Application Unit: What do I want to research?
We have explored many questions, texts, and topics throughout the year. What has really interested you? Join a team of peers who share your interests, come up with your own research question, explore it, and report back to the community about what you have learned and why they should care about it. When beginning to research important questions, we often encounter an overabundance of information. We work conscientiously with our sources, understanding that each one has a particular relationship, understanding, stake, history, and involvement with the issue.
We will develop skills, methods, and learning habits that build our proficiency in conducting deep research on a topic. We will learn to ask important questions about our world, use those questions to critically explore the themes that interest us, and, consequently, open ourselves to new knowledge. Building off of what we have learned in previous units, we will deepen our abilities to find information, evaluate the validity of our sources, make connections between ideas, and organize what we find.
As we move through our research, we will return to our initial inquiry questions and refine them, coming up with better, richer answers. Eventually, this exploration will lead us to a growing perspective, rooted in deep understanding, and it will strengthen our ability to express meaning in any medium. Throughout the course of our work, we will reach out to our community by listening actively to others and building on their knowledge. Finally, we will take on distinct roles in our team to write and deliver a detailed, clear, and engaging final presentation to our audience. We will evaluate each other’s research, reflect on our own breakthroughs and challenges during the research process, and benefit from our peers’ responses to our work.