The impetus for the observational study I will be carrying out is rooted in what I perceive as a divide created within academia between personal and academic writing. I wish to help close this artificial divide as I do not see it as altogether necessary or natural. The question I aim to answer is to what degree the conflation of personal and academic writing results in a more engaged and satisfied student.

The results of my study will fit within the scholarly discourse that focuses on narratives/stories as a springboard for students’ academic writing. Our English 101 curriculum already begins with a narrative project, but, additionally, I want my students to understand just what they are doing at a technical level when they compose said narrative. According to Robert Nash, narratives involve establishing “clear constructs, hooks and questions” and moving “from the particular to the general and back again… often,” habits which are essential to writers regardless of their discipline (Addison 380). My hope is that by emphasizing the writing moves they are already making in completing their narratives that I can get them to continue to utilize those same techniques going forward into the research portion of the quarter.

Having the literacy collage directly connect into the pre-proposal letter will hopefully cause my students see what Nash refers to as the “larger implications” of their stories, drawing on their “vast store of formal background knowledge” to take the personal and extrapolate it out into the academic (Addison 380). Too often students self-deprecate themselves through their writing and I believe this negative attitude can be attributed in large part to academia telling them that their stories do not matter compared to the “experts.” In “Narrative as Method and Methodology in Socially Progressive Research,” Joanne Addison argues “that if our understanding of narrative and narrative analysis is to progress in systematic and substantive ways then we need to take at least a momentary turn away from ‘the products of expert storyteller,’ as in literary analysis, and toward the original narratives of a personal experience” (374). Valuing my student’s stories and forcing them to take a look at those stories from a wide-angle lens will help to create an environment where they feel their voice is valued instead of something that needs to be fixed/reworked.

Celebrating the importance/relevance of student’s stories will help create a classroom that prizes translingualism, a term that Rebecca Mlynarczyk defines in her article, “Storytelling and Academic Discourse: Including More Voices in the Conversation” as “an approach that recognizes, even celebrates, the vast variety of forms and functions of language” (12). Using my students’ stories as starting points into the academic discourse will be particularly helpful for those of them not born into affluent families, who did not perhaps get the quality education that their more well-off peers did.

That being said, the English 101curriculum, as currently constructed, does a nice job of having a personal narrative as the first project that invites the students to tell their story followed by them attempting to find some kind of common ground with a partner’s story in the literacy collage. Where I want to make a connection is between their personal experience and the larger world and more importantly to help them understand academic discourse to be “fluid and adaptable rather than as ‘autonomous’ and unchanging” as the stereotype would have it (Mlynarczyk 13). By having the literacy timeline, narrative, and collage all factor into what research my students explore I hope to create more of an interconnected feeling between the personal projects at the beginning of the quarter and the more academic/research-oriented projects at the end of the quarter.

As far as the practical methods involved in carrying out my study I will begin and end the quarter by having my students take a survey that deals primarily with personal vs. academic writing. The statements would be as follows on a 1 to 5 Likert scale, 1 being extreme no and 5 being extreme yes:

Effective personal writing is crucial to success in college and beyond

Effective academic writing is crucial to success in college and beyond

My personal history has value within academia

Academic writing has nothing to do with personal writing

I will compare the data gathered at the beginning of the quarter with the end of the quarter and will hopefully see some kind of change in responses to at least some of the statements.

A secondary purpose of me reshaping the pre-proposal letter to be a product of some commonality in the partner literacy collage was the idea that it would help in keeping both students engaged with each other and the research more so than this last quarter in which they researched potential topics individually than settled on the most feasible topic. While the original approach perhaps led to easier research projects I observed that it left the partner whose topic was not chosen as a bit of a shadow to their partner. With my restructuring of the pre-proposal letter assignment I will measure student engagement not only through observation as I did last quarter, but also through a survey that will be given three different times during the quarter; once after the research proposal, then after the research poster is due on Canvas, then after they complete their webtext. The statements would be as following on a 1 to 5 Likert scale, 1 being extreme no and 5 being extreme yes:

I find the research we will be/are doing to be interesting

My partner finds the research we will be/are doing to be interesting

My partner and I evenly split duties

I encourage my partner to contribute to research/work being done

I have an equal voice to my partner as far what is included in our project(s)

I am satisfied with the direction our research is taking

Interviews will also be a requirement for their research poster and subsequent webtext to give their research a more personal feel than one based strictly around surveys would. I will also be encouraging them to use content from their interviews as a hook to their introduction that will make the readers of either their poster or webtext want to read more than if they did the standard, and what I think of as somewhat boring, hook of what they researched and why. Additonally, I will be encouraging my students if possible to interview family/friends if it relevant to their research as I think this will lend yet even more of a connectedness between them and their project, giving them something to talk about at the research showcase that personalizes the project.

I also plan to add academic reflections to the literacy-sponsorship narrative and the literacy collage and personal reflections to the research poster and webtext that will be uploaded to Canvas to get my students to think about these projects from a different perspective than they may be used to doing. My hope is that in completing these reflections my students will be able to tease out on their own what is going well and what is not as far as their projects and make the appropriate adjustments with minimal assistance on my part. That being said the reflections will also be useful as an indicator as to whether I do need to step in from either a content or partnership standpoint.

The academic reflection will ask my students to consider the writing moves they made in the literacy-sponsorship narrative whether those be showing vs. telling, using present tense, limiting the moment depicted, etc. In the academic reflection for the collage I will get them to expand individually a little more on the reflection that is already part of the project. Something along the lines of why they omitted one element of CRAP or another from their project, why they chose to work with PowerPoint or Photoshop, what advantages/disadvantages doing a paper, digital, or audio collage offered them versus the other forms, etc.

The personal reflection for the research poster and webtext will deal more with affect-related questions like how working with their partner is going, if they feel the research they are conducting is relevant, what their excitement/engagement level is with the project, etc. Here again, I see the reflection as a way of me getting an update on what is working and what is not that is between me and the individual student (why I chose Canvas over WordPress). This last quarter I felt a little disconnected from my students and what they were working on and I think the reflections are a great way of closing that distance as well as allowing them to think about their work from a more detached perspective.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Addison, Joanne. “Narrative as Method and Methodology in Socially Progressive Research.” Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive and Ethically Responsible Research, edited by Katrina M. Powell and Pamela Takayoshi, pp. 373-83, Hampton Press, 2012.

Mlynarczyk, Rebecca. “Storytelling and Academic Discourse: Including More Voices in the Conversation.” Journal of Basic Writing, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 4-22, City University of New York, 2014.