THE CHALLENGE

Typically situated within departments of English, the allied fields of writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies (WRL) face a particular set of challenges with respect to undergraduate research. Specifically, many of the methodologies that inform WRL research are archival and empirical in nature. Undergraduate English majors, however, practiced in scholarly inquiry guided by textual interpretation and literary analysis are often unfamiliar with the methods used in WRL. Moreover, becoming proficient enough to conduct independent undergraduate WRL research requires several semesters of engagement. This is an amount of time often beyond the reach of many students. The same is also true of English majors studying folklore and linguistics, disciplines that often engage archival and empirical methodologies and longitudinal studies.

FINDING A SOLUTION

Although research opportunities in WRL may be open to all students, faculty face the institutional challenge of making them accessible to all students as departments of English strive to prepare a more diverse range of students to engage in undergraduate research.[1] That accessibility, then, is contingent on creating sustainable means of introducing students to, and preparing them as, archival and empirical researchers. By situating the research experience in English 3379 (“Methods for the Study of Writing, Rhetoric and Literacy Studies”), the faculty sought to mitigate the challenges of students’ unfamiliarity with WRL methodologies. They also addressed the limited time available to them to conduct research.

THE COURSE

As a required gateway course in the WRL concentration, English 3379 was designed to guide students through the processes of articulating research questions, aligning those questions with and then practicing empirical methods, building project proposals, and presenting their in-progress work. Through a series of three scaffolded research modules, students consequently gained a better understanding of the research undertaken in WRL. The course also employed a series of short videos to introduce students to the Ohio State WRL faculty and their areas of research. Additionally, ENGL 3379 included a course-specific LibGuide that offered resources and processes for undertaking research in English studies and WRL.

THE RESEARCH MODULES

Module One

The first module in 3379 introduced archival research methods, prompting students to apply their established skills in textual interpretation and rhetorical analysis as they engaged the historiographic methods necessary to examine and interpret primary source artifacts originating from the Ohio State University community during the 1970 “Spring of Dissent.” Then, students collaboratively researched and analyzed artifacts related to social justice and social change on the OSU campus, producing final project proposals such as “The Rhetoric of the Spring of Dissent: Music as a Primary Motivator in the Student Riots of 1970.” Specifically, they

• Analyzed one oral history or dissent documentary artifact housed in the university digital archive.
• Collaboratively conducted background research on the period.
• Searched the student newspaper archive and the University Archives to locate additional artifacts that situated the oral history and dissent documentary artifacts.[2]

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Module Two

Then, the second module required students to apply their developing skills and knowledge of WRL to examine and code discursive artifacts and investigate questions related to writing studies. Specifically, students

• Practiced coding portions of selected anchor texts
• Articulated a rationale for a RAD (replicable, aggregable, and data-supported) study that required empirical (qualitative or quantitative) research methods
• Proposed a working research question and claim situated in discrete data sets examined through aligned research methods.

Module project proposals then examined the “Efficacy and Impact of Early College High School upon Student Achievement and Identity” and “Evolving Classrooms: Trading Pen and Paper for Laptops.”

The Final Module

The final module further extended students’ engagement with qualitative research. Here, they created interview and survey protocols and analyzed their fieldnotes.  This module asked students to

• Conduct an ethnographic observation of a community literacy space and compose field notes and a reflection on that observation
• Study a range of literacy narratives, including those from our class and others housed in the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), and formulate research questions from those narratives, and
• Create interview questions for a specific set of subjects (participants).

Student Projects

Students then composed project proposals such as “Literacy Standards in the Housing Industry” and “Crafting Coffee, Community, Literacies, and Lattes: Understanding Coffee Literacy within the Roosevelt Coffeehouse in Columbus, Ohio.”

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The course ultimately closed with a Work-in-Progress Symposium, a showcase event open to the University community through which undergraduate 3379 researchers disseminated their work to and had conversations with graduate students, faculty and staff.

IMPACTS

As a survey of WRL and its research methods, English 3379 creates the space for WRL students to engage published scholarship in the field. Additionally, they try their hands at WRL methods, and use those methods to ask and investigate the questions that interest them—alongside their peers and under the guidance of a teacher-researcher and mentor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to acknowledge the Office of Distance Education and eLearning at The Ohio State University, which has funded an ALX Grant to support the curricular revision of English 3379. Professor Jonathan Buehl serves as principal investigator on that project. Thanks, as well, to Professor Tamar Chute, University Archivist and Head of Archives at University Libraries for her partnership in the archival project and Professor Jennifer Schnabel, English Subject Librarian for designing the 3379 LibGuide.

Kay Halasek, Susan Lang, and Addison Koneval, and will present “Designing with Research in Mind: Implementing Diverse Methdologies in an Undergraduate Course in the Humanities” at ISSOTL 2019 in Atlanta, GA at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, October 11, 2019 (Session A708).

NOTES

[1] National venues for developing and presenting undergraduate research in WRL are many: The Naylor Workshop in Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies and the Conference on College Composition and Communication undergraduate poster sessions as well as publications such as Young Scholars in Writing.

[2] See Sheridon Ward’s August 19, 2019 CURAH blog post, for another undergraduate English major’s archival experience at Ohio State.