Collaborative Research Project Resources

Titles of Previous Years' Research Projects: Starting in 1989, when I first came to Goucher, and continuing through every three-year period when I direct the Writing Program, students in 221 write collaborative research projects.  Some of these are unique projects that might give you ideas about how to do something similar, and some generate time-dependent data which needs to be refreshed every few years to be useful, so you might "re-do" the projects of a previous group with changes from your new perspective.

Advice for Collaborative Group Formation and Operation: Collaboration is not always easy, but when it's done right, it's an immensely productive way to do research.  This page includes tips on how to structure your group and on how to manage producing the final report of your findings.

Proposal Writing: I ask each collaborative group to write a short proposal specifying what they are going to try to do, why it needs doing, what they have already accomplished toward doing it, and what they still need to do.  This page describes what should be in a typical successful proposal.

Report Writing: Doing the research, itself, is only part of the project.  The enduring value of the research depends on your ability to generate a report of your findings.  Reports can be produced in a number of ways, and they can be evaluated in a similar variety of fashions.  Their contents also can vary depending upon what evidence you were using.

The Paris Review Interview Series:  English 221 students sometimes become interested specifically in the composing processes of creative writers.  The decades-old tradition of interviews conducted by PR  are an unparalleled resource of your group wants to investigate some aspect of creative writers' composing processes.  The library has numerous printed collections by decade (search OLLI titles for "Writers at Work" and "Poets at Work") and I have the recent anthology of interviews with women writers in my office, but you also have online access to these interviews via the hyperlink above.  Be careful as you draw conclusions from them, though.  As numerous scholars have warned us, what works for novelists, dramatists and poets often does not work for academic writers, and first-person testimony can allow authors to disseminate fictions, either intentional or unconscious.