Dear teachers (old, new, and not yet practicing),
In a few weeks, my composition class will be embarking on the BIG research paper adventure. I'm not looking forward to it, if only because I have to re-learn how to teach them all the steps of the thing, which is something that I have internalized.
That aside, I am seeking some advice in terms of their topic. I want to give them the freedom to write about something that matters to them so that the paper is more than an fruitless exercise, but I don't want the topic to be too broad (ie: "write about whatever you want!") Therefore, I am seeking general topics that will allow for a variety of subtopics. One example is "education." That narrows the focus a little bit, but it allows them to pick something within education that matters to them.
Thoughts? Other suggestions for similarly broad, yet not too broad, topics?
Yours sincerely,
Rhetorical Twist
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10 years ago
7 comments:
teachers (old, new, and not yet practicing)
You left out "former"!
What I did was keep a collection of specific questions I was curious about, and assigned them to students as research projects. This was before the Wiki, see, so it saved me a lot of legwork.
"Government" could be a fun one ;-)
Or "Technology," (which, broadly considered, is pretty darn open-ended, but I think in a good way).
Government is a little broad. How about political scandals?
Oh, wait. Also to broad...
*too*
Typo - not stupidity.
"World Cultures." The nice thing about this topic is you can manage to fit almost ANYTHING under this topic. As my class realized as we tried to come up with a "thematic unit" topic. :-P
I tell my students that in a composition class, we study language and communication. So, that is the umbrella topic for the research project. I get everything from perspectives on emerging technology (think Twitter or, geez, blogs!), to arguments about what constitutes censorship, to the origins of cuss words. Fun!
Thank you, all, for your ideas. I shall consider them well.
Now I just have to re-learn how to teach a research paper...
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