English 305A:
    English Novel 1700-1900

                                                                               Spring 2006


Stephen C. Behrendt
319 Andrews; 472-1806
office hours: 11-12 and 2-3 TR
and by appointment

sbehrendt1@unl.edu

Email Stephen C. Behrendt


The Research Project Portfolio; or, And Now for Something Completely Different


For the portion of your course work represented by the "research project," we are going to ask you to prepare a portfolio of research materials – but NOT a typical, finished "term paper" – to satisfy this part of the course requirement. Please read on.

The "research project portfolio" is NOT meant to be a "paper" in the usual sense. We want you to spend your time working on research – on detective work, discovery, following the trails, finding new insights (and resources) – rather than on writing, so that you will be able to look at the largest and most diverse set of research materials possible. Your grade for the project will reflect both the extent and sophistication of your research and the extent to which you suggest how all this work (and all these materials) could be made into a really good (and interesting) paper or project, if you had the time and leisure to create that paper or project in the usual way and to the fullest extent of your abilities.

In this respect, your portfolio should represent an expanded set of study notes that you develop by consulting various sorts of research sources. You may go on-line, of course (remembering that many on-line sites are only as reliable as the persons who set them up, and that many contain vast numbers of errors of fact and inference). Ideally, your portfolio should include at least 50% of its materials from traditional print or other "hard" media sources (photographic reproductions, etc.), so that less than half of the contents will be downloads from on-line sources. Think of the Research Project Portfolio as a personal (and personalized) documentation of your own individual, private research into a topic related both to this course and to your own particular personal and career interests and expertise.

You may choose any topic that interests you, so long as it is directly connected to any of the texts, authors, subjects, or contexts we are examining in this course. Once you have selected one or more possible topics for your project, we would like you to run it (or them) by one of us to make sure that you are doing something appropriate. This will prevent both surprises and disappointment later. It will also allow us to be of some help to you as you work.

You may want to begin thinking about your Research Project Portfolio by considering the following suggestions about what the finished Portfolio should contain:

1. a cover letter or introductory statement that explains the form, format, and substance of the Portfolio as a whole. It should say why you have chosen to follow the direction you have followed, what principles guided your research and your selection of materials to include, and what you see as the relationship among all these materials (including your reading notes) in terms of the sort of paper or other project that you might write or create from these materials. In practical terms, this statement should tell us what to expect in the Portfolio, including why the materials you have chosen are important, both for you personally and for the "picture" they help to draw of the subject you have chosen to examine. And (to repeat), it should briefly describe or explain the sort "finished product" you could create from these materials

2. a table of contents that identifies each component in the Portfolio in the order in which they appear.

3. a set of research and study materials that reflect your individual efforts better and more fully to understand the subject you have chosen as the focus for your research project. These materials may take many forms: paper copies of essays and articles (entire or in excerpts), visual materials, downloaded materials, original work, etc. For each item, you should provide the following information:

a. the exact source of the materials (give complete bibliographical citations for print and visual materials, complete URLs for Internet downloads);

b. a brief statement (a sentence is plenty, and it need not be a grammatically "complete" sentence, at that) explaining why you consider the selected item important enough – or interesting enough – for inclusion; and

c. another brief comment (as in "b," above) on the item's relation to the "angle" on the course you are developing in your own work and approach. You can even put the information for b. and c. on sticky notes, if you choose large enough ones.

4. a relatively brief summary statement that explains what the value of this entire Research Project Portfolio project has been to you. What have you learned? What did you discover that you might not have expected (including about your own interests and abilities)? What (if any) additional questions or areas of inquiry have emerged that you have not had time to pursue?


Submitting the Course Portfolio

Our last class meeting is on Thursday, 27 April, and our Final Examination is on Thursday, 4 May. We would really like to be able to return your portfolio to you at our final meeting, so that nothing but the Final Exam will remain. This means that you will need to submit your Course Portfolio no later than Tuesday, 25 April. We will of course be delighted if you can give us the portfolio earlier than that, simply because it will give us additional time to read it and see what you have done. But we really must have it no later than Tuesday, 25 April.