Greetings from the Oregon coast! I’m here on a fairly impromptu vacation, and I’ve decided to not wimp out my first week into this project. For today’s article, I’ve returned to TETYC, hoping for a brief article that I can respond briefly to. Here it is, folks, a la article roulette:
Article 4:
Blue, Tim. “A Creative Approach to the Research Paper: Combining Creative Writing with Academic Research.” TETYC 34.2 (2006): 179-84. Print.
As usual, I was drawn to this article because of the title—I have long looked for ways to make academic research writing more interesting for students to write (and for me to read, of course). Blue’s article offers a detailed explanation of one assignment he’s used, what he calls a “creative research story,” in which students are asked to imitate a fiction story after researching the author. Blue uses this assignment with his basic composition students (though it’s not clear to me whether or not this class would be equivalent to our English 90: Developmental Writing or English 101: Introduction to College Writing course—I suspect it’s more of an E101 class because of the emphasis on research, but that’s just a hunch).
As I was cruising along through this reading, my gut reaction was to dislike Blue’s assignment, or I at least had the sense that I would not assign it in any of my classes. This is not because Blue has his students imitate a published writer’s style and story—I believe imitation can be an effective way for students to learn new moves, and I frequently pull from They Say, I Say, which offers templates for students to borrow, and these templates show students the writer-ly moves that can help them agree and counter other people’s ideas, and students love being shown how to write this way (which of course brings me back to Devan’s article from yesterday where the students asked why they hadn’t previously been taught to write that way—the want explicit instruction: osmosis doesn’t always work).
By the end of the article I was able to solidify to major premises of Blue’s assignment and approach that I strongly disagree with. (And, for the record, I much prefer to play the “believing game” over the “doubting game,” but I just couldn’t get myself there with this article.) The first element I disagreed with is the way Blue instructs his students about the endings of their stories. He explains:
I insist that students have a clear idea of how to end their stories. To convey the importance of knowing this from the beginning, I ask them how they are able to get driving directions off the Internet . . . what do they need to know, in other words? Of course, the answer is that they have to know where they are going before they can know how to get there. I had one student this year, long before I assigned this project, say to me, “Mr. Blue, it seems like these authors start out with an ending in mind and then write the rest of the story leading up to it.” “Bingo!” I replied. (182)
First, from a fiction-writing standpoint, Blue is instructing his students to work from a plot-driven perspective as opposed to a character-driven one. I’m not a fiction teacher or writer, but that just seems like bad advice (though, I’ll be sure to double-check with fiction-writing friends). From an academic-writing perspective, this is surely bad advice. To me, this is the equivalent of saying to a student, “Okay, decide what you believe on a topic, THEN go to the library or online to research it, so you can find some research to support what you already think.” Yuck. I ask: Where’s the inquiry? Where’s the discovery? Where’s the surprise that occurs when students get to figure out what they think as opposed to merely confirming their already-held beliefs? Yuck. The greatest teachable moments that have happened in my research-based assignments are when students come to me to ask if it’s okay to change their opinion. “YES,” I say. “YES, YES, YES.” And it happens more often than I would have expected because even though I ask students to try to not have an opinion to begin with, they often do—but, then they change their minds. Awesome.
The second element I disagree with is also a bit philosophical when it comes to teaching research-based writing—Blue has seemingly separated the research from the writing. Let me explain: the students’ major project is the fiction story, but the research they do is then compiled into a smaller, separate piece (which seems more like a reflection about the process of writing the fiction piece). Here’s how Blue describes it:
I ask them to go back to their research (now that they know their story’s plot more clearly) and write a short paper discussing how they will take what they have learned from the process they have undergone to tell their particular story. This step provides the chance to cover any elements of research paper writing that have been missed by the initial research and writing. It reinforces the selection and integration of quotations, in-text citations, works cited pages, and so on, allowing them to focus on how the research is related to their own creative stories. In this piece, students must cite multiple scholarly articles as well as the two stories they have now read. Also, as it is more traditional, this step gives students a chance to learn appropriate documentation and provides teachers with an opportunity to discuss plagiarism issues. (184)
Wow, he’s clearly done his research-instruction duty then: quotes, citations, works cited pages, and plagiarism! All in one short piece—not incorporated into the larger piece at all. And maybe this does work for him and his students as an introduction to research, but there’s a larger issue here. Blue describes the creative writing aspect of the project: “While the creative writing can present difficulty for some students, it should be the enjoyable part, the icing on the cake of the deep thinking they have done” (183). He later concludes the article with an aside: “One way or another, this assignment will have pushed them in ways both academic and creative (I don’t mean to imply that the two are entirely distinct!) […]” (184). So, he says he doesn’t mean to separate the two, BUT he does. He clearly separates the fun (creative writing) from the work (the research), which does imply that academic writing is separate from creative writing. This, of course, brings about the theoretical question, “What constitutes “creative” writing?” I would argue that good research-based writing is creative, full of life and voice and interest and intrigue—the same as fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. Whether Blue realizes it or not, he has set up a dichotomy here—academic versus creative writing—not broken one down. In our department, Steph Cox teaches an assignment she calls “historical fiction” (which might have originally been a Devan assignment, if I recall), and this assignment weds creative and academic writing well, and students love it.
Well, I don’t think I’ll be borrowing any of Blue’s ideas for any of my classes, but thinking about his work has helped me solidify what I believe to be important (or not) in teaching research-based writing. And, while I meant to keep this short, I’ve rambled for far too long (as usual).
Alright, I might go take a look at the beach now. More tomorrow!
mk
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