My research starts with specific questions and attempts to systematize them:
- Why is disguise in Le Morte Darthur and The Faerie Queene alternately accepted and rejected in the narrative episodes of the texts?
- How can a communication center justify acquiring a set of tools when they have not yet found an application for them?
- How can tutor training create tutors who can help a wide range of students, rather than just those tutors who think like their students?
- How do writing center tutors and subject tutors respectively think about tutoring? To what extent do students follow those similarities and differences?
I often start inductively at the level of the text, the utterance, the tool, or the practice, adapting research and theory to find satisfying arguments and explanations for what is going on.