Rethinking Research Writing: Research as a Public Activity Linda Adler-Kassner Eastern Michigan University

Pressing Questions about Research Writing

• When we talk about “research papers” do we have some prototype, or some genre with predictable features, in mind? If we do, how do we define that thing or those features?
• When we talk to students about research writing, what do we mean?
• When we work with research writing strategies in our classes – whether they’re directed toward “the research paper” or something else – what are we working on, and why?
• What experiences do we want students to take away from a research writing class?

My colleagues and I took up these questions four years ago at Eastern Michigan University when we wanted to redesign our second-semester composition course.

Keeping in mind Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s notion of “backward design,” we started with the last question first: what experiences did we want students to take away from research writing in our courses?  We said students wanted to take away experience with:

• Engaging in writing that was relevant for their lives/to their experiences
• Engaging in (research) writing as a public act – that is, as something that is used by (and shared with) a larger audience
• Becoming curious about a topic or situation, then using resources (people, texts) to pursue their curiosity
• Discovery – learning something they didn’t know before
• Identifying and assessing sources that shared ‘common interests’ with their questions
• Making connections and engaging in dialogue with others (through oral and written conversation) about a subject of interest to them
• Reflecting on their research writing process in order to articulate what strategies they had employed in it, how/why they had used those strategies, how those strategies and their research was relevant, and for whom.

We then moved to the next question – when we worked on research writing strategies, whether pointed toward researched essays (as we call them) or something else – what  would that mean? We found that responses to this question echoed what we said we wanted our students to experience. We would work on:

• Helping students identify research questions that were relevant to their lives/experiences
• Engaging in (research) writing as a public act
• Working toward research questions about which students were genuinely curious
• Locating and assessing sources
• Learning to make connections between their ideas and sources that might seem initially disparate
• Developing research/writing strategies that would enable written ‘dialogue’ among students and sources
• Reflecting on research writing processes

So – with ideas about what we wanted students to experience and what we wanted to work on, we moved to the last two questions: When we talked to students about research writing, what did we mean? When we talked about “research papers,” what were we invoking? Here, our thinking became more complicated and troubling. We’d both experienced teaching many research writing courses that did the right thing, but just weren’t very satisfying – students came up with research questions, used library (and, sometimes, other) sources to investigate them, and wrote papers reporting what they’d learned, using their sources. We didn’t think  that our students were engaging in what Bruce Ballenger, Paul Heilker, and others have discussed as a process of becoming a researcher – becoming genuinely curious about something, learning more about that thing, and engaging in a kind of written conversation with others who are curious about it (or something related to it), as well. Instead, they were going through motions, jumping hoops which we’d set out on the path to “the research paper.” They only reinforced what Richard Larson had found years earlier, that “students see research as a wholly’separate activity’ with little or no relation to the other work they’[d] done as writer in the composition class” (Ballenger, 99).

As we wrestled with questions surrounding how to change this practice, we thought back to WAC and writing to learn workshops that we’d attended and offered, many of which began with questions asking teachers to think about the ways that we worked when we wrote. How did we come to understand the conventions of writing, especially research writing, in our disciplines? Through experience with and analysis of them. As we wrote, we developed habits of mind – an understanding of the conventions surrounding research in our discipline(s) and the ability to develop writing, reading, and thinking strategies to make decisions about whether (or now) and how to enact those conventions in our work.

We had some ideas about a theoretical framework, then, but we still needed to consider how to put it into practice. We knew that teaching something called “the research paper” was not the approach we wanted to take. Instead, we wanted students to develop the aforementioned “habits of mind,” particularly an understanding of how literacy strategies – including, but of course not limited to “academic” literacy strategies – were  always grounded in specific, local contexts. To do this, we developed models where students grounded their research in specific, local contexts; ideally, we hope that students will work from these models to understand that in any context, whether in or out of school, literacy practices are always embedded in and suffused with the ideology of that context. We also wanted students to experience researched writing as the public act that it is – not something directed toward essays that would be pitched in a drawer (or a trash can) after the class’s end, but pieces of writing intended for particular audiences and particular purposes.

For this to happen, we developed a broad structure for students and instructors to use to develop researched essays. First, students would choose a community – probably a physical site, but sometimes a virtual one – where they would spend 4-6 weeks observing and using a double-entry format to record their observations (in one column they would record what they saw; in the other, they would ask questions or make comments about their observations). We stressed to students that these should be sites that they were interested in, since their semester’s work would be rooted there. Then, from the questions/observations in their research journals, students would develop research questions which they would pursue using library resources, conducting interviews, analyzing artifacts, and conducting additional field research. All of this work would be used for one or two (typically two) researched essays: an ethnographic researched essay (a mini-ethnography of the site that worked through the questions arising from the research – this model draws on Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater and Bonnie Sunstein’s Field Work); an inquiry-based researched essay (an essay addressing what the researcher’s question was, why they were interested in it, and what they learned about it – this model draws on Bruce Ballenger’s Beyond Notecards and The Curious Researcher), and/or a multi-genre researched essay (an essay targeted toward a very specific audience that uses multiple genres to communicate different points about the research to the audience – this model draws on Tom Romano’s Blending Genre, Altering Style). 

We’ve also used the researched essays that students create through these models as a springboard for a very public event, called The Celebration of Student Writing, where students create projects based on their research work and display them for an audience. The Celebration (as it’s known) takes place on a day near the end of the semester for 1-1/2 hours in a large ballroom in our student union. Last fall, 600 students participated; last winter, 900 students displayed their work. All participants attend the Celebration; they are joined there by other faculty, members of our administration, and (more recently) students from surrounding high schools and other colleges in the area. On the appointed day, for 1-1/2 hours, their voices merge to produce a cacophony of talk – if not about writing, at least convened by writing.

• While we’ve been generally pleased with the progress of this model thus far, there still remain questions – about this work and about researched writing generally – that I hope we can take up here. These include:
• What should be the goals of a researched writing course? (Those above? Different ones?)
• How can we best represent those goals to different audiences: other instructors, students, colleagues in our department and others, administrators, instructors on other campuses…
• On a related note, when we talk about the work in which students engage in our research writing courses to others outside of our programs/departments, how can we best represent that work, particularly as it relates to their (diverse) goals?
• If programs work to “reimagine” the researched essay as we have tried to do, how can we best help other audiences (students, colleagues, etc.) find points of overlap between “the research paper” as they imagine it and “the researched essay” as we do?
  
  

I look forward to our conversation!

Resources

Teaching Composition

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