Home » flags » propose-flag » sample-proposals » independent-inquiry » Sample Proposal: Independent Inquiry

Sample Proposal: Independent Inquiry

College of Liberal Arts

Please direct all questions about the flag proposal process to the Center for the Skills & Experience Flags.

LAH 350 Treasure Hunt in Campus Archives: Giving Voice to Hidden Histories

Department of Liberal Arts Honors

Please describe how students will engage in independent investigation and presentation of their own work through the course. Please explain specifically how your course engages students in the process of inquiry in your discipline.

In this course, students will learn about the purpose and process of archival research in literary, cultural, and historical studies. Students will first learn how to develop analytical, comparative, and historical questions about primary source material in an archive. Students will then learn how to situate those questions in a scholarly critical context and use that context as a foundation for targeted research at the Harry Ransom Center, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the Benson Latin American Collection, or other archival collections. Students will practice these skills in a series of short analytical essays, online response papers, and a guided midterm research project using materials at the Ransom Center, all of which will be presented informally in classroom presentations. The course will culminate in an independent research project in which students will identify archival materials on campus that (unlike the high-profile material at the Ransom Center, for example) have little attention or research done on them, and that maybe align or overlap or include or are part of marginalized conversations: African Americans, LGBT, women, Mexican-American/Latin@, first nations, etc. Their goal will be to use their research skills to build an “island of order” around an item or small set of items in one such archival collection to give it voice it otherwise would not have. Through the development of an online exhibit, students will demonstrate the ways in which their selection helps to deepen and refine both the scholarly community’s and the public’s understanding of specific critical and historical questions.

What kinds of projects, artifacts, presentations, or performances do your students produce as a result of engaging in this process of inquiry?

Students will produce 6-10 short essays and response papers, one substantial midterm paper, and one final research project. Short essays and response papers will be opportunities for students to practice applying analysis and research skills to archival materials and to report some of their initial findings in their research projects. For example, to learn how archives preserve evidence of the creative processes that goes into the production of cultural objects and texts, students will do a comparative close reading of two variant early printed versions of a Shakespeare text. To familiarize students with the meandering, selective, and allusive way cultural histories form, students may write up a report on an historical production or film of a play read by all students in the class, and then compare their findings with each other. Another short essay may ask students to find a scholarly article on the topic they are researching, and to use it to identify important research questions in their field and to critique existing scholarship to find opportunities to develop their own investigations. Then, in a more involved midterm project, students will work either independently or in pairs to describe and contextualize an “island of order” that can be built around an item or small set of collection materials at the Harry Ransom Center. This first “island of order” project will be guided by the instructor and curators at the Ransom Center, in order to help students learn how to make significant critical claims around pieces of primary evidence and how to connect disparate sources to form a cohesive – perhaps even narrative – context for those claims. For example, one “island of order” students might be able to explore at the Ransom Center could be focused on The Diary of Anne Frank. They would closely read the diary, research its publication history and what is known and uncertain about the history of Nazi-occupied and post-war Amsterdam, and then they would use the Lillian Hellman Papers and related collections to research how Frank’s tragic story was turned into a Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning play. Their midterm paper could then examine the ways Frank’s book’s transformation into a cultural phenomenon affected the Western world’s perception of the Holocaust. Finally, in students’ capstone research project – which will occupy most of the second half of the semester, they will work to create their own “island of order” on a topic of their own choosing at another archival collection on campus. They will then publish an online exhibit that both contextualizes their chosen archival subject material for a public and scholarly audience and makes a critical claim about its significance. I am working with the Learning Programs Librarian at UT Libraries (currently Elise Nacca) to identify collections on campus that will be suitable for such projects, to work with various archives’ staff to facilitate visits by undergraduate researchers, and to develop a technical support strategy for students’ production of online exhibits. Provisionally, I may also organize a public symposium for students to present their projects and showcase how their work helps to give voice to otherwise hidden or marginalized collection materials around campus.

Please explain what independent work students will do in this course. If students are engaged in team-based projects, explain how every student will exercise responsibility for and independence with some portion of the project.

Most work students will do in this course will be independent. Students will begin to define their own critical questions about archival collection material in the first short essays they write for the class. They will hone analytical skills on details in texts of their own choosing that appeal to their own interests, even when working from texts read in common by the whole class. While they will be guided by the instructor and archive staff throughout the class to help them make choices and see the relationships between different sets of collection materials, students will be asked to define their own research parameters and even to select their own readings for much of the class. Students may collaborate for their midterm “islands of order” paper at the Harry Ransom Center, but in doing so they will each be tasked with clearly defining their individual parts of the research and final work product for the instructor and presenting the final paper to the class in tandem. Finally, the capstone research project will be fully student-directed from start to finish; i.e. from selecting an archival collection to work with, to describing an item or set of items in that collection, to defining a research question for that collection, to researching the critical context for this question, doing interpretive analysis, and publishing that analysis using an online platform for multimodal writing.

What pedagogical strategies do you use to prepare students to undertake the inquiry process in your course? If applicable, how does the work that students produce in this course build upon skills or knowledge they have developed in previous coursework?

My key pedagogical strategy for this class is “scaffolding.” The writing and research students produce in the course will build upon any previous research experience they have in libraries and with databases of scholarly articles. Students from a variety of disciplines are welcome (especially history, gender studies, film, English literature, theater, and humanities) and their various experiences and interests will inform the class’ analytical approach to texts and archival materials. While prior humanities research experience and critical close-reading analysis of texts will be helpful, the course assumes that all students will come to archival research as novices and will benefit from learning some basic methodology not only in how to use archives, but also in how to develop research projects. The short essays and response papers will lead students through the basic elements of humanities research, show students how they build upon one another, and how they can be applied to archival materials: i.e. how to analyze and critique primary sources, how to find and engage with secondary sources, and how to discover the historical contexts necessary to understand and develop critical claims about archival materials. The course is intended as a practicum to teach undergraduate students how archives can be used to inform humanities research questions. A secondary goal is to encourage students to consider using archival research in future seminar, thesis, or graduate-level work in their disciplines.

Please specify what percentage of the students’ grade is based on the process of inquiry described above. Note that for a 3-hour course, at least one-third of the course grade must be based on the students’ independent investigation and presentation of their own work. (Students’ independent work must constitute one-half of the grade for 2-hour courses and all of the grade for 1-hour courses.)

The final capstone research project will be worth 35% of students’ final grade. The midterm “islands of order” project will be worth 25% of the students’ final grade. The remaining 40% of the grade will be apportioned between the short essays and response papers, participation, and attendance. Since so much of the class is designed to facilitate students’ processes of inquiry (and each process will by necessity be independent for each student based on the materials and topics they choose to investigate) I consider all the writing assignments for the course to be based in independent inquiry and critical thinking. While the instructor will be directly involved in shaping the students’ questions and investigations, the midterm and final projects will be based fully on students’ independent investigations and presentations of their own work.