Writing connected research

Adventure by Ben Harvey

In my last post I wrote about the connected research and social scholarship that's happening in my classroom. The most significant way those things manifest themselves is through the discussions that my students post on Youth Voices. The students search for information about their inquiry as they learn to navigate different resources and then post the most interesting things they discovered on their Youth Voices blogs. After all the blogging and discussing at the end of the unit, they distill the most compelling information into the traditional research paper format.

Is their writing that's done for the screen better than their writing for paper, or vice-versa? I don't know. But what I do know is that I need to prepare my students for both types of composition, at least for the immediate future. And I also know that students now need to understand how to access and assess information from a lot of different sources. For example, some of these databases and resources I use are open; others are locked behind paywalls or only accessible through library subscriptions (more on that later).

If you're interested in doing this yourself, here is some information about the resources and databases the students use as they blog and discuss their findings:

• Read some Opposing Viewpoints about a current political issue. 
• Using the date range advanced search feature in Google, read recent news articles written about your topic. 
• Search using the Gale database available through our school library.
• Search the EBSCO database, available to all students in our state. 
• Use the Google top-level site operator, read the different types of information available through .org .edu .mil .gov .info etc.
• Interview experts with extensive knowledge of your topic.
• Search Twitter and blogs for real-time information. For this and all posts do the assessing credibility exercise

Bringing the White Paper into the classroom

Lately I've been thinking about a genre to include in my English classes for next year - the White Paper.

This idea is a continuation of an earlier post I wrote about blogging your research as a way to breathe life into the traditional research paper as it's commonly taught in schools – an attempt to reconcile two genres, blogging/connected writing and the research paper. I've noticed that when students write interest-driven posts on Youth Voices, they participate in numerous discussions over the course of a term that touch on a recurring theme that matters to them. What if students periodically were to pull back and compose a white paper on their enduring interests? Here's a definition of a government white paper that I came across: "White Papers have tried to perform the dual role of presenting firm government policies while at the same time inviting opinions upon them." In my mind this is good research because, while it may be finished, it's not yet done. Good research continually informs practice and vice versa. What if our students explored this "dual role"?

This seems like another type of academic writing that's worth a closer look. The Purdue Online Writing Lab has a section devoted to resources for the White Paper.  

Here are a couple of examples of the kind of research writing I want my students to do this year, White Papers that continue to inform my own teaching and learning: Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture and Living and Learning with New Media.

Bridging the Gulf

Detail from Franklin's print shop.

As I continue try to balance my high school teaching duties with my doctoral studies, I came across "Rethinking Ed Tech Research," by Punya Mishra that encapsulates a central dynamic that I've learned about the relationship of research/theory and practice.  More specifically, how researchers and pracitioners view each other.  And remarkably, how little contact there is between the world of academic research and the day to day practice of teaching.

When I conduct workshops for my colleagues in schools, I sometimes have participants read a research study. Invariable someone takes offense, sometimes because it challenges our own expertise, the belief (in most cases correct) that "no one knows my students better than I do."  Additionally practitioners often discount research because it's distant (both in the sense that the language isn't the most reader-friendly, but also distant in the sense that it seems so far removed from anything we teachers experience on a day to day basis).

Similarly it didn't take me long in my graduate studies to realize that a lot of the action research teachers conduct in our classrooms is rarely valued by researchers.  Sometimes the professorial attitude seems a bit condescending, but other times this opinion is warranted. Speaking for myself, much of my own research and writing makes sense to me in my own situation, but it's not always generalizable. So I have to be honest with my teacher-researcher self and ask, "what good is it to the educational community if it's only relevant to me?"

One solution is to bring these worlds together in schools that maybe don't exist right now. If John Dewey were here, I'm guessing he'd create some kind of virtual or hybrid laboratory school where researchers would bounce their ideas off practitioners in process, and practitioners could apply these emerging research findings to their practice. Continuing the learning loop, researchers might benefit from practical applications of their ideas, and that it turn would make their research ideas more dynamic. Teaching loads might be reconfigured as well. Professors could teach children some of the time, and working teachers might lead a few graduate student seminars.

I read a lot about how K-12 schooling and higher education in their current forms are becoming less relevant for today's learners. One way to make formal education more relevant would be to locate more intersections to these two mostly parallel universes.