Research Paper—Proposal, Draft, and Final with Cover Letter (10-15 double spaced pages, APA format):

  For this assignment, you are being asked to enter an academic conversation and develop a position on an issue related to leadership, education, and/or justice. You are expected to write a well-conceived essay that takes a position on an issue of some importance. This means you’ll need to make well-reasoned claims and provide ample evidence to support them, based on your research in this course and beyond it. Please identify a journal where you could submit your paper for publication. Be sure to look at sample articles from the journal and adhere to all submission guidelines. Remember that research can take many forms (i.e., an analysis of existing data, a narrative inquiry that uses story as research, a program review, a policy analysis, etc.), and you should identify and plan your approach to your paper accordingly. Your final paper also needs to include a cover letter that does the following: 1) describes how your paper has evolved; 2) presents details about how you’ve revised your paper and highlights how you responded to suggestions and questions on your draft; 3) includes a self-assessment and a grade for yourself in the course. Finally, you should plan to use our class readings as sources for your paper, but you can (and should) draw from other sources as well. We will develop this papers in three stages: 1) the proposal (written in the form of an abstract); 2) a draft of your paper; and, 3) a final revised and edited paper with a cover letter.