I currently teach World History in an Alternative Learning Environment at the high school level. Some of my students are competing in the 2014 History Day competition. Their projects have moved on to the State level, and they are in the process of fine-tuning them. One issue facing them, however, is research fatigue. They have been working tirelessly on their projects since November, and most of them feel that they have reached a dead end with their projects.
Any and all help would be appreciated, as I am also exhausted at this point. In return for your help, I will have the students list you in the credits for their projects. If you want to share an address, I will also have them write and send a Thank You note, as I'm trying to teach them both perseverance and gratitude.
Here are their topics and focuses:
I am absolutely not asking for you to do their projects. Rather, I ask for guidance for them. Send them in a direction that you think would help them, but let them discover it. Archives and databases for primary sources are also helpful, but allow the students to interpret the sources themselves. I'm really proud of these students for their work, and I would hate for them to stop pushing themselves. Just point them in the right direction.
Thank you for any and all help. If there is any interest in this post, I will link to some of their projects in progress, along with a link to our school website.
When I was an undergrad, one of my art history/classics/archaeology profs told our class that papers about a particular sculpture didn't interest him. He wanted to know about the toenails on a statue, he said.
He wanted to know something unique and insightful. He wanted us to drill down to something extremely specific and then work our way back out from there. Sometimes it was difficult to pick out really particular things before you'd already delved into the material, but once you did, it had a way of really making the research and learning process more interesting.
On the toenail example, you might start by just looking at this single statue's tonails, but then you end up looking at the evolution of toes/feet in sculpture generally, and how this particular artist excelled/sucked at this challenge. Or maybe you end up investigating the technique of sculpting that particular part. Or maybe you look at the cultural/artistic biases shown by the detailing on the toes versus the detailing of the face/genitals/hands, etc.
As a senior classics/religion major, I ended up looking at the policies and partition systems in Byzantine double (coed) monasteries. It was a ridiculous paper about a phenomenon we have very little information on, but it was a great project for an undergrad to work on. It ended up giving me some insight on all kinds of things related to monastic life and the evolution of monastic architecture that I never would have had if I'd stayed at a more general question (ie. what was monastic life like in the Bzyantine empire?).
Your students have been looking at this material for a long time. Ask them to pick out 2-3 really small things in their research that they'd like to zoom in on. Then alter the direction of the project to be about that specific issue/aspect, and the project as it stands will be the background for that more focused work.
The two awesome things about this style of work are:
As a researcher, you are really pushing yourself and your ability to find good sourcing and you tend to learn a lot of interesting esoteric information as you go down the rabbit hole.
As a presenter (conference, contest, journal), you tend to be exposing the judges to information they haven't seen before. History teachers should all know about the Little Rock Nine. How many of them will know about Ernest Green's background as an Eagle Scout? How did the scouts deal with segregation then? How was his experience as a Senior different from the other nine? How did his experience shape his work as Sec of Labor under Carter? That kind of info is more likely to engage a judge than well-researched material that they have seen before.
TL;DR: Get more focused. Ridiculously focused.
Can you do oral histories? Have them ask their older family members what they remember about things like polio or desegregation. Also local senior centers might also enjoy contributing their own stories from their younger years as well as their families back histories. There might be some ethical issues, but it's still doable.
For the last one, on polio, I assume they've looked at the CDC's website. Have they looked at the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has a lot of good stuff (including videos and photos) about pre- and post-vaccination era, and some links that may not just duplicate what they already have?
With regard to Turing, let's get crazy and follow Prof Jack Copeland idea: and study Turing death as a narrative created after his death.