During your capstone research project you will have the opportunity and are invited to tell the story of your learning throughout your UNM master's program and the impact it has had on your teaching and learning in your own classroom. Your teacher practitioner project will become a way to reflect on and share the journey of your learning as your intellectual history. Above all, this will be personal and professional storytelling at your best. The journey is different for each of you, as it shoud be for any kind of learning is personal and emotional. Your practitioner research story will honor the learning relationship you have with your students. In this process you will also have opportunities to engage in conversations with other colleagues face-to-face and through reading educational literature in supporting and investigting your ideas and questions.
During this year you will draw on your course content and what you have learned, your prior knowledge, your expertise and your curiosity and drive to want to know in professional, personal and intrinsic ways.
When I was in education, I admired writers like Howard Gardnder, Tom Dooley, Bertrand Russell for they found something they were passionate about. I hoped to find for myself – to come into my own, so to speak- that same kind of passion about something- a topic, a question. I searched during my masters and I have completed two and almost three of them. I realized my passion was asking questions and more recently coaching others in asking their own questions. My role is your coach, your advocate, your spokesperson, your promoter, your editor. The syllabus provides a framework of a landscape but you are the driver, initiator, creator. You must assume the driver’s seat in your practitioner research process. Above all it is a process. This may be the first time in your academic career, where you really own it.
In practitioner research you are ethnographers in your respective classrooms, describing your learning envirnments, what is working and what is not working as well for them. From your struggles to teach effectively and become a better educator, your question is borne. Your research is a question of who you are, what your classroom is like, who your students are and what seems to be bugging, nudging or tugging at you in your evolution as an educator from an intrinsic need to know.
Your particular style will emerge in the way you tell your research story. ABOVE ALL, you must realize that this is YOUR RESEARCH STORY. As Nikki Giovanni says, "If you want to share a vision or tell the truth, you pick up your pen and take your chances." Research takes courage and conviction and this is your hero(ine)'s journey that only you can do. This process will transorm you in some or many ways-in the ways you need to spiral toward another level of awareness and clarity in becoming an effective teacher practitioner.