Books for Upper Level Writing Research Courses

Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies by Lee Nickoson, Mary P Sheridan

An essential reference for students and scholars exploring the methods and methodologies of writing research.

What does it mean to research writing today? What are the practical and theoretical issues researchers face when approaching writing as they do? What are the gains or limitations of applying particular methods, and what might researchers be overlooking? These questions and more are answered by the writing research field’s leading scholars in Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies.

Editors Nickoson and Sheridan gather twenty chapters from leaders in writing research, spanning topics from ethical considerations for researchers, quantitative methods, and activity analysis to interviewing and communitybased and Internet research. While each chapter addresses a different subject, the volume as a whole covers the range of methodologies, technologies, and approaches—both old and new—that writing researchers use, and examines the ways in which contemporary writing research is understood, practiced, and represented. An essential reference for experienced researchers and an invaluable tool to help novices understand research methods and methodologies, Writing Studies Research in Practice includes established methods and knowledge while addressing the contemporary issues, interests, and concerns faced by writing researchers today.

Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive and Ethically Responsible Research by Katrina Powell & Pamela Takayoshi

 Research pratices-much like literacy and writing themselves- are shaped by and responsive to context. Contemporary research methodologists have increasingly called upon researchers to be explicitly and systematically reflexive about their practices. As writing researchers have begun untangling the complexities of ethical reserch practice, new practices have developed and new issues have arisen. This volume contributes to the continuing examination and development of ethically responsible, self-reflective, and systematic research on writing. With a look toward the ways diffractive methodology can inform our self-reflexitivity, this volume highlights particular ways of looking back and forward, as ways to complicate our practices in the moment. This text inculdes chapters focused on theories of research, research and institutional practices and reflexive/diffractive research practices.

Thinking about how to teach upper level/grad courses on composition...

Should I have started with the process movement? Part of me is feeling like that story needs to be told... Who helps me?

Yagelski's book review: he proposes we read Murray, Elbow and Freire.

Lad Tobin's introduction to Taking STock: The Writing Process in the 90s

ENGL 378 or other Upper Level Studies in Composition

Framing Questions:

• What is writing?
• What does writing do?
• Who is a writer?
• What is an audience?
• Why does one write?

Issues of Identity and Writing in ENGL 378

Ivanic proposes that we make our study of writing and identity an explicit part of our teaching and she proposes a method for doing so under the heading of "raising learners' critical awareness of the nature of writer identity, so as to give them maximum control over this important aspect of writing" (339).

The full passage is here:

I mentioned critical language awareness (CLA) in chapter 5 as a research methodology; here I am recommending it as a pedagogy. CLA focuses on the critical discussion of discourses, discourse practices, and the way in which they position language users. In relation to writing it means recognizing that writing in a particular way means appearing to be a certain type of person, as discussed in Part Two of this book; that is, it involves raising awareness of the discoursal self and gaining control over it. CLA also involves action as a result of awareness. it is based on a view of language in which discourses do not mechanistically determine what people say and write, but are open to contestation and change. Learners are encouraged to make choices as they write which will align them with social values, beliefs and practices to which they are committed, if necessary opposing the privileged conventions for the genre and thereby contributing to discoursal, and thus social, change.

Learner writers need to be aware that writing is an extremely complex social act, and it is not their weakness which causes them to get stuck with it. Not just people who are construed as 'learners', but everyone has to face the difficult task of deciding how to present themselves in writing: which discourse types and associated identities to accept, and which to reject. Students ned to develop a critical awareness of their own life-histories, and the sorts of social constraints which may be responsible for any difficulties they have with acquiring particular discourse types. If someone is able to blame the inequities of society for the fact that a certain discourse doesn't' come easily to them, and recognize the political implications of this inequity, they are likely to stop taking the blame on their own shoulders for the difficulties they face. This might be a lot more enabling than thinking that they must just try harder. (339)

There is more. Basically, start reading on p. 335. The section is "Putting writer identity on the agenda in the teaching and learning of academic writing" (338-343)

Teaching paradigms of composition

So, next fall I am slated to teach the first Issues in Composition course. In the spring, I am slated to teach the graduate course in composition theory. An interesting way of thinking about how to structure this course has occurred to me this morning as I have been reading Anis Bawarshi's Genre and the Invention of the Writer. The relevant section comes on p. 51 in the section called "The Process Movement in Composition: Reclaiming Invention." The structure that occurs to me as I read this passage, a way of organizing a course on composition (history? theories of invention?):

Part 1: Current Traditional Rhetoric (19th century to 1960s)

Product to Process

Part 2: The Writing Process Movement (1960s to 1990)

Process to Context

Part 3: Post-Process (1990 to present)

I could have students read articles which embody the various positions on writing espoused during these periods. It's interesting to think about how these movements argue for paradigms, ways of thinking about how writing works and that discovering these arguments and having students examine them might be useful. We might also discuss the way that these paradigms don't die and exist simultaneously. Current Traditional Rhetoric is still with us. Among a large cohort of writing teachers, process approaches are still the prevalent way of teaching. Post-process has gotten hold, but certainly not successfully changed public perceptions about how writing works.

Bawarshi's organizing question might be a useful one here: What is involved when we say what writers are doing and why are they doing it? (50)