MY LITTLE CATor

Research in the UK WP

Why “My Little Cat”?

• “My Little Cat” is a grabber intro.• This is the second item in a bullet list.• My cat does not figure further in this

presentation.• I guess you had to be there.• Go to the next slide, please. Hurry.

Research in the UK Writing Program

• This is more like it. Now, where was I? Oh yes:

• What follows are passages from sources (research) that inform our Writing Program’s approach (theory) toward the situation we work within, with respect to “research.”

The Situation

• The situation is a problem of relations (as all problems are): relations between who they are (students), who we are (teachers, scholars), and what our context consists of (academia, home communities, society at large).

• This first passage, from Ken Macrorie circa 1980, describes the relational problem for students:

The Problem for Students: AlienationWhen students arrive initially on a college campus, they’re overwhelmed by the foreignness and size of the place. The professors seem to come from a different world. In strange vocabularies they rain new knowledge and theory upon these young people, who feel alienated at the very time when they need to become attached. Now they must make responsible decisions about how to manage their money, time, sex life, eating, recreation—all without the counsel of the people they’ve grown up with. In classes, the experiences in textbooks and lectures belong to others. Students are expected to see the relevance of this material to their new lives, but their old lives are seldom allowed into the discussion, and half-people learn poorly. So most of them feel diminished and frightened in unfamiliar and hostile territory. A bad place to begin a new life. (Ken Macrorie, Searching Writing)

• The problem of alienation Macrorie describes

—so enduring and intransigent—prevails especially at institutions like UK: so-called “research universities,” top-of-the-heap exemplars of what’s called “the academy.”

• This next passage—from Richard Larson’s great screed on the vagaries of the “research paper”—describes a central aspect of the relational problem for teachers: their charge to teach “research” and methods of so doing.

The Problem for/with Teachers: The “Research Paper”Why, then, an essay whose title makes clear a deep skepticism about “research papers”? First, because I believe that the generic “research paper” as a concept, and as a form of writing taught in a department of English, is not defensible. Second, because I believe that by saying that we teach the “research paper”—that is, by acting as if there is a generic concept defensibly entitled the “research paper”—we mislead students about the activities of both research and writing. (Richard L. Larson, “The ‘Research Paper’ in the Writing Course: A Non-Form of Writing,” 217)

It’s a “non-form” because:– It lacks a “conceptual or substantive identity” (there’s no such

genre)– It lacks a “procedural identity” (there are all sorts of activities

called “research”)

• Following Larson, let’s parse our problem of

relations under two headings: a problem of genre (what do we write?); a problem of action (what do we do?). They are tightly interwoven, of course.

• This next passage presents Ken Macrorie’s genre intercession to the problem of student alienation he decries: a shift from “research” to “I-Search paper.”

Solution: The I-Search Paper?

Allow something to choose you that you want intensely to know or possess. Maybe it’s a stereo record or tape player that’s right for your desires and pocketbook. Maybe it’s a motorcycle. Or the name of an occupation or technical school best for your needs. Or a spot in the United States or a foreign country you’d enjoy visiting this summer…. [Y]ou’re being asked to investigate something you’re interested in that will fulfill a need in your life rather than a teacher’s notion of what would be good for you to pursue. (62)

[Suggested form for the I-Search Paper]1.What I Knew (and didn’t know about my topic when I started out).2.Why I’m Writing This Paper. (Here’s where a real need should show up: the writer demonstrates that the search may make a difference in his life).3.The Search (story of the hunt).4.What I Learned (or didn’t learn. A search that failed can be as exciting and valuable as one that succeeded). (64)

This is a strong move, one that’s proved enabling for many. Yet from the perspective of academics, it’s wanting:– Students’ interests are radically individualized,

atomized, seen as set, discrete, and trivial.– Their interests are sharply opposed to those of

teachers; students are enjoined to pursue the former instead of the latter.

– On top of this (social) action problem, there’s a genre problem: the proposed template is essentially narrative in form—not what’s called for in most intellectual and professional work, and not what students most need to work on.

Well, then: what is it that constitutes an academic posture toward research—one we can agree on and work through with students? Here’s a view from James Slevin:

What’s “Academic”?

Academic culture is all about looking and looking for. It is about the hunt for a conclusion, not about conclusions; it’s about the making of meaning, not the meaning. While we tell students more than they need to know about theses and the formats of our writing, about organization and lucidity and clarity (that is, about the form in which we make public our conclusions), what we value is something other than all that, though not unrelated to all that. The values of academic culture are not the conclusions we draw but the drawing of conclusions from the evidence before us—more exactly, the drawing of conclusions from the possibilities of evidence before us that we make into evidence enabling something worth saying. (James Slevin, “A Letter to Maggie,” 62)

• Slevin stresses the action of academic work—the

making of evidence out of the stuff of reading and living. This, in a nutshell, is what we mean by research.– It’s what Thoreau meant in saying (something like) we

oughtn’t to disparage a fact, since it might flower into a truth.

• So research is action—or many sorts of actions, as Larson insists. What does this suggest for genre, the sort we might teach? Here’s Bruce Ballenger’s proposal:

The Exploratory Research Essay

[W]hat students rarely perceive about academic writing is that a structured argument is the product of inquiry, and that the process of inquiry that preceded it often invites complexity, ambiguity, and playfulness. Academic inquiry frequently demands that we suspend judgment about what might be true, and embrace a dialectical process that might lead us to new understandings. Using published scholarship as a model for the freshman research paper, or teaching the formal research paper as we’ve inherited it, is, I believe, unlikely to teach students these habits of mind. In fact, those approaches may encourage students to get the wrong idea about researching. Instead, it is the extension of essaying… that can be the best introduction to academic inquiry. It offers freshmen the invitation to experience that playfulness and uncertainty that both motivates researchers and gives them pleasure. The exploratory research essay, rather than the argumentative research paper, makes the introduction to inquiry—and the process of coming to know—central aims of the assignment rather than focusing exclusively [on] a written product that follows academic conventions. (Bruce Ballenger, Beyond Note Cards: Rethinking the Freshman Research Paper, 81)

• Ballenger’s answer to the genre question stresses the

purposeful, unpredictable process by which research makes evidence—a process, in essence, of essaying.

• He reiterates, too, what Larson observes: that teaching “research” as separate, in “paper” form, may obstruct students from learning to engage in research.

• The genre proposed is the essay, not “paper”—a distinction discussed in my essay to the UK signature section of the St. Martin’s Handbook.

• And yet: a genre problem of sorts persists. Just as (per Larson), there’s no such thing as a “research paper” as such, and no one has yet produced an anthology of the world’s great Five-Paragraph Essays, so it is that the “Research Exploratory Essay” is not a genre recognized beyond the bounds of classrooms.

• Here, then, is a further answer to the research genre question, the best I’ve seen:

• But it needs a preamble. Try this:In the following passage, Marilyn Cooper has been addressing those who, opposing a Macrorie-like “expressivist” approach to conducting students into college writing, instead stress initiation into an “academic discourse community.” The problem with this, says Cooper, is that there’s no such thing: there is not one community to which academics belong, characterized by one genre of discourse, one mode of research. There is no one course or genre that can prepare students for academic work: the ways and scenes of academics are too disparate for this.

• Well, then: What sort of community can our students be brought into? Characterized by what genre of discourse? Here’s Cooper’s answer:

A community and genre for first-year writing I argue that the discourse community we are inviting students into, in their first-year writing class, is the community of professional nonfiction writers, people who analyze ideas in writing as an occupation or as part of their occupation.… This community values discourse practices that lead to a certain kind of knowing, a kind of knowing usually referred to as critical thinking. Critical thinking implies the ability and inclination to examine things from different points of view, to develop, test, and apply theories in order to come to understand experiences. Critical thinking is clearly not a value solely of this community, but for nonfiction writers it is a kind of knowing that is the result of writing and reading, a kind of knowledge that develops intertextually.… To explore, question, and change society is not the purpose of all writers or of all writing…. But it is the purpose of the writing that we find valuable and that we often teach in first-year writing classes. […]

If we wish to focus research writing courses on inquiry and the discovery of knowledge, a better genre [than the letter to the editor or the research report] to assign would be the well-known, if not well-defined, genre of general analytic nonfiction. Its purpose is the critical examination of social phenomena from the point of view of current theories; the mode of writing is analysis, synthesis, hypothesis, and comment, not primarily persuasive or informational.… It is a genre that college-educated people are supposed to be comfortable with, and it is a genre that allows students in writing classes to move the base of their inquiry beyond the bounds of their personal experience. And, again, the genre projects workable roles for students and teachers: students write about social phenomena of interest to them using theories to explain them in ways that are interesting to educated people such as their teachers, who also are willing and able to help them perfect their mastery of this discourse genre. (Marilyn M. Cooper, “Unhappy Consciousness in First-Year English: How to Figure Things Out for Yourself,” 51-53)

• This genre—”general analytic nonfiction”—gets composed in essay form (or in the form of an article, a related thing).

• It is the genre in which most essays in our in-house course reader (like many comp readers) are composed—even when the author is primarily identified with one or another scholarly discourse community.– For instance: check out “Mothers and Others,” by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in the

latest edition of The Engaged Citizen. Hrdy is an eminent anthropologist, a student of what biological science reveals about gender relations among humans and other primates. Her reputation rests on professional publications. But here she writes for a general audience, exploring what findings in her and adjacent fields suggest for an issue of pressing social concern: how communities provide for their children to be reared. She writes in essay form, its shape discursive, an “I”-voice clearly present and direct though not foregrounded, rather subordinate to the questions at hand.

• It is the genre, not incidentally, of many of the works by students in our booklet, Award-Winning Essays….

… but not all of them! Some award-winners are more “exploratory research.” The first-place winner is an inward-directed personal essay with threads of secondary research. These essays don’t follow one way.

Here’s the upshot. I’m comfortable with teachers in our program working across the research-genre space opened by Ballenger and Cooper—from the more student-centered, inward-directed “exploratory research essay” that Ballenger (working in a Macrorie-influenced, expressivist-inflected vein) propounds, to Cooper’s more “social epistemic,” critical pedagogy-oriented approach. We can invite students to write across of continuum of approaches variously stressing personal expression and social engagement, with research the making and framing of evidence from facts and through methods of many sorts. I don’t think we ought to assign “research papers” as opposed to other writing, or “argument essays” that presume rather than work toward the fruits of inquiry. We have better, truer, less alienating, more active ways to work.

In summary, let me offer:A credo and lexicon for first-year writing• The Key Term is INQUIRY (not “argument” or “research”).• Inquiry takes form in PROJECTS (not “MEA’s” as such).• Projects depend on SOURCES (experiential, textual, etc.).• Projects extend from THEMES (cement for shared inquiry).• Projects unfold in SEQUENCE (the course arc).• The tacit theme is LANGUAGE (many themes, same course).• EVERY PROJECT asks students to:

– Represent experience, something observed;– Connect to motives, values, purpose;– Interpret what’s represented, advancing a stance;– Draw upon readings not just for information.

• That is, in a project, we make evidence to create a stance.• The project’s upshot is not a paper but an ESSAY.

BYE BYE, says My Little Cat!