Solving Syllabus Problems: Teaching Research as a Part of Scholarly Life vs. Teaching "the Research Paper" (Rev. 8/16/04)
Teachers and students trained in the last half of the twentieth century tend to use the term "research paper" when describing a particular type of academic prose produced by advanced high school and college students. The assignment typically involves either an assigned topic or a completely open topic in the course's subject matter, instructions on the use of the library catalogue and indexes of periodical publications, and students' perception that they must assemble as much "information" from as many "sources" as they can find into a document that summarizes what those sources say. Some instructors in high schools actually require mere source summary as the end product, but by the time they enter college, students usually are instructed to develop an "original thesis" from their contact with those sources and to use the sources to support that thesis (Wilhoit). However, this instruction "to think originally" often occurs outside the working contexts in which professionals develop original thinking within disciplines, and students often feel as if they are expected to guess what their instructors want to read (at worst) or to invent impossibly grand, innovative ideas in a discipline they have not yet entered. Students' "sources" are completely exterior to their lives: they are published in journals students never ordinarily read, and they are written using words and rhetorical patterns that make little sense to the beginner.
In brief, students cannot be expected to practice the methods and follow the rules by which intellectual property is created without practicing those methods and following those rules for their own original purposes created within an authorizing discipline. Until students have been led within a discipline, they are outsiders and can "know" things only as believers in myths "know" the myths are true. As long as no incontrovertibly contrary belief arises to destroy the myth they believe in, their myth will serve them as well as any other. Mythic beliefs often are borrowed and adapted at will to serve the needs of outsiders when there is no enforcement apparatus to punish "misbelief" or heresy. This may explain why as many as 45% of Kansas State University undergraduates surveyed in 1999 admitted to "copying a few sentences of material without footnoting them" and two-thirds of them thought it was not an important violation of the rules of scholarly practice (McCabe). To scholars, such an act would combine two unimaginable violations of the rules of their professions: theft of another's intellectual property that inevitably will be detected and imposture, the assumption of the appearance of authority one does not have. The combination would destroy one's career, preventing further employment in that, or any other scholarly field. For students who don't yet have careers to lose, however, the sanctions are distant and improbable. Unless captured by the "Inquisition" (AKA an Academic Honor Board), students do not perceive that such thefts and impostures cause harm because they do not belong to the discipline that is harmed. They are only "writing research papers," assembling mythic knowledge in exchange for a grade.
The process of "writing research papers" is a terribly demanding one, however, and the strenuous effort required sometimes is thought to be as important as the paper product, itself--hard work, some say, is good for students no matter what its intentions or outcomes. Unfortunately, both the process and its product are founded on faulty logic and disconnected from any real-world writing behaviors which adults typically pursue. Until Anglo-American colleges and universities invented the "research paper" in the mid-twentieth century, that genre did not exist (Larson). Nevertheless, it survives and thrives despite the evidence of its futility which accumulates in stacks outside the doors of faculty offices and in the trash rooms of student dormitories at the end of every semester. Far too many "research papers" assigned in American colleges are destined to be read only once before being thrown away, producing only one tangible result apart from fatigue--the grade. Even while those "research papers" were being assigned in composition classes, scholars performed research, and they wrote about what they found, but they never called what they produced a "research paper." Nor did the resulting document consist almost entirely of other authors' opinions strung together. Scholars often refer to what predecessors and contemporary colleagues have discovered and to how they interpreted what they found, but those scholars were not trying primarily to reproduce that information in a summary.
This is also true in every professional occupation save, perhaps, the compilation of encyclopedias and college literature "study guides." News reporters and feature writers investigated their topics, often going to libraries to seek previously published information, but they rarely publish something that is no more than a rehash of what others had published--they have to deliver "news." Architects planning buildings research others' designs, as well as recent publications on materials and site data, and they write proposals based on their interpretation of what they found, but the proposal is not an end in itself--it produces buildings for people to live and work in. Literary scholars seek evidence in their primary sources and, combined with other scholars' opinions, develop new understandings of what the primary sources meant, but even in the case of a "review of recent research," they never merely reproduce their colleagues' opinions--they have to contribute something original to how we read the literature. Mathematicians investigating new ways to use numbers might head to the library to read what their colleagues thought, and they use the results of that research to introduce their work, but they never would mistake the value of a summary of previous work for a genuinely new contribution to the field. None of those adult professionals, ever writes what many students and teachers call a "research paper."
Only students are assigned to write "research papers," and not enough of them really understand how those assignments are supposed to relate to their curiosities, their ambitions, and their ethical sense of "what ought to be done." The resulting documents often are empty of passion, boring to read, and riddled with near- or full-bore plagiarism by paraphrase. Why not abandon the practice entirely and teach students to use research the way scholars and other professionals use it--to solve problems, to support a proposal to make something happen or to correct something that is wrong, to persuade someone to allow them to undertake advanced study of a topic, or even just to discover what other scholars do not know and would appreciate being told?
As early as 1988, Ken Macrorie proposed replacing the "Research Paper" with the "I-search Paper," a document that grows as an answer to a question the student genuinely cares about, a solution to a problem with practical consequences for the paper's author. His title refers to the way his proposed assignments are motivated by "I," the person conducing the research, the origin of the process, rather than the motiveless function of "research," itself. For Macrorie, the engine that drives successful "I-search" is curiosity fueled by passion. Method and sources improve over time. Though students' objects of curiosity initially may seem trivial, "non-academic," they learn to develop more academic curiosities by following the ones they already have until they reach the roots of knowledge about their topic, or until a new, more profound curiosity arises. All practicing scholars begin life being curious about simple things. They just learn quickly to seek the foundations and implications and causes of those things, and that leads them to scholarly methods and sources. Students who do not come to college already curious about academic subjects need a path to get them there. Whether we call the path an "I-search" or introduce it without fanfare, any course can incorporate this approach to research as a natural outgrowth of the mind's need for correct explanations and satisfying outcomes. The student who has produced such explanations and outcomes "owns" them in a way that the "research paper" writer is unlikely to own the product of the research process. From this sense of ownership arises a respect for intellectual property, an understanding of why sources deserve careful acknowledgement, and a resistance to habits that result in plagiarism, whether accidental or intentional.
English 105, in particular, benefits from a teaching strategy that blends the search for helpful and reliable information into the syllabus throughout the semester, rather than concentrating it in a single, mammoth assignment at the end of the syllabus. Assignment sequences which delve deeper into previous topics, seeking successively more expert sources for each new paper, form a pathway that is more likely to lead students to respect the hard-won authority of scholarly sources than a sudden shift from assignments using only easily accessible primary or popular sources to a final paper based only on difficult to read scholarly sources. Students' reading skills, and their ability to use the terms of art and concepts common to the discipline they are following, must be improved every bit as much as their writing skills if they are to enter the scholarly community as apprentice members. For practical suggestions about how to structure an assignment sequence starting with an "I-search"-style paper, Macrorie's book is still a great resource and it is still in print. A CCC article by Davis and Shadle condenses a number of useful approaches (see below). A sample "I-search" style research assignment leading students from popular to expert sources is available on the Writing Program web site. Those are things any 100- or 200-level course at Goucher could do to help students begin to think of research as a normal functional element in their everyday lives. For instruction beyond this period of apprenticeship, students must choose their masters from among the majors at Goucher, and faculty in the majors bear the next level of instruction in research and in writing.
The concept of apprenticeship helps us understand both the limits of what a lower-division college course can teach about research, and the way such a course must emphasize the transferability of those basic skills to higher level skills, concepts, method and theory taught in students' academic majors (Moxon, Thrupp, Postan, Dyer, Kermode, Nicholas). Medieval crafts were learned by accumulating skills and knowledge on the job, so even rudimentary skills were performed in close proximity to people practicing high-level skills, and their significance was thereby made more, rather than less important to the learner. Bad masters, as we know from court records, were charged with failure to teach, letting apprentices work in isolation, and with punishing them for poor work because they had not bothered to keep the apprentice in touch with more advanced craftsmen who would insure the work was done properly. Poorly trained students, told to go to the library and return with a set number of scholarly sources on a topic the instructor has chosen, are likely to feel much like a medieval apprentice who sued his master for failure to instruct and unreasonable punishment. If we think of first-year students as apprentices learning the most basic tools and codes of scholarship based on their own need to discover reliable answers, we can eliminate the "Research Paper" assignment's tendency to teach the process out of context rather than as something arising from the student's needs.
Medieval apprentices performed necessary work for their masters while practicing the fundamental skills of their crafts. Even if what they made was only a small portion of a "masterpiece," their valuable labor rarely would be wasted on products destined to be thrown away. The traditional seven-year term of apprenticeship was far longer than that needed to learn the craft because their work was considered valuable to the master in its own right. More importantly, once they had passed the most basic levels of training while working side by side with journeymen and masters, they were taught the social codes, language, even gestures and jokes which formed the craft's members into an interdependent cultural unit. Some of that more advanced information was taught to them as secrets which never should be revealed to those outside the guild, but in practice such "secrets" easily could be discovered by anyone willing to invest the time and routinely were stolen by rivals in other cities or lands. However, within a city or land, those "trade secrets" and the non-secret socialization built a quasi-kinship among practitioners of the craft, which led members to respect and support each other rather than destructively competing against each other. Apprenticeship has acquired an unsavory connotation in the modern era, and it's true that unscrupulous masters and ne'er-do-well apprentices can be found in printed records due to their presence in legal records and their superior appeal to poets (e.g., Chaucer's "Cook's Tale"). The system's overall success at turning apprentices into practicing masters can be judged by its spread throughout Europe, Britain, and the British colonies, including those in the Americas.
From their first year at Goucher, students should be treated as the scholarly apprentices of faculty members, especially in the conduct of research and the practice of writing. We should not assign students research or writing tasks which do not produce products students value. We should use students' desire to master the secrets of research and writing to bring them into the family of scholars to which we belong. We should neither delay nor hurry the process of learning. Students should begin their apprenticeship from their first day on campus, but they also should receive dedicated class and conference time devoted to higher-level mentoring in the advanced practices of their majors. That was what Writing Proficiency in the Major requirements were intended to insure.
For faculty members who want more specific suggestions for how to implement alternative forms of research writing instruction, the February 2000 issue of College Composition and Communication contains a well-written, practically useful study of college-level research pedagogy in "'Building a Mystery': Alternative Research Writing and the Academic Act of Seeking" by Robert Davis and Mark Shadle. They point out that when we teach research with extremely tight control on student's topics, resulting only in studies whose outcomes already are known, "we teach them to fear the unknown" (426). Davis and Shadle encourage students to understand research as the pursuit of mystery, and writing about research as the story of that pursuit, its motivation, and its outcome. This article explores ways to integrate writing based on scholarly research into all kinds of courses, and it would be especially appropriate for instructors in English 105 and Writing Across the Curriculum sections. If you are an NCTE member, you can read it online at http://www.ncte.org/pdfs/members-only/ccc/0513-feb00/CO0513Building.pdf If you are not an NCTE member and do not have access to CCC, please let me know and I will lend you my copy. Although the authors derive their article's first title from a modern song by Sarah McLachlan, a Middle-English-speaking apprentice or master would have known their "mystery" as what we would call their "craft" or "profession." We are all professing a mystery.
Works Cited
Davis, Robert, and Mark Shadle. "'Building a Mystery": Alternative Research Writing and the Academic Act of Seeking." CCC 51:3 (February 2000): 417-46.
Dyer, Christopher. Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200-1520. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Gay, Yvonne. "The Business of Cheating Stirs New Solutions: Mellon and Hewlitt Foundation Grants Propose to Keep Students Honorable."
Kermode, Jenny. Medieval Merchants: York, Beverly and Hull in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Larson, Richard L. "The 'Research
Paper' in the Writing Course: A Non-Form of Writing." College English
44 (1982): 811-16. Stable JSTOR URL:
Macrorie, Ken. The I-Search Paper. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1988.
McCabe, Donald. "Academic Dishonesty Survey Preliminary Report." Undergraduate Honor System: Kansas State University. 1999. Available online at http://web.archive.org/web/20020804065045/http://www.ksu.edu/honor/mccabesurvey1999/survey.htm (8/16/04).
Moxon, Joseph. Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683-4). Ed. Herbert Davis and Harry Carter. London: Oxford UP, 1958.
Nicholas, David. Trade, Urbanisation and the Family: Studies in the History of Medieval Flanders. Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum, 1996.
Postan, M. M. The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain 1100-1500. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972.
Wilhoit, Stephen. "Helping Students Avoid Plagiarism." College Teaching. 42:4 (Fall 1992): 161-65.