Movement 6: Synthesis Reflection — Voice Your Stakes
Movement 6: Synthesis Reflection — Voice Your Stakes
This is about stepping into your voice. What have you learned, struggled with, reimagined?
What tension are you carrying forward? Speak not just about what you found, but why it matters to you, and to the world you are entering.
Core Question:
What stakes are you carrying forward from your inquiry — and how are they preparing you to shape a public story?
Pedagogical Purpose:
To help students synthesize their research journey, reflect on the tensions and insights that remain alive,
and prepare to transition from inquiry into public storytelling.
Student Outcomes:
Students will be able to:
- Articulate key tensions, insights, and stakes from their inquiry,
- Reflect on their evolving voice as a researcher and storyteller,
- Begin mapping how their inquiry will shape public communication.
Interaction Design: Reflection Prompts
(Choose 2–3 prompts to reflect on.)
- What tensions or contradictions feel most alive in your inquiry?
- What are you hoping your audience might reconsider, feel, or do after engaging with your project?
- What has changed about your assumptions, your questions, or your understanding of your topic?
- Where does uncertainty still exist and why does that matter?
- What "stakes" are you willing to voice personally, publicly, ethically?
- How will your lived research process , including friction and surprise, inform your storytelling?
- What’s the most important insight you want to share?
- What research do you still need to integrate or make more accessible?
Reflection Journal Companion
Follow the standard Reflection Journal structure:
- What I Am Noticing,
- What Feels Hard or Unsettled,
- What I Want to Carry Forward.
(See Movement 1 for a full detailed example.)
Black Box Micro-Engagement
At the end of this Movement, you will complete a Black Box Micro-Engagement:
- Action Step: A production-related reflection on how friction, surprise, medium, and voice will shape the story you are preparing to tell. (Specific task TBD.)
- Personal Reflection: Reflect on the tools and experiences that felt most generative.
- Relational Reflection: Reflect on the kinds of help, community, or dialogue that strengthened your process.
- Source Acknowledgment: Briefly note any media, guides, or conversations that shifted your thinking.
- Organization Reflection: Describe how you are preparing your research materials, notes, and recordings for the production phase.
(See Movement 1 for detailed reflection structure.)
Crossing the Threshold: Preparing to Shape Your Story
By completing your Synthesis Reflection, you are not ending your inquiry , you are carrying it forward into a new phase.
You have lived through what many researchers never articulate:
- Finding questions that matter,
- Facing contradiction and uncertainty,
- Building relational and technical resilience,
- Staying connected to inquiry through friction.
You are now ready to shape, craft, and share your inquiry with others —
through medium-conscious storytelling.
Forward Work: Bridging Inquiry into Communication
Before beginning the formal production phase, you will complete the following:
✅ Review Your Reflection Journal and Black Box Entries
- Look for recurring tensions, unresolved questions, emerging motifs.
- Identify at least two moments where friction, surprise, or discovery shifted your thinking.
✅ Draft a Preliminary Story Move Sketch
- Story Moves are rhetorical shifts that guide an audience through experience, tension, and resolution.
- A typical sequence might include:
- Setting the Scene (context)
- Raising a Question (tension)
- Unfolding Inquiry (exploration)
- Facing Complexity (complication)
- Offering Stakes (so what?)
- Sketch your project roughly:
- What is your opening move?
- Where will tension or friction surface?
- How will you invite reflection or insight?
- What stakes will you voice?
✅ Frame Your Core Stakes (3-Paragraph Structure) Prepare your reflection for future storytelling work by completing a short 3-paragraph framing exercise:
- Most people think/believe that...
- But my research reveals...
- This matters because...
This framing will help you later as you shape your Story Moves, narrative structure, and audience engagement strategy.
📜 Mini Manifesto Reminder:
Friction is part of the story.
Relation is part of the story.
Stewardship is part of the story.
You are part of the story.
Final Thought
Inquiry is not just a gathering of facts. It is an unfolding, a movement through noticing, questioning, making, adapting, relating.
Your story is not just what you found. It is how you moved through complexity, relations with real and imagined audiences, and meaning.