For the last 5 weeks of the quarter, you’ll work on a research project on a topic of your choosing (but related to themes introduced in the program). The project is an opportunity to deepen and integrate your understanding of program themes, expand your knowledge through research, improve your ability to work in teams, improve your writing and oral communication skills, and start to prepare for the candidacy paper winter quarter. In choosing a topic for the project, keep in mind that you have few constraints. The project topic should:
- relate to the Pacific Northwest, but it can be a comparison between some geographical area (or endemic PNW topic), contrasted to another area of the country, and
- concern issues of interest in the PNW, preferably those covered fall quarter: cultural landscapes; regional dynamics, physical characteristics, and ecological relationships; regional environmental decision making, policy, and political ecology; Native American tribal interests; watersheds; global climate change implications; energy; nuclear waste remediation, long term data repositories.
The two major deliverables for the project are:
- a research paper (~10 pp, written individually); see Guidelines, and
- a panel presentation with the others in your Affinity Group.
You will also be asked to write peer evaluations of others on your panel, of other panel presentations, and, in your self evaluation, reflect on what you did and learned from your project.
Schedule: We have staged work related to the project during the quarter, as below. Intermediate project deliverables will include project idea submissions and discussions, a project proposal, draft of your paper, and presentation outline or draft.
- Finding, submitting, and refining the topic (Weeks 4-7)
- Project topic area and talking circles (Week 4)
- Written project idea and discussion with affinity groups (Week 5)
- Using the library for research and Zotero http://www.zotero.org/ (Week 5)
- Submission of final topic proposal (Week 6)
- Forming Panel Teams (Week 6 or 7)
- Refinement of topic proposal (Week 7)
- First draft of paper (Week 8 ): email draft of paper to your seminar faculty by 5pm, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. All drafts must be formatted as ___.doc or ____.rtf (You can give your faculty a draft Thursday Nov. 18 for email feedback and then turn in a more refined version Tuesday.) Please also post the draft to the moodle so other students in your affinity group can see it.
- Panel presentation Outline (Week 9)
- Final paper (Week 10)
- Panel presentation (Week 10)
- Feedback on other panel presentations and feedback to your panel participants (Week 10)
See each week’s schedule, as it is posted, for specific due dates and modes of submission.
Faculty evaluation of your project work will be based on: Timely submission of project deliverables, active participation in the panel, and quality of the completed assignments. Plagiarism (as always) is grounds for no-credit. The evaluation will consist of a brief description and evaluation of the research paper, and a description and evaluation of the panel presentation (both as a whole and individual contribution). The following will be taken into consideration for the project evaluation; percentages are estimates of the relative importance of each criterion:
- ~20% – on-time submission of project assignments,
- ~10% – how well the project relates to program components and themes, and reflects learning and integration of those,
- ~20% – panel presentation, including how well the panel worked together,
- ~50% – quality of final paper: content and style.
