Using Search Everything
Using the default search on the Library website is not perfect, but knowing a few tips for ways to filter your results can help.
- Choose keywords that represent the concepts you are looking for explicitly. You could start with a very general search like "early childhood" and "crip theory"; or "early childhood" and "participatory action research", and then perhaps refine your search further by adding phrases like "children's rights" or "curriculum"
- Use the Discipline/Subject filters to narrow your results to subject matter that is more relevant to your context:
- Education
- Sociology and Social History
- Social Welfare and Social Work
- Women's Studies
- Gender Studies
- Queer Theory
- If you limit your results to Scholarly/Peer Reviewed you will eliminate books. This is not necessarily an issue, but if you find you are having a hard time locating relevant content, you may want to try to take off that limiter and try looking at book content. While books are not the same thing as a peer reviewed article, they are still considered acceptable scholarship for academic assignments.
- Try using a subject specific database such as ERIC. The advantage is that you are assured you are only searching education related material, and there are search limiters that can help you narrow your topic down by things like grade or age range. Other subject specific databases can be found in the Early Childhood Studies research guide.