Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
This study aims to produce efficient and effective group writing workshops for students within the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University. To balance two opposing theories in writing center pedagogy - the direct instruction theory and the student-led/ collaborative theory - this study also aims to determine whether a balanced combination of these approaches in writing workshops will increase student confidence in their writing abilities. Several writing workshops were held over Zoom utilizing a combination of direct teaching methods and collaborative techniques. Students were then surveyed to determine whether they found the workshops helpful, learned new skills, and/or grew more confident in their abilities. The student responses proved the hypothesis that a combined approach leads to an increase in student confidence.
This research investigates what aspects of certain college students' quarantine experience were contributing to specific changes in gender identity. For this project, a general survey was distributed, and multiple interviews were conducted with willing survey participants to gauge more in-depth information about this phenomenon. Through the survey portion of the research, I found that many Barrett students felt that their identity had changed over the course of the pandemic, and a unique subset of these students experienced a change in their gender identity. Interviews with these folks highlighted several mechanisms that fostered this phenomenon: first, that quarantine allowed them a time to introspect, second, that they were not being policed or scrutinized in public for their gender performance, and third, that this was taking place in a supportive physical and/or virtual environment. This new research provides insight into the specific experiences of nonbinary college students whose identity shifted over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring factors that can influence identity development. While this is a unique and niche situation, it illustrates changing trends in how younger generations view themselves and their gender identity.
The goal of this project is to document and format a cookbook of my grandmother’s Palestinian recipes while learning about her life and the history of Palestine. This process included research of Palestinian history from many different sources: books, Palestinian cookbooks, and online articles to form a foundation for the food and culture behind the recipes from Palestine. It also included intensive cooking lessons with different women in our family to measure, practice, and taste different dishes included in this project. The focus of this cookbook was our grandmother’s recipes, but soon after starting, we realized that cooking in a Palestinian household is a group effort and rarely done by one person. Due to this realization, we decided that everyone in the family would be recognized in constructing this cookbook. After completing this project, we documented stories and experiences of my grandmother’s move to America at a young age, raising five children with no family around her, and her ability to find substitutes for ingredients that were not available in America that we did not know of before. Our relationship with our family and culture has strengthened during this experience, and we are now more confident in who we are and what we can offer to our future generations.
The goal of this project is to document and format a cookbook of my grandmother’s Palestinian recipes while learning about her life and the history of Palestine. This process included research of Palestinian history from many different sources: books, Palestinian cookbooks, and online articles to form a foundation for the food and culture behind the recipes from Palestine. It also included intensive cooking lessons with different women in our family to measure, practice, and taste different dishes included in this project. The focus of this cookbook was our grandmother’s recipes, but soon after starting, we realized that cooking in a Palestinian household is a group effort and rarely done by one person. Due to this realization, we decided that everyone in the family would be recognized in constructing this cookbook. After completing this project, we documented stories and experiences of my grandmother’s move to America at a young age, raising five children with no family around her, and her ability to find substitutes for ingredients that were not available in America that we did not know of before. Our relationship with our family and culture has strengthened during this experience, and we are now more confident in who we are and what we can offer to our future generations.