(8/2006) - In 2000, when I was teaching an Advanced Placement history course, I felt that my students were being forced to rush through as many topics as possible in a short period of time, with no opportunity to slow down and look carefully at the things that really interested them. I then conceived a year-long research course in which students first write a scholarly paper about their chosen topic and then complete a project that builds on the original research. This course, now known as “Masters Thesis”, allows students an opportunity to stop and dig a little more deeply.

Unlike more traditional independent study courses that The Masters School has offered for years, Master Thesis students do not work on their individual topics in a vacuum. Students come together as a class twice a week to share ideas and resources. Themes evolve and students see similarities emerge between their topics that none of us suspected. Who knew, for example, that papers about pornography, the changing images of female athletes and racism in a post-civil rights era would, in the end, be about almost the same thing: how society constructs images of its members, and how we as individuals can correct that image. The class functions as a critical eye, brain-storming session, and support group. The process of explaining ideas to others is one of the keys to deep understanding of any subject.

Juniors interested in the Masters Thesis course as seniors would meet with me to present their ideas for a paper or project. Often these are just vague concepts, but after a summer of reading and a first month of school dedicated to sharply honing the topic and guiding questions, students are ready to do some serious research. Some of this is traditional library research. However, students are pushed to tap the many riches of the New York metropolitan area and find more unconventional sources.

New York is blessed with great archival and museum resources. Usually archivists and librarians are quite accommodating. Christina R. looked at a large archive of material at Marist College for a 1960s proposal to turn Storm King Mountain into a hydroelectric plant. Sasha F. spent some time using the Walker Evans archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while researching her paper on the objectivity of photography.

But Masters Thesis students are also adept at simply calling up experts in their fields. Tim M., who was writing about the intersection of jazz and race, surprised me by calling the jazz critic Nat Hentoff, and getting some great quotes.

“How did you get in touch with him?” I asked.

“His number was in the phone book,” Tim replied.

“Oh,” I said.

Sometimes it’s that easy!

A relatively recent requirement of the Masters Thesis course is that during the second term, students must complete a minimum of one hundred hours of what we simply call “Experience.” An “Experience” can be almost anything, as long as it is related to the chosen topic – we keep it loosely defined on purpose. Jess M., who wrote about tattooing and henna art, became an apprentice at a tattoo shop in New York City. Kathryn M., when writing about Ballanchine, worked with choreographers to learn several of Ballanchine’s signature dance pieces. And Ruthie F., who studied social aggression in middle school girls, designed a ten-week course to teach young teens about bullying and then actually taught it to The Masters School sixth graders.

Sometimes an “Experience” is a more traditional internship. Christina R. worked with the Riverkeeper organization to create a how-to handbook on organizing grassroots environmental efforts. The block schedule works well as it is not uncommon for seniors to have a day or two a week when they are finished with classes by noon. This means that they can easily get on the train to New York City to do research or go to an internship.

From the beginning, an important aspect of Masters Thesis has been sharing discoveries with a wider audience. The process begins in the immediate class, but as the year progresses the audiences get bigger and more varied. In late February, Masters Thesis students share the results of their research to an audience during day and evening presentations. Though the first few years saw limited attendance, by 2005 it was standing-room only. Teachers, students, parents, friends and alumnae/i crowded in to listen to a summary of the thesis papers, and then participate in a vigorous round of questions and discussions.

The final project is the last way that Masters Thesis students share what they discover. After writing a scholarly paper, most students opt to do a more creative project based on some of the themes that they have been exploring:

Mallory B. studied the causes of wrongful conviction and then for her project staged a version of the play The Exonerated. Katie L. researched the way technology has changed music, and then for her project collaborated with Muse, The Masters School dance company, to produce a dance in which the dancers all wore iPods and danced to music only they could hear. And, Ali R. produced an art installation of broken and fun-house mirrors to illustrate her thesis about the myths of beauty.

Honestly, I was being selfish when I thought about creating this course —my favorite time of year in my ninth grade world history class has always been research paper time, although my students probably don’t agree with me! I love reading research papers because it’s a time when my students, as the cliché goes, teach me more than I teach them. How interesting would it be, I wondered, to read research papers from seniors who spent an entire year working on their subject? Pretty interesting, it turns out.

Excerpt from an article appearing in The Bulletin, Spring/Summer 2006, The Masters School.