Composing Your Research Project

The research project offers you the opportunity to get coaching and support from the very beginning of the project through to its completion. Your research will entail learning to use Hamilton Library's resources to find scholarly books, scholarly print journal articles, and scholarly online sources. We will participate in a number of workshops presented by specialty staff at the library--the same people who conceptualized and put into place the English 100 Students page on their web site. Along with these workshops we will hold a number of review sessions focused on your evolving drafts. It is critical that you arrive on time for these class meetings, with your prepared materials, and attend each one, so that we can help you conduct research in the "writing as a mode of learning" style rather than resort to a last-minute hasty piece of writing that didn't enable you to learn anything at all.

Your topic must be related to sustainability, but as the Sustainability Web Site reveals, the topic of sustainability is vast. You can approach this topic from almost any discipline, making it accommodating for our course, in which your peers will be envisioning a variety of majors. In addition to helping you become a better research writer, we want these research projects to go beyond the usual aim of fulfilling a requirement for an instructor. We want our class to be able to use this research to teach us all about various topics that we could never cover individually. Thus the research assignment connects with our emphasis on collaboration as a key part of the course.

In addition to the scholarly sources in print and online that you will find, you may certainly bring in other sources, including interviews. By the time we begin this project you will have interviewed at least one person (as part of the Mapping project) and you will have written about at least one place in Hawai‘i in some detail. You can certainly build upon either of these experiences in planning and conducting your research.

The final product will be 8 - 10 pages long (minimum), with a Works Cited or References list that includes several scholarly sources (and possibly some lay sources, too, depending upon the topic). When we compile our class web site, these research projects will constitute a central part of it, so we will want them to be as stellar as possible. As with the other major writing projects, we will decide upon the evaluation criteria as a class, once you get a sense of the possibilities.