What does each set of sources contribute to your understanding of your chosen issue?

EXPLORATION (ESSAY/WEBSITE/PORTFOLIO/MINDMAP/?) Though you’ve kept track of individual research findings on your own, this assignment is meant to help you synthesize your process into a cohesive whole explaining your most important findings to help you start distinguishing between your gathered evidence and your own reasoning about your issue. This exploration is a narrative, beginning with your initial perspective and potential thesis on the issue and progressing toward your (mostly) final perspective and potential thesis. As you take this journey, you’ll chronicle how the sources have worked together to shape and challenge your thinking. This synthesis should focus both on what you’ve found, and what you might still need to find in the last few steps of this course. You should order your narrative with the goal of showing your own evolving perspective as a stakeholder in your issue. You might arrange your paragraphs (or slides or images or) chronologically to show your evolving reflection, or you might focus instead on the clusters that emerged by the end of your investigation. Whatever pattern you choose, your Issue Proposal should offer you a starting place for your investigation: begin with what you know at the outset and walk through the steps that have led to your new understanding. I’ve given you a few elements here to get you started on demonstrating these useful investigation threads, but you should not treat this like a check list I want to see your reflection and investigation process modeled here. A visual/alphabetic representation of how your sources fit together (this is where your genre choice might be especially useful: see below): o What does each set of sources contribute to your understanding of your chosen issue? Where does that understanding overlap or contradict other findings? o How do these sources work collectively to answer your investigation questions? Describe how this set of your best sources works to alter your perspective on the issue: o How do they challenge or reinforce your preconceived notions? How does your full set of sources offer you new perspectives on your issue and proposed thesis? o How did some sources work to open new lines of inquiry? o How did some sources change your identified constraints? At the end of the synthesis, outline your new potential thesis, how it dis/aligns with your initially projected thesis, and what avenues of investigation you still need to pursue as we move into the final stages of constructing your argument. Format: Your choice of genre for this assignment should represent your process and thinking; there are many, many free online tools that will allow you to shape your synthesis in a visual as well as alphabetic representation, which for many of you will more closely resemble your actual exploration. Yes, this means you are not limited to an essay: you should choose something that is comfortable for expressing the process youve undertaken. Ive offered a few samples in this module to help see a range of what can work. A few possibilities are: A quick, one-page website using a tool like Weebly, Wix, or Google pages (using your school account) A Prezi or Powerpoint that walks through your clusters of findings