Let the Research Begin! Blog Post 1/21

Today we started researching about our topics in class using databases. Mr. Rivers has provided us with a list of databases and their respective logins on the senior paper proposal post on google classroom. There is also a list of podcasts for us to listen to for a better understanding of what exactly we are researching. 

You should be in  your most productive state for researching in class. If this means listening to music, then listen to music on headphones or earbuds. On the contrary, if you know music or people being around you distracts you then you can move your desk. We need you to be efficient students!

We talked with our groups and as a class about what discussion means in terms of how it relates to our senior paper. Discussion is a transactional experience where ideas and thoughts on a certain topic are exchanged. As we research about our seeds, we will see how scholars are making conversations with each other through their different perspectives and thoughts. These conversations can be agreement or disagreement, where scholars’ thoughts about topics conflict. We will also see how our film’s perspective on our seed creates cinematic conversation with our seeds and the scholars that we research. These different perspectives will allow us to synthesize in our paper.

To begin researching, try staying zoomed out of your topic. Answer big picture questions to get a big picture understanding on your seed. This can be done through finding casual conversations from news articles, podcasts or even Wikipedia. These should not be our scholarly sources, but a way more us to understand the context of our seeds. 

As research goes on, we can start to zoom in and ask more specific questions. These questions should start to be answered by scholarly conversations from the databases. Our topics may even evolve as we do more research and that is fine. Our research will answer our questions about our topics with reasoning, evidence and points of views. At the end of our research, we should have two scholarly sources and one film source.