Thesis Projects

Alright Gentlemen,

I'm sure the two of you are working on your thesis projects, so I thought I would share with you the outline of my own. I am currently in the process of writing my thesis proposal, which in my program counts as my comprehensive exam (comps).

As part of SPF 301 Culture and Schooling, I require my students to keep a journal over the course of the semester. The prompt for each week is simply, "How does what we are discussing in class connect to what you are seeing in your placement sites?" The journals have approximately 14 entries each and there are approximately 30 students who completed journals and agreed to let me use them.

I want to analyze the journals using critical discourse analysis as a method to uncover the hidden and underlying meanings within the text. I wish to focus specifically on race. I will share with you that already several themes are emerging from the journals including race as something to be overcome and race as an excuse. I then want to place these finding side by side with my own pedagogy and practice in the class. These journals are representative of a particular place and time and I am the intended audience, meaning I am an inextricable part of these texts. Using the method of practitioner inquiry, I wish to explore my own aims and goals as the intructor for this course, as well as the stated aims of the course from the syllabus to determine whether or not the students, while engaged in the practice of critically interrogating their own pedagogy, also critically examined their own held notions of race.

That's what I'm working on day and night these days. What are the two of you working on?