Today we met in the classroom to go over the information about Birdwood and the Garth family that we had already gathered and to try and develop our primary objectives for further exploration. At this point in the process, we had acquired a fair amount of information on a variety of aspects regarding the history of Birdwood. However, it was not entirely clear how it all fit together and where we would go from here. We decided to do a brainstorming session with the information and knowledge that we had discovered both as a group and individually to see if any common themes arose. We wrote on the board the different topics we had touched on and what questions we might try to answer as we continue our research. By the end of our discussion we had managed to develop a list of several aspects of Birdwood’s history and cultural landscape that we felt would be beneficial to investigate further within the scope of our class.
The brainstorming session allowed us to organize our information and look for the central questions that we wanted to answer regarding the Garth family and their plantation home. Once our objectives were more clearly defined, we were able to bring together the information we had gathered as individuals to assess how it all fit together and contributes to the bigger picture of Birdwood's history. The rest of the time we dove deeper into our research, working both independently and in small groups. We utilized various searching methods to learn more about our topics of inquiry and identify resources that we felt would be helpful to pursue in our continuing research.
Students working on exploratory research