My first attempt to use the library databases on my own was let’s say, not so successful. I tried many different phrases, “school spirit” and “school pride” were among the phrases I searched in OmniFile. OmniFile presented articles relating to the “Spirit of the Jesuit” and many other religious-themed documents. Unfortunately in the end, I came up empty handed. Many of the articles that I found were associated to the religious aspect of school.
I then tried to search for another word that was identical to “spirit” but did not have a religious connotation. I ended up searching for “school environment” with an emphasis on the positive aspects.
What I found turned out to be very useful. I found an article titled, Student Success Built on a Positive School Climate, which was written by Liz Warner and Patricia Heindel from the NJEA Review.
The article was about how the inclusion of a few minutes at the beginning of the day for students to talk about their feelings with each other helped to foster a positive atmosphere. This time was also allocated for the students to bond from anything from thoughts on the upcoming test, to how one felt about being teased last class.
A big emphasis on the conversation the students had was to focus not on the academics or personal thoughts, but to focus on the emotions behind those thoughts.
“The bottom line: Students get a chance to talk about how they feel at school. The premise of the exercise is simple. Just as students need to learn how to read and write and solve math problems, they also need to learn how to manage their emotions” – Warner and Heindel
In the beginning of my searching process, I was not mindful in thinking of what each word could mean to a different aspect of school. SCU associates “spirit” as a religious word and no mentions of school spirit in terms of the hype students have are acknowledged. This little bit of information may have been useless at first, but then I realized that because the school is based off of the Jesuit values, it occurred to me that SCU may not report on school spirit (as in student’s enthusiasm) because there isn’t:
- Enough student spirit/emotion
- Too much of a religious association with the word “spirit”
Ding! Idea! – Source
Overall, discovering this article provided both things I wanted to find, and things I did not want to find. Those items I did not want to find, however, turned into items I was lucky to find. Thus, fine tuning my research process and proposing new ideas to explore.