Metaphors We Live By) and have a substantially revised draft to an article that i submitted to a journal in our field. Now, you might be thinking that focusing on an article at a time when i should be drafting my prospectus would be a distraction. The truth of the matter is, you're probably right. In some ways it probably will be/is a distraction. However, my justification is that i'm just double-dipping. The article - which is on some research i did on high school student athletes' effective ways of learning in classrooms and on bball courts - needs to have some serious beef added to the theory section. And here is how i plan on making this a useful prospectus exercise:

The theoretical framework for this article (and, at this point anyway, my diss research plans) includes Dewey and Vygotsky's notions of play, Vygotsky (and Neo-Vygotskians) theory of concept development, Bakhtin's/Dewey's/Vygotsky's social theories of dialogism, Merleau-Ponty's theory of phenomenology, and Lakoff and Johnson's elaboration of and unification of phenomenology to concept formation/development.
All of this may sound like a lot. And it is. I know this. I should note, though, that dialogism and social aspects will, for the time being, remain in the back seat - very subtle, almost implicit-like. Primarily i am concerned with concept formation and development as it relates to the body and language use. This means i'll focus mainly on Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty and Lakoff and Johnson (with some words, possibly, about Dewey and experiential stuff).

So there it is. My first diss-related goal: establishing a theoretical framework for research on student-athletes' learning as an inquiry model for reconfiguring classroom space for 21st century learning/training.