Final Project Presentation (5% of final grade)

Due

  • Thursday, May 1

Requirements

Please see the Final Research Paper assignment page for a description of the final research paper requirements.

Your final project presentation should be 7-8 minutes long. I encourage you to view your presentation as a report on your paper in progress; you don’t need to have your whole argument figured out in advance of presenting it to the class! It is fine for some things to be preliminary.

However, please practice your presentation ahead of presenting it to the class and time yourself so that you have a good sense of how long your presentation will be. I will warn you at 8 minutes, then again at 8 minutes and 30 seconds, and then ask you to end your presentation at 9 minutes. Just as you should strive not to go much over the time limit for your presentation, you should also strive not to fall under it. If, in practicing your presentation, you discover that it comes in under about 7 minutes, this is an indication that you need to include more material.

Your presentation should include:

  1. Your 1-2 sentence central research question. Please see the Final Project Proposal assignment page for more details about your central research question.
  2. A brief summary of your Research Synthesis. What have other scholars already written about this topic and/or question and/or text(s)?
  3. A preliminary statement of your argument. What are you adding to this conversation?
  4. An explication of at least one example – one point from your argument – that you think best provides an answer to your central research question and exemplifies your argument or one part of your argument. This example should include textual evidence from your primary text(s) (at least one if you are writing about more than one).
  5. At least one issue or question that you are still working on and that you would like some help with from the class.

Signing Up for your Presentation Date

Presentations will occur during our final class period on Thursday, May 1. I will bring a signup sheet to class on Thursday, April 17, and you will have the chance to sign up for your preferred presentation slot that day at the beginning of class. The signup sheet will operate on a first-come, first-served basis; I will arrive in the classroom 5-10 minutes prior to the beginning of class and the signup sheet will be placed on a desk by the door. If you are absent from class that day, I will sign you up for a slot based on which ones remain open.

After everyone has signed up, I will list the order of presentations on our course calendar.

Visual Aids

Though I encourage it, you are not required to create slides or other visual aids for your presentation. But if you would like to use slides, please email them to me by the end of the day on Wednesday, April 30. Then, before class the next day, I will download and collate all of the presentations on my computer. You will then use my computer to display and advance your slides during your presentation. I will also share your slides with the class via our Canvas site.

You can send your slides as .ppt/.pptx (PowerPoint) or .pdfs, or you can share Google slides with me.

Feedback and Discussion

As you present, your classmates will jot down notes about your presentation and provide structured feedback via a short worksheet that I will provide. After 2-3 presentations, we will pause for a 10-15-minute holistic discussion of the presentations we have just seen. We will proceed in that way for the rest of the presentations. At the end of class, you will receive the worksheets your classmates filled out about your presentation.