Joel Shaver

May 10 2013 ∞

“ In my composition class, students’ first assignment asks them to conduct research on the writing and research practices of other disciplinary activity systems by interviewing professors, students, and professionals on their writing and research practices. I provide students the option to study an activity system outside of the university, but no student has chosen to do so, possibly because students already have access to the activity system of the university. Students are encouraged to observe a class meeting and to collect any syllabi, assignment prompts, or other documents from this activity system, in addition to conducting interviews.

— CF 25: “The ‘Research Paper’ Prompt” by Kerry Dirk

+ ∞

“ I recently taught a freshman composition course that included several short papers, some of which involved research, but no extensive research project. Although I had distributed a syllabus that included descriptions of the assignments we would cover that semester, a student approached me several times throughout the semester to ask when we would write “the big research paper that is common in every English class.” Despite my attempts to convince her that we would be writing no such paper in this particular course, she could not let go of the idea that an English course could exist without the inclusion of this particular genre. What fascinated me most was that her previous experiences had so deeply engrained into her the belief that there is one unified research paper—a paper that seems to belong to an English class—that makes up one unified genre. I could not fault her for this belief, as many students rightly come to my classes with similar expectations, often seeing writing courses as hoops through which they must jump before moving into their disciplinary courses and being done with “English.” Through additional conversations with this student, I realized that for her, and I suspect for many other students, a research paper stood between her and the rest of her disciplinary work for which she believed there would be no such papers.

— CF 25: “The ‘Research Paper’ Prompt” by Kerry Dirk

May 08 2013 ∞