Making Research Relevant: The Shoes on Your Feet, The Words in Your Mouth, The Borders They Crossed

I love research. To be perfectly clear, I love the idea of research. I love that there are people who dig, dig, dig for answers to questions. I love that they are passionate about finding those answers and truthful in the the relation of those findings.

Yesterday, I wrote down three questions that, in my notebook, I labeled "Research Questions Worth the Time and Intellectual Effort of American High School Students." I would amend that to include college students as well. They are:

Who made your shoes?
Why do most Americans speak English?
How many Americans come from immigrant families?

They are simple and they are wide-open--and they are direct in their indirection. In the first one, I'm not asking them to research human rights, sweatshops, corporations, outsourcing of jobs, or any other hot button issue with direct language. Instead, I'm skipping the technical terms that experts use on television or in published articles and simply asking them to look down at their feet and start thinking that somewhere somebody had to construct the shoes they see. That can lead them to a lot of places, including human rights, sweatshops, corporations, outsourcing of jobs, and many other hot button issues. It's a back door approach. Really, it's a student-discovery-centered approach, and it's connected to their lives, not some abstract idea.

Asking them why Americans speak English is the same approach to get them to think about a) the cultures and languages that enter(ed) America, b) what happens to cultures and languages in America, and c) how language is liquid and always changing. Asking them about immigrant families brings the present and the past together and highlights the nature of the formation of the current United States.

Discussions of terms and theories and abstract ideas can be tacked on to these concrete questions. Some people are more apt to think in terms and theories and abstract ideas than others; everybody can look down at their shoes and ask who made them.