Tag Archives: research

Research as a Conversation

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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.

Difficulties of Teaching Research on a Campus with Minimal Wifi and Other Thoughts on Research Papers

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In my own writing as an academic, “research papers” have often relied on secondary sources. I love the idea of having students do research on their own lives and have recently encouraged them to mine their text message exchanges or record conversations to find words or phrases to explore in writing for 1121’s Unit 1 “Portrait of a Word” assignment–but I could do well to follow my own advice. My 1121 students who focused on autobiographical material were much less likely to plagiarize (although I think the few who did mostly did so without realizing they were committing academic dishonesty). I would love more prompts like that in 1121 Unit 1 that help students reframe their own experiences as generative material to think and write about. While my dissertation research focused primarily on poetry and memoirs and critical sources about my literary sources, I have occasionally done research for more creative autobiographical writing by asking family members to fill in details for stories I don’t fully remember or wasn’t originally there for. Maybe this could be an assignment in an 1121-style and/or -level class: Profile an older relative; gather information by interviewing family members, freewriting your own memories, and reading through any written records you can find.

In my classrooms, I rely a lot on librarians’ workshops and annotated bibliographies to explain research. I’m interested in primary sources from students’ lives and sources from library databases much more than I am in what students find in the first page of Google results. But I don’t necessarily do a great job at this–my 1101 students last semester had a pretty hard time using library databases to find sources for their annotated bibliographies, despite the intense scaffolding of my course. This semester, I was pleased to schedule library workshops for my 1121 students in person, but when one section’s librarian was quite late and my students voted that another library workday to find sources with assistance would be helpful, the librarians told me that there were no available days my sections could use what seems to be the library’s one computer lab during our normal class meetings before my students’ research assignment is due. I’m a bit frustrated with that–it feels hard to teach online research, through the library’s databases or otherwise, given the extremely unreliable internet on campus. (I emailed NYCCT’s VPs about this last week, and was told that the wifi signal wouldn’t be amplified until next fall–so frustrating!)