Final Research Project Options and Advice

As you know, you have to do two options for the final research projects in my sections of Novels and Tales--a Family/Community Migration Narrative Project and a Photograph Research/Creative Writing Project. This page includes the assignment sheets for each options. For answers to frequently asked questions on these projects, which include much useful advice and explanation beyond what's stated below, please click here. To see student projects, click on the following names: Jason Morrison, "Inheritance"; Heather Neckers, "Family Migration Project"; Lauren Wozniak, "Migration from Afghanistan."

Family/Community Migration Narrative Project: Requirements

Your task for this project is to find a migration narrative from your family or community, and, in an experimental essay or web site, relate a version of it, relate it to some aspect of the readings in the course, and reflect on the significance of this relation. Your goal in the project is to find interesting connections between actual migrations in your family or community history and relevant issues, themes, situations, or characters in the works we've been reading, on the one hand, and to reflect on the significance of those connections, on the other. Your project should be making a point about how the connections (whether direct or subtle) between what you've been reading in the course and what you've been finding out about migrations in your family or community have made you see your family/community history differently.

A word on making connections between your family or community history and the readings: while very few of your ancestors (if any) may actually have been slaves, or indentured servants, refugees from war, or survivors of the Holocaust, many of the stories in the course raise larger issues or topics that may well overlap with migrations and migration narratives in your family or community history (see the frequently asked questions page for further advice on making connections).

There are several purposes and goals behind my giving you this option for the final research project:

• Since I believe that general education courses should give you the opportunity to connect the subject matter and modes of analysis in the course to your own lives and people/issues close to you, I have chosen to give you this option rather than simply assign a longer essay in literary analysis than the critical essay.
• Since this course is about the relation between past and present, and between individual lives and large-scale historical processes, I want you to apply to yourself and your family or community the kinds of analyses writers whose works we are reading are applying to themselves and their characters. So as you're reading the literary works in this course, be thinking of them as possible models for your own exploration of the "mystery of [your own] inheritance" (Naipaul) and the legacies of migration among those close to you.
• Since this course is about reading actively and carefully, I want you to apply some of the lessons you've learned over the course of the semester to the acts of listening and researching by probing into your own family's or community's past and drawing out a story of a migration from a living relative or community member or from genealogical documents. Those who are interested in a career as an historian, anthropologist, sociologist, social worker, or journalist will find this segment of this option particularly relevant.
• Since this course is about modes of comparative analysis, I want you to apply what you've learned about comparing and contrasting literary texts from outside the United States to the act of comparing/contrasting an actual American migration narrative that you are connected to personally (either by family tie, friendship, or simply proximity) with a fictional non-U.S. migration narrative or narratives.
• Finally, since all the other assignments in the course reward steady, consistent work and the ability to connect what you're reading with what you write about, this project is something of a culmination of that anti-cramming ethic behind the assignments in this course.

Due: The completed project is due no later than 5 pm on Wednesday, December 19, 2001, in my mailbox in the English Department main office (277 Fenton) or in the envelope outside my office door (240 Fenton). If you choose the web authoring option, your site must be up and running by Thursday, December 20, 2001, and you must notify me over email of its URL (web address) before 5 pm that day. People who are interested in the web authoring option must make an appointment to see me right after Thanksgiving Break. Late projects will NOT be accepted and will automatically earn you an incomplete (I) in the course. You are also required to report periodically on your progress on the project and to bring a rough draft of your project to the last class of the semester (see "process" below).

Format: The standard formatting for your previous essays holds: double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins; title that indicates main argument of paper; heading that includes your name, the course name or number, and the date; bibliography and citations in MLA style (see links page for explanations of this style of citation); proper quotation format--"..." (12). for quotations within a paragraph; blockquote format for quotes five lines or longer. Page length is flexible (although I can't imagine the project being shorter than eight pages), so long as you are devoting sufficient attention and space to each of the three key tasks of the assignment: sharing your family/community migration narrative; relating/connecting it to some aspect of the course; reflecting on the significance of those relations/connections. You will be graded (see "grading criteria" below) on the quality of your performance of these tasks, rather than on quantity of words devoted to each. Similarly, the structure of this experimental essay is flexible: you can draw on many of the techniques the writers in this course--particularly Naipaul, Ghosh, and Sebald--have themselves pioneered or adapted. In fact, you may choose to present this project as a web site rather than an experimental essay; web authoring offers opportunities to play with form, structure, and design that simply are not available in print. It is possible to scan and upload photographs, as well as audio and video clips, onto a web site, relate the story you have collected and presented to the literature we've read, and share your reflections on the significance of these connections--all in unconventional ways (through the use of links, for instance). No matter what medium or structure your project eventually takes, I will be able to provide technical and conceptual help, but I will expect you to put a lot of thought into what kind of reading experience you want this project to be for your audience (the class).

Grading Criteria: Your project will be graded on several criteria: (1) The quality of the connections you draw between what you've found out about your family's migration history and what you've been reading, thinking, talking, and writing about in the course. (2) The quality of your reflections on the connections you've found--how thoughtful and interesting your reflections on the "new perspective" they've given you on your family or community are. (3) The effectiveness with which the structure of the essay or web site helps tie the project together and helps convey your connections and reflections.

Process: As stated above, you must periodically report your progress on this project to me over the course of the semester.

• The first report is due no later than 5 pm on Wednesday, October 3, 2001, in an email addressed to me at bruce.simon@fredonia.edu. In it, you must discuss possible sources of migration narratives in your family (or community if you feel the family avenue isn't promising) and some issues you feel might arise in tracking them down. You should also ask me any questions you have about the project. Your goal should be to show me evidence that you have thought carefully about what doing the project well entails, and have taken some first steps toward identifying a focus for your project.

  In thinking about what you're going to write me, you might consider the following questions: Do you know any relatives who migrated from one part of the country to the other or emigrated from another country--or who know someone who did? Is there a person in your family who got interested in genealogy and already did some detective work on your family history? If it's going to be difficult to get access to your family history, why do you think this is so? (Not just the conditions that would make it difficult, but possible reasons behind those obstacles existing in the first place.)

• No later than 5 pm on Wednesday, October 31, 2001, you must turn in a polished proposal for your family/community migration narrative project, in which you describe specifically what you want your project to focus on and justify that focus by explaining its importance/significance/value, as well as lay out what research you plan to do during the month of November. I will return your proposal during a mandatory individual conference to be scheduled before Thanksgiving Break.

• No later than 5 pm on Friday, December 7, you must turn in a brief annotated bibliography of works you have consulted and plan to consult to provide you with historical/social/cultural/political context on the migration you've chosen to focus on (in MLA format, including a sentence or five on how useful you expect to find each source and how you plan to use it in your project). I can't recommend strongly enough that your bibliography include at least one fairly recent book that gives a synthesis of the best work on the large-scale history of the migration your project focuses on. The other things I recommend that your bibliography include are an autobiography of someone in your ancestor's generation who also took part in that migration and a listing of interviews and other sources you will be using (or plan to use) with or from your family.

• On Friday, December 14, 2001, you must bring a rough draft of your project to class. We will have a peer review workshop session in class that day.

Missing any of these deadlines or turning in work that suggests you haven't been thinking carefully and consistently about this project will hurt your preparation/participation grade, just as making deadlines and showing you've thought carefully about the project will raise it. If you do happen to miss a deadline, remember the old adage, better late than never, and get it in as close to the deadline as you can. It's still possible to pull together an excellent project having missed some of those deadlines, and you will be graded solely on the final product itself: on the quality of the connections and contrasts you're able to draw between the real and fictional migration narratives; on the quality of your meditation on the significance of those connections and contrasts; on the thought put into the way in which your project is organized and structured. But your chances of putting together an excellent final product increase exponentially with each deadline met.

If you have any questions about any aspect of this project, please consult the frequently asked questions page to see if they have already been answered to your satisfaction. If not, please contact me for an appointment or send me an email with your question ASAP.

To see examples of student projects from the Fall 2000 semester, click here.

Photograph Research/Creative Writing Project: Requirements

Your task in this option is to show what you've learned in the course about migrations and migration narratives through the way in which you choose to write a migration narrative of your own that is based on/inspired by a photograph from Sebastiao Salgado's book Migrations (on reserve), your research about the place, people, and situation represented in the photograph, and selected literary techniques from our readings that you feel are most appropriate to the story you want to tell. (For more on Salgado's photography, including selected photos from Migrations and an interview, click here.) Your goal should be to convey in the form and content of your migration narrative something of the social/historical context of the situation depicted in the photograph on which you've chosen to base your research and story, and in so doing, to develop your own angle on the particular contemporary migration you have chosen to focus on (perhaps in contrast to existing "conventional wisdom" about that migration).

There are several goals and purposes behind my giving you this option for the final research project:

• Since I believe that general education courses should give you a chance to apply what you've learned (in terms of both subject matter and modes of analysis) to something going on in the world today, I've decided to give you this option to show what you've learned in the course about migration narratives by writing one of your own rather than analyzing someone else's.
• Since this course is about analyzing how and to what ends writers invest stories of migrations with significance and the ways writers put individual lives in social and historical context and illuminate the global through the personal, I think the best way to gauge what you have learned over the semester about these things is to have you do a "how to/do it yourself" project. In other words, rather than write another essay in which you analyze how someone else does these things, you instead show what you know about doing these things through the way in which you choose to tell your story and what you choose to emphasize/convey/accomplish.
• Since most of the migrations and migration narratives we are reading in the course are set in the past (whether the time of medieval African-Asian connections before the period of European explorations and conquests [Ghosh], the time of European exploration and conquest of the New World [Naipaul], the rise of the slave trade and plantation slavery in the New World [Naipaul, Phillips], the period of genocide and decolonization around World War II [Phillips, Sebald, Ghosh, Salih], or the period of the Cold War and its apparent end [Naipaul, Ghosh, Sam]) or the future (Phillips, LeGuin), I thought it was important to have the final project require you to engage migrations in the present. Choosing a photograph from Salgado's book Migrations and doing research on the situation and people portrayed in it provides us with just that opportunity.
• Since the Family/Community Migration Narrative Project gives you the option to analyze migration narratives "close" to you, I think it's important to have a second option that allows you to focus on something that may seem at first very "far" from you. You might be surprised in the course of these projects to find out how "foreign" the domestic can be and how "close" the "far" can be.
• Finally, since all the other assignments in the course reward steady, consistent work and the ability to connect what you're reading with what you write about, this project is something of a culmination of that anti-cramming ethic behind the assignments in this course.

Due: The completed project is due no later than 5 pm Wednesday, December 19, 2001, in my mailbox in the English Department main office (277 Fenton) or in the envelope outside my office door (240 Fenton). Late projects will NOT be accepted and will automatically earn you an incomplete (I) in the course. You are also required to report periodically on your progress on this project and bring in a rough draft the last day of classes for a peer review workshop session (see "process," below).

Format: The standard format for your essays holds: double-spaced text with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins; an interesting and vivid title that relates in some way to the story; a heading that includes such information as the course, assignment, and date, along with your name; a good copy of the photograph on which you are basing your research and story; a bibliography of texts and web sites consulted during the research process in MLA style; and an author's note (either an afterword or a foreword) in which you discuss the genesis, goals, and techniques of the story (in the course of doing this, you might choose to discuss why you chose the photo/migration to focus on, how you generated a story from the photo, your goals in the story and your reasons for choosing them, the influences on your storytelling techniques and strategies and the reasons behind your choices of which to use and not use in the story, and/or what you discovered while researching and writing it). Page length is flexible, but I expect that the story itself (based on the photograph you have chosen, the research you have done, and the thinking about literary influences you have done) and supporting documents (author's note and at-most-one-page bibliography) will run at least eight pages. (If you get into this, it can run far longer, and I'm willing to read whatever you have written.) You may choose to present your story and author's note as a web site rather than in print; see me for advice if you wish to do this.

Grading Criteria: Your project will be graded on several criteria: (1) What the story and author's note reveal about what you've learned in the course about migrations and migration narratives. (2) The quality of the goal or purpose of the story that you've chosen to tell and how inventively it relates to both the Salgado photograph and your research--how well the story you tell allows you to put the scene depicted in the photo in some sort of social/historical context. (3) The relevance of the narrative strategies and literary techniques that you've used to accomplish your goals/purposes and how creatively and provocatively you've drawn from or responded to writers we've read in the course through the form and structure of your story.

Process: As stated above, you must report periodically on your progress on this project. You may ask for advice or stop by my office hours any time, but you must turn in the following progress reports:

• The first report is due no later than 5 pm on Wednesday, October 3, 2001, in an email addressed to me at bruce.simon@fredonia.edu. In it, you must discuss possible photographs/migrations that could become the focus of your photo research/creative writing project. Your goal should be to show me evidence that you have thought carefully about what doing the project well entails, and have taken some first steps toward identifying a focus for your project.

• The second report is due no later than 5 pm on Friday, October 19, 2001. In it, you must hand in a copy of the Salgado photo on which you have chosen to base your story with a brief explanation of why you chose it, a list of key questions the photograph provokes for you, a discussion of your preliminary sense of the kinds of stories that emerge from it which you might tell, and a discussion of research tacks you have taken and might take. Think of this report as doing a "close reading" of the photograph you have chosen; the same questions that we traditionally ask of literary texts (say, about the significance of important details and patterns you notice, and about what these details and patterns may reveal about the photographer's intentions or goals) can be applied here, so that you think carefully about what stories are implied or suggested by the photo itself.

• No later 5 pm on Wednesday, October 31, 2001, you must turn in a polished proposal for your photo research/creative writing project, in which you describe specifically what you want your project to focus on and justify that focus by explaining its importance/significance/value, as well as lay out what research you plan to do during the month of November. I will return your proposal during a mandatory individual conference to be scheduled before Thanksgiving Break.

• No later than 5 pm on Friday, December 7, you must turn in a brief annotated bibliography of works you have consulted and plan to consult to provide you with historical/social/cultural/political context on the situation portrayed in the photograph (in MLA format, including a sentence or five on how useful you expect to find each source, how you expect it to help you better understand the situation your photo depicts, and how you expect it will help you develop your story).

  I can't recommend strongly enough that your bibliography include at least one fairly recent book that gives a synthesis of the best work on the large-scale history of the place your photo is set in, so you have a sense of the sweep of history in the region over at least a couple of centuries if not a millennium or more. You can use WorldCat (under FirstSearch on the library's on-line databases page) for this search, and ask research librarians to help you evaluate the reliability of the works you find. Our library's resources are limited, so you may have to use inter-library loan to get ahold of a book like this--I recommend putting this request in ASAP, as they always get swamped after Thanksgiving break, which will be here sooner than you think.

  The other things I recommend that your bibliography include are good, reliable journalism on the situation depicted in the photo from the time period of the photo and after (Lexis-Nexis--also on the library's on-line databases page--is a great tool to help you zero in on this; this database includes newspapers, magazines, and much else--it's an awesome research tool; so, too, is Ethnic NewsWatch--see the frequently asked questions page for more research tips). Any other sources are gravy.

• You must bring a rough draft of your project to class on Friday, December 14, 2001. We will have a peer review/brainstorming workshop in class that day.

Missing any of these deadlines or turning in work that suggests you haven't been thinking carefully and consistently about this project will hurt your preparation/participation grade. It's still possible to pull together an excellent story having missed some of those deadlines, and you will be graded solely on the final product itself: on the quality of your research and your ability to incorporate it subtly yet tellingly into the story; on your ability to put the scene depicted in the photo in some sort of social/historical context through the story you tell; on the quality of the story and your ability to engage the reader on an emotional and intellectual level; on the craft with which you incorporate narrative strategies and literary techniques from writers like Naipaul, Phillips, Ghosh, Sam, Salih, and Sebald into your own implicit commentary on some aspect of migration. But your chances of putting together an excellent final product increase exponentially with each deadline met. This assignment is impossible to leave till the last second, so don't!

If you have any questions about any aspect of this project, please consult the frequently asked questions page to see if they have already been answered to your satisfaction. If not, please contact me for an appointment or send me an email with your question ASAP.

ENGL 209: Novels and Tales, Fall 2001
Created: 9/21/00 3:58 pm
Last modified: 2/26/02 4:22 pm