Researched Writing

Real Research for Real Audiences

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Is your campus as cool as mine?  I absolutely LOVE when departments or schools showcase student academic work – after all, that’s why we’re all here!  At IUP, we’re celebrating Research Appreciation Week, which showcases research projects by undergraduate and graduate students as well as faculty.  Now, as a newbie faculty member here, I didn’t know anything about this until about two weeks ago.  Had I known, I would have certainly incorporated it into my classes in some way.  Fortunately for me, a colleague is very involved, and she invited me to be a judge for both the undergraduate and graduate scholars forums.  I sat in on an undergraduate panel where students presented their research on art history, fine art, and autism education.  I also sat in on a graduate panel where students presented on fine art, gender studies, and history.

What a delight.  Seriously.  Not only were the panels interesting, I took away a lot about why these types of events are important and how they can help us as teachers of writing in any discipline and specifically as teachers of researched writing.

We need to go to these events, and here’s why:

1. Students need to know that faculty are supportive of their (students’) lives as academics.  Why are they doing all this work if even their teachers don’t appreciate it beyond just giving it a grade?  Students perceive many of us as interested only in our own scholarship.  This simply shouldn’t be so.  As great as I thought this event was, the turnout by faculty was abysmal.  This also simply shouldn’t be so.

2. There’s a lot to learn at these events that hs nothing to do with the actual presentation content,  including what students are writing about, how students are writing, and what types of writing are going on in other disciplines and classrooms around the university.  Personally, I’m not so interested in fine art, but I learned a lot about how students write about fine art by listening to these presentations.  It’s also not a bad place to figure out what you want and don’t want in your students’ writing – there are good and not-so-good presentations at any conference, and exposure to both is educational.

Faculty should encourage students go to these events for the same reasons.

We also need to encourage students to WRITE for these events, and here’s why:  Sure, not all of your students are going to become academics, so the need for polished presentable critical essays (supplemented by powerpoint slides) might not be necessary for them after college.  But why shouldn’t they be learning the importance of these skills as part of their college education, as part of what it means to participate in an academic environment?  It doesn’t matter what they’ll be doing after college – writing, articulating understanding, clear communication, conveying ideas, and debate are skills that will help them regardless of their career field.

If your campus doesn’t have an event like this, it should.  And if it’s just not feasible, why not create this type of forum in your classroom?  Provide opportunities for students to share their research in front of a real audience who might have real questions.  And of course, show that you have real interest.

Real Researchers in Class

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This semester, I have been teaching ENGL 360: Editing and Publishing.  It’s a career-prep course intended to introduce English majors to a variety of job possibilities in the fields of editing and publishing.  Although I have some experience in this area, my profession is teaching.  So, I decided to seek out some professionals in editing and publishing and have them come to class to speak about their careers.  We heard excellent talks from Deb Klenotic, the web content and social media editor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania; Dr. Zack Stiegler, communications media professor and expert on media law at IUP; Jennifer Bails, freelance writer and editor; and Luis Fabregas, reporter for the Tribune Review, author and self-publisher of A Transplant for Katy.

My students in 360 have told me numerous times how useful they’ve found these talks from real writers and editors.  And in our last presentation, from Luis Fabregas, I was struck by something he said quite often that I thought would have been useful in my more general composition courses too – research.  He used the word research many many times.  Here was a real writer talking about the many ways in which he does research on a daily basis as a reporter, and also how he had to do research not only on the content of his new book, but on how to publish it.

So it occurred to me, if you’re teaching students to write any sort of researched document, whether in a writing class or across the disciplines, bring in problem-solvers to talk about how they do things in the real world (outside of school).  I’ve often shown students my own blog, the one I wrote while doing my dissertation, and talked about how I did research for that project.  But that’s way out of the scope of what a first-year writer is thinking about, and I definitely see a lot of eyes glaze over and worried faces when I bring it up on the screen.  My own experience as a researcher isn’t interesting to them – they see it as part of my agenda to get them to do things they don’t want to do (of course, that is not my agenda, but they too often probably see it that way).

Instead, I’m thinking of people who work on smaller projects on a daily basis that require multiple avenues of research.  We all know people in a variety of fields – we should use our friends and colleagues to help our students.  I’m thinking this semester of having my friend who works in marketing come to my Comp 2 course to talk about the various ways she uses research to keep her company’s Facebook page updated with cutting-edge news.  I have another friend who works for an adoption agency, and I know that on a daily basis she uses professional research in social sciences to keep current in her field and also to help her solve problems that come up in her job.  The administrator at my son’s daycare does research on every day – in early childhood pedagogy, school administration, she interviews and meets with administrators from other schools, she does surveys of parents – this is all research.  More advanced students are also great resources – have some seniors come in and talk about the ways in which they’ve researched post-graduation opportunities (jobs, grad school, etc).  I think we’d find that they use much more than Google for these types of research (they probably go to the library for reference books, brochures, talk to friends, parents, advisors and career counselors – these are all sources for research).  Ask these students to talk about how the research skills they learned in college are helping them outside of college.

So here’s the take-away: have real researchers come to class to talk about their processes.  It’s one way to combat the ‘assignment-for-school/teacher-as-audience’ syndrome that comes along with a lot of researched writing assignments.  And, like it did for me with Luis, you never know what ideas you might get from it too.