''Stacie Gonzales, “Broken, Yet I Smile''

Your research proposal is your plan for data collection. It is necessarily flexible, and things may not always go according to plan (that’s okay!). Even so, it is crucial that you have a plan. The research proposal asks you to question what you know, what you don’t know, and what you hope to know. Also crucial are the ways in which you are going to treat the community you are investigating and the data you are collecting to represent them (all with great respect, of course!). Your Research Proposal must include the following elements. 1.Include the title of the study. 2. Include a definition of the study (consider defining key terms, e.g. literacy, literacy practices, literacy events). Explain where and how the study will happen. Explain the significance of your study and why it is important for you. 3. Include your research questions. Write your preliminary guesses on your research questions; in other words, write what you hope to find out at the end of your study. 4. Include a discussion of the spaces (locations), actors (people), texts, literacy events, and/or literacy practices you plan to study and their relevance to your research question. Remember, this must focus on literacy in some way. 5. Describe how you will collect your data specifically. Explain how you will get permission to collect your data. 6. Include a tentative timeline of the dates of data collection. Mention how many participants you will have and when you expect to meet with each one of them. 7. Include the materials that you intend to use when you go to the site and collect your data. Add those materials as appendices. Describe each one in details and explain why and how you designed those materials (e.g., interview questions, artifacts you will analyze or that you’ve already analyzed). 8. Mention the studies that you will use to support your research, and in a short paragraph describe how the content of the authors’ work relate to your study. Each reference should be explained in its own paragraph. Please cite the references properly using MLA format. 9. At the end, include any major concerns that you have related to your research study and how you expect to navigate them. 10. After your Research Proposal, include an appendix that has an Informed Consent and Code of Ethics that you developed for your project. There are examples in the book, but these should be developed in your own writing. As you write, keep in mind that your responses to the guiding questions listed above should be integrated into a coherent essay. Your paragraphs should not stand as separate, isolated responses to the questions but should be held together as a cohesive proposal by the exploration of what you want to research, why you want to research this in particular, what makes it important, and the connection you can make between your research in this local context and the larger scholarly conversation in literacy studies. Your Research Proposal must include the following: a three- to four-page essay that responds to the items listed above; a copy of your Code of Ethics; and a copy of your Informed Consent Form.