Featured in this section are three of my biggest projects from the semester.

The first piece is a Genre Analysis Paper. The goal of the paper was to take the genre of peer-reviewed scholarly journals within my field of interest and look at what different conventions are used and what the purpose is behind them. I chose the field of bilingual education and selected two different articles. One focused on bilingual education in a preschool while another focused on how we evaluate assessments for older elementary-aged bilingual students to holistically understand their strengths. I felt pretty satisfied about this paper and I think my comparison was successful. I think for this paper I just did not leave myself enough time to complete it, so I would improve by giving myself more time to work on the project. I learned from this assignment that peer reviewed articles have a general format, similar to a lab report, and I can use what I have learned about each section to make focusing future research easier.

My second piece is my Research Paper. The goal of this paper was to continue in the research of my genre analysis and develop a specific topic. I chose professional development in bilingual education. After conducting research, I identified where the conversation was in my topic and synthesize my sources to describe what they were saying together. After conducting some primary research to see if it assisted in my findings, I made some conclusions about where the conversation and further research should go. I was not as satisfied with this paper; I felt that my sources did not lend to as strong of an argument as I wanted to make. I learned from this assignment that not all types of bilingual education are the same and not all focus on a student learning both languages.

My last piece is based on my research paper, but I remixed some of the elements and placed them into a PowerPoint with the goal of having this project presented to an audience of professional development developers so that they would implement some of the principles I discussed in my paper. The goal of this project is to have us refocus our paper information to a specific audience, and make our presentation decisions based off of our audience. Then we were to write down our explanation in a short justification paper. I am very satisfied with how this project turned out, I was able to find a good format for my presentation that was a crucial piece to getting across to my audience. It also helped most effectively communicate the material in a concise manner. I learned from this project how when you center a project around the audience, every choice you make matters, down to the specific slide.