2022-2023 course description

This challenging course for highly-motivated seniors enables students to develop advanced research, writing, and presentation skills, while grappling with essential questions that span disciplines. It will pull together and further refine the skills that students have developed and advanced in all courses during their Boston Latin School education. It will culminate in the creation of a truly interdisciplinary investigation and Capstone project that students conceive and execute with the support of faculty mentors throughout the school.

During the first part of the academic year, students will engage in inquiry-based, self-driven authentic learning while researching, collecting, analyzing, evaluating, and presenting information from a variety of sources, all focused around their chosen topic. Coursework will also focus on delivering engaging and informative presentations that persuasively advocate for a particular point of view or perspective. As part of the coursework in the first half of the year, students will be developing and receiving feedback and approval on an essential question, a series of primary and secondary research questions and a proposal for their final Capstone projects as well as building a website and blogging on their weekly research and work progress.

The class will culminate in a student-designed and faculty-advised interdisciplinary project. The project may take multiple forms—some examples might be (but are not limited to) projects such as: building a vehicle, writing (and performing?) a play, creating a significant work of art, creating a mobile app, planning and testing a new course, producing a documentary film, conducting and documenting a laboratory investigation, writing a manual or plan for community action.

This project will require students to formulate a sophisticated research question on an academic, artistic, cultural, sociological, scientific, technological, or community-based topic of deep personal interest. Students plan and conduct an independent, inquiry-based research project that results in an innovative product that takes a form appropriate to the nature of their research question, reflecting the thinking and skills they have both acquired cumulatively during their time at the school and refined in the course. All of these projects will be presented by the students to the entire school community in the form of a series of individual 18-minute TEDx-style talks delivered over two days in the spring.