Narrowing Down My Ideas!

After looking at other Honors Theses in the field of Education, I started to figure out exactly where I want to go with my project.

I am studying challenged novels and the reasons they are/were being censored

because I want to find out how teachers can choose novels for their classroom library/discssions, and also be aware of the implications that the novels may come with

in order to help my readers understand the severity/importance of censorship challenges, and how teachers can prevent and deal with them

I have also realized a number of things that I would like to "do" or "research" within my project:
-research banned/challenged books and their reasons for censorship
-try to justify why these books should NOT be banned or censored
-observe how censorship effects teachers and students
-understand the consequences of a censorship challenge
-find out how teachers can deal with censorship challenges 
-share how parents can approach a teacher about specific novels, without immediately jumping to a censorship challenge

Mind Mapping

My project is going to center around censorship and banned books, but I am not sure where to narrow it down.  There are a number of different fields that it encompasses:

Education - Dealing with censorship in the classroom

Writers - Authors may write according to how others will read, rather than writing how they want

Media/Communications - How censorship impacts society and the media

Law - What allows people to ban books, freedom of speech, power struggle between people

Psychology/Sociology - Why do people request censorship? Personal lives, power, impact...

Community - Schools and libraries, free service, first amendment rights

Marketing - Publishing and book sales 


My concern is that there will not be enough material for me to research in this field, and that the topic will grow boring after the first few pages.  I need to find the spark among all of the research that will set it apart from just censorship and banned books, but actually grab the reader's attention.  (Maybe something along the lines of choosing books for the classroom, or how censorship impacts teens...)

Introduction

          As a future Secondary Education/English teacher, I am interested in one of the largest problems in both English and Education, which is, censorship.

Questions:

• How do teachers deal with banned books or censorship challenges?
• Is it possible to teach a banned book?  What are the consequences?
• Is there a way to un-ban a book?
• What happens if a student is reading a banned book?
• What if a student brings up a banned book in class?
• Is there a safe way to talk about censorship?

Some of these questions are easy to answer, but others require a bit of research.  I would love to ask teachers and librarians (both school and public) how censorship has impacted their career.  Censorship can easily cause a teacher to lose their jobs, which is one of the reasons it is so important to me.  I feel like high-schoolers should be able to have mature discussions about censorship and be able to read the banned books and understand why some people may be offended by them.