TESU Liberal Arts Capstone mentor feedback

[happydayruth]

I just realized that I wrote a review about my mentor on another forum, but never posted it here. I'll do so to hopefully help others in the process of choosing a Capstone mentor!

- My Mentor
My Mentor for the online class was Dr. Gregory Caicco. Dr. C. was very engaged with the class and with the forum posts, which was very helpful to everyone. I will also say that Dr. C., for the most part, responded to all of my email questions (except one) and provided excellent direction for the Capstone projects, and I also ended up with a great grade. The biggest thing that bothered me with Dr. C. is that I consistently felt like his feedback, while he did give it, was mostly generic and blanket-like. Also just to note, Dr. C. does not provide examples and will not "pre-read" assignments before they are turned in. He was, however, very willing to answer questions asking for clarification on instructions.

I think a *lot* of your Capstone experience depends on which mentor you have. I get the impression from reading about other students' experiences that not all mentors have the same requirements. Bear that in mind. Dr. C. pretty much *required* that our project include research that you conducted yourself via survey or interviews. The topic chosen needed to be fairly narrow, and confined to a particular time/place. For example, you could not say that you want to research the effects of technology on teenagers. He would probably say that "technology" is too broad, and your study group of teens needs to be a particular group in a particular place. So...teens (ages 13-18) from low-income families in the U.S. between year 1999-2015. (My example is not perfect, but I hope you get the idea.) Generally, Dr. C. wanted the "problem" to be one that is able to be documented as existing, before doing the research on it. So for example, one of my classmates wanted to research the "problem" of food safety in U.S. restaurants, and used the recent Chipotle issues as documentation of the problem. In Dr. C.'s own words: "You first have to document that this is actually happening before you can study it--Ideally it needs to happen within the United States and in the past 5 to 10 years. You cannot go on your own anecdotal evidence or heresay. Otherwise this will be a project that will simply be created to confirm your own bias. A good way to document that public this is by looking at government data or published research that has noted a problem..."

- My Topic
First, I want to mention that I had kept the Capstone in the back of my mind ever since I began pursuing my degree. I would make note of ideas and links that I thought might prove helpful once it came time to take the course. However, I was not able to nail down my topic until after I actually started the course. So don't panic if you don't know exactly what you want your project to be on before you start.

I knew I wanted to do my project on a topic that had something to do with English as a Second Language, since that is my area of interest and the focus of my English degree. But I started the course without being very clear on how to make that a good research topic. I ended up with the following "main question" for my research project:

"Why do adult (18-65 years old) U.S. immigrants whose first language is not English seem to demonstrate a consistent pattern of functional English illiteracy, even after living in the U.S. for 10 or more years?"

I was able to establish documentation of this problem through data reports and published research, and I knew that I could conduct my own primary research by distributing a survey to a network of ESL teachers and administrators that I belong to. The survey ended up being one of my favorite parts of the project.