Developing my Research Question 1- Stuck in the Moment

Ok.  I have to say it, "I need help."  Why needing help is such a big deal for me to admit is beyond me, but I am in that place and I am saying it.

HELP!

I cannot conceptualize a research question to save my life.  I have been sitting here, literally sitting, for 3 hours digging through notes, thoughts, books, websites, articles and my sub-conscious (to the best of my ability anyway).  Sad to say I am no further along than I was back in the summer of 2009 before I began my doctoral program.

I had a meeting today to discuss my upcoming pilot study.  The meeting ended with one goal- determine a research question.  OK then.  Now what?

I have gotten good, no excellent, advice on how to begin thinking of my own research agenda.  I am guided to ask myself the following questions:

1. What are you interested in knowing?  
2. What bothers you the most?  
3. What intrigues you? 
4. And my favorite (truly, it is my favorite.  I am not being cynical): What keeps you awake at night?

So I sit here and openly think through these questions with you...
1) I am interested in knowing who it is that is excluded/marginalized and why on earth anyone would allow that to happen?  Following that I have to ask myself if anyone really allows marginalization to happen, or if bigger "forces" in society are at work. And if so, what are those abstract "bigger forces"? Which leads me to #2.

2)  I am most bothered by the fact that the same groups of people tend to be excluded from opportunities and have narrowed life choices decade after decade in multiple countries.  This really bothers me and I see this playing out in schools everyday.  That bothers me even more.  I see schools as one of the many democratic spaces in society, and am truly bothered to my core that many people do not have the freedoms to choose the life they may choose to live because of experiences they are segregated from.  That bothers me.

3) So what intrigues me?  Today I am intrigued by the observation that many places and faces work tirelessly to "combat" exclusionary cultures in schools, yet system-wide/nation-wide hierarchies of people and groups of people persist. It's like inertia.

Now onto #4...

4)  What keeps me awake at night?

Man this is a good one.

A lot of things keep me awake at night.

• I lay in bed thinking about the kind of schooling my children will be a part of and what that will socialize them into thinking and doing.  
• I worry about living in a community where children with various labels attached to them are not a part of the day to day classes and experiences that my children will are.  Most importantly, I worry  what this "teaches" my children.  
• I worry about my kids having to compete along the same lines as everyone else to make their place known in the world and to be able to progress through the same curriculum as every other child.  
• I worry about their creativity and what will happen to it.  
• I worry about how they will learn to view themselves in a world of diverse people when they grow up alongside only those (because of how the society we live in is geographically and demographically organized) that seem on the surface to be just like them in a lot of economic, cultural and racial ways. 
• I worry that I won't get the opportunity to meet some amazing people and that my children won't have the opportunity to develop critical friendships with important people because our society is segregated along artificial lines of human difference.  
• I worry what is happening to our world and why we are so obsessed with the bell curve and where each individual falls from that norm (or varies from a mean performance). 

 I worry about a lot.

And so now I travel back to my task... finding a research question.  I am no more closer to this than I was 3 hours ago.  To borrow Bono's words I've "got myself stuck in a moment and I can't get out of it". (U2, "Stuck in a Moment")

I don't have the skill set today to craft questions that address the worries which keep me up at night.  I am not trained in critical research and I have very limited experience reading sociological pieces.  That is why I go back to the books I have, and why I continue to search for others.

Am I awaiting the illuminous moment that a question comes to me like a spark of light?

That just doesn't make much sense.  If I want to be a researcher I need to figure out how to do research.  That means I need to do research, because I learn best by doing.  Therefore, I need to come up with a researchable question.

HELP!