Berkley Center

In the educational documentary Take 20, professors of composition and rhetoric are asked to reflect on 20 questions about teaching and learning, including “What do you wish you had been taught in graduate school (but were not)?” Writing studies theorist Nancy Sommers responds that she wishes she “could have been taught how to do research.” Her answer serves as a reminder that teaching undergraduate or graduate level research is often challenging and elusive, not in the least because, at its core, it is a skill that requires engaging with the intellectual and disciplinary traditions of the humanist, the social scientist, and the scientist.

In the field of writing studies, we know that finding effective strategies for teaching research, like framing both empirical and textual research as active and dynamic, can help our students have a greater potential to transfer their knowledge to new writing situations. The five sections below offer instructional strategies for teaching research across the curriculum. Each section focuses on a key aspect of the research process, seen through the lens of how to best keep students attentive and engaged with their broader goals as scholars.

Entering a Conversation: Audience Awareness

In my Writing 015: Writing and Culture seminars, I try to emphasize effective research writing as writing that enters into an ongoing conversation. For most forms of textual research, the goal of reading widely and annotating texts is to eventually articulate a set of patterns to a particular audience. Compositionist Doug Brent notes that “the ability to learn from texts is the fundamental academic research skill.” Altering and demystifying student perceptions of what research is, and emphasizing its link to continuing an already-in-progress dialogue, proves to be useful across the disciplines. 

Building a Knowledge Base 

Any accomplished researcher will tell you that building one’s knowledge base is an essential component to producing successful research writing. As scholar of teaching and learning Nancy Chick notes, a student researcher needs to similarly “recognize the limit of one’s knowledge or ability,” and then devise a way to develop that knowledge. I often stress to my writing students the position of the bricoleur when I am encouraging them to move past the stage of collecting data and summarizing sources. The bricoleur moves in opposition to the master planner who waits for a vital source to solve everything. Customizable and hands-on library sessions are excellent opportunities for students to build their knowledge base and start to fashion connections between sources. 

Researching as a Recursive Craft 

Research occurs at every stage of writing: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing. More than a decade after being introduced to Booth, Colombe, and Williams’s The Craft of Research, I still use excerpts from Chapters 3 and 4 in my courses. A narrow topic, a focused research question, and a clear significance are frequently in flux as the research process (including advice, feedback, and coaching from instructors) develops. Because I ask students to choose their own topics for most assignments, they are often still perfecting essential aspects of their argument or subject matter as the final due date approaches—and that is often productive work. Students tend to take far more ownership of their projects the more they are allowed to radically revise and make crucial adjustments to their topics and questions.

Thinking about Thinking...about Research 

One key to teaching writing effectively is to deliberately encourage self-awareness in students. If students can view research as a dynamic process, and can engage in metacognitive reflection on what choices they have made as they research, then there’s a significantly higher chance that they will remember and bring their refined research habits to future writing activities, both within academia and outside of academia.

Studies have suggested that “the best reflection is often social/collaborative,” and so often my goals for reflective lessons include cultivating that same spirit of conversation that researchers bring to academic writing directly to the classroom. In this way, students “plan, monitor, and assess” not only what they are learning, but how they are active agents in that learning. Students may not be aware when they enter a college classroom that they are choosing research methods every time they begin a research project; part of the instructor’s goals, then, includes not only working with students to produce polished and well-developed final works, but also to help students recognize that they made critical choices along the way. 

Trying Out Digital Tools

Digital tools can fundamentally change how students conduct research in the context of academic writing. Stanford’s TeachingWriting Commons offers a good starting point for an introduction to digital annotation, while ZoteroBib and Refworks aid students in building bibliographies by collecting, importing, managing, annotating, and sharing bibliographic data. Beyond helping students locate and organize sources and annotate digital texts, data management tools have helped to reshape research disciplines in collaborative ways that are often public-facing and open access. 

With recent shifts toward open-sourced materials for teaching writing, many instructors assign and incorporate selections from the Purdue OWL, college writing centers, and the extensive Writing Commons as required reading. Moving toward more Creative Commons licensed texts or shared free web resources offers students a compelling option in a world where guides to research can become quickly outdated and often cost hundreds of dollars.