Epiphany Amongst the Tulips

This week, whilst on international duty with a school trip in the Netherlands, I am reading papers 91, 92 and 93. I wish now that I had catalogued them differently and distinguished between a book and a journal article, but it is a little late for that.

From out of nowhere, or rather from simply being next on the list, Paper 92 was Norman, J. Unrau & Matthew Quirk (2014) Reading Motivation and Reading Engagement: Clarifying Commingled Conceptions, Reading Psychology, 35:3,260-284; and, as the title suggests it focused on sorting out the tricky concepts of engagement and motivation which are fundamental to my study.

I think this would become one of my 'desert island papers' if I had to write this thing in splendid isolation, and feels like a moment of breakthrough in terms of defining these ideas. In a week where I should have been enjoying the cycling and the tulips and the stroop waffles, I was busy trying to articulate ideas in relation to the focus group interview questions and lesson observation schedules so that they could be more clearly tied to either engagement or motivation.

I enjoy these moments where writing and thinking are inescapable forces. Often, it seems, I am forcing myself to sit down and read or write something, but this paper seemed to force me, so that on my glorious morning cycling commute to work which took me along the Harderwijk waterfront, I was busy mentally composing sentences and revising questions which I had to commit to paper as soon as I arrived in school. 

Or perhaps it is simply travel broadening the mind!