I'll begin by echoing everyone else in saying that talking these issues out with everyone else has been extremely helpful to me. I still don't like the phrasing of my research question and I think I can do a better job of explaining the connection between the two ideas in my question, but I feel much, much better about my actual project. I feel like I have a much better grasp of where to start with my literature review, which is a huge relief for me because that's seemed like a fairly daunting task because I could see so many different ways to go with both the project and the research and now I feel like it's a more manageable project.

Problem:
I feel that my students lack critical thinking skills, specifically that they take texts at face value when they are presented to them and that they fail to understand or differentiate value between different historical records and texts. I want to see if having student's go through the process of creating a historical record of their own will change the way they approach other texts. It's interesting, while looking up an article for my paper for Sharon's class I came across an editorial in the New York Times about the Texas State Board of Education revising their Social Studies Core Curriculum. The editorial argues that student's "... deserve to have a curriculum chosen for its educational value, not politics or ideology." I agree with the sentiment of the article but I think the fact that it exists highlights the fact that other teachers also recognize that student's do not critically engage with the texts they encounter in the classroom. The editorial makes the assumption that student's will accept what is presented in their textbooks as history rather than as a version of history.

Research statement:
The purpose of this study is to document high school student’s abilities to critically analyze historical texts while participating in the creation of an oral history project.

Data Collection:
* Student projects
* lesson plans/student handouts
* roundtable interview and observations from student's--I think I'd like to do a pre and post interview and ask student's how they view texts etc, before the project and then ask them the same questions again at the end and see if they perceive any difference in how they interact with historical texts.