To me, research means identifying, evaluating, and joining the voices in a conversation. Students should learn what is meant by “discourse,” why a discourse is important, how it functions, and the specific avenues through which a given discipline’s discourse is conducted. This includes not only scholarly journals and research databases but the discourse as represented in lay journals and newspapers, colloquially on college campuses and in the non-academic world, in their own lives, and surrounding the real-world events that scholarly discourse attempts to analyze and interpret.

To this end, I try to empower my students to two specific ends. First, to understand that they get to decide which voices are relevant to them and, second, that by doing so they augment their own abilities to be part of a conversation and be heard. We don’t simply converse with authoritative voices in our work because it makes people more likely to believe our writing is worthwhile; we do it because engaging in the conversation makes us more authoritative, qualified, and interesting thinkers and writers.

Getting students to want to be part of a conversation is difficult, and I think the common thread in the two readings today is that it’s important to show students that there is a discourse surrounding whatever they are most interested in. I try to emphasize that research is simply a purpose-driven process of trying to learn more about what you naturally want to know more about anyway. Allowing students to find the greater import or value of things they’ve been conditioned to see as unimportant is a path toward greater investment in the research process. Guiding students past what they might consider frivolous to the deeper human meaning of recreational activites, artistic communities, etc., can be rewarding for them and show them that academic work is best seen as an extension of who they are, not some alien imposition from insular academics who want to transform them into professors. I find that the most direct way to do this is something along the lines of the “finding your beat” exercise questions in the 1121 syllabus. I’ve had a lot of success asking students what they naturally think about, care about, Google when they’re bored, and so on.