Davis and Shadle Dialectical Journal

Quotes

1)      “Research writing textbooks, despite their earnest good intentions, tend to reinforce unoriginal writing by providing students not only with maps through the conventional rules of academic research, but also a standardized concept of how academic research writing should look and sound; textbooks typically provide sample papers, and stock evidence on the “rules” of logical argumentation, linear organization, acceptable evidence, and the proper way to cite sources” (417-18).

2)      “We would like to believe that research writing teaches valuable skills and encourages students to commit to the academic ideals of inquiry and evidentiary reasoning. However, it may be as often the case that the research paper assignment teaches students little more than the act of producing, as effortlessly as possible, a drab discourse, vacant of originality or commitment” (419).

3)      “…teaching the research paper as the sole example of research writing will fail to prepare students for a myriad of other research based writings…” (420).

4)      “Research writing, we are told, should teach students about how data is generated and expertise gained. It should also allow them to cultivate their intellectual curiosity and expand their knowledge. The issue becomes method and form—how to do research and how to write it in ways that will allow students to embrace academic ideals and escape the cynicism of Posusta” (420-21).

5)      “The ideal of alternative research writing is exploration freed from its historical weight of conquest and enslavement” (422).

6)      “Alternative research writing inscribes an inclusive cross-disciplinary academy, which mixes the personal and the public and values the imagination as much as the intellect” (422).

7)      “…still, we want them to have, and heed, an itch” (423).

8)      “The research paper came to be chiefly a vehicle for training—not in the creation of knowledge, but in the recording of existing knowledge” (424).

9)      “In teaching multi-writing in our discourse theory course, we first open students up to a sense of either a multi-dimensional self or multiple selves, in order to create in a postmodern world” (434).

10)   “She was intellectually exploring a question that she was also urgently living” (437).

11)   “We return to them again and again, trying to understand them in full, but also finding pleasure in knowing that we will not, that they will remain fertile mysteries”  (439).

12) “A collective appreciation of mystery can also be a basis for revising the academy, making it truly a place of free inquiry, where the unknown is approached from many directions, using a variety of ways of thinking, writing, and making” (441).

 

 

Responses

1)      Davis and Shadle set up their problem with conventional “modern” research papers and how they are taught. Their views are reminiscent of Kleine’s description of students in the “night library”. Furthermore, the textbook Davis and Shadle differs greatly from Writing About Writing, which overtly states that it will not tell students how to write a research paper; it gives no checklist or set of rules.

 

2)      We want students to become engaged with research; to feel compelled to answer questions for their own edification as well as to write a paper for class. We want students, as Greene argues, to engage in the academic conversation as equals. But Davis and Shadle think that the research paper as it is currently taught does not achieve these goals.

 

3)      Davis and Shadle bring up another important limitation of the research paper; it doesn’t really prepare students for writing across the disciplines like it is supposed to, because the research essay is only one type of research writing.

 

4)      So the ideas and goals behind research writing are still very much valid, the authors contend, but the way teachers teach students to go about writing said research paper does not achieve those goals. Davis and Shadle want to show how students can go about writing a research paper that will allow them to engage in the academic discussion teachers are eager for them to be a part of. True academic discussion and discovery doesn’t come from a checklist, but rather from honest questioning.

 

5)      The purpose of research is to discover new knowledge, not to be bogged down by the rehashing of old knowledge.

6)      What Davis and Shadle are proposing shakes everything up, the personal and the public, the value of creativity, even the promotion of interdisciplinary study. Because they include so many facets, Davis and Shadle are allowing students to truly explore the “mystery” of their research questions.

 

7)      We want students to want to research.

 

8)      Another way of saying that students simply follow a pattern of research writing that isn’t conducive to producing new knowledge

 

9)      Students have to acknowledge that different genres require different styles of writing. Davis and Shadle take his a step further and say that to write in these different genres requires a student to formulate different selves.

10)  Students need to have an immediate connection to a research project if they are going to continue to research of their own accord to broaden their own knowledge—the stakes have to be higher than a paper grade in an English class.

 

11)  In the multi-modal projects, Davis and Shadle revel in the fact that they cannot wholly comprehend their students’ projects; they enjoy the fact that students have succeeded in not writing a standard modern research paper.

12) Davis and Shadle want the joys of the mysterious to spread to all of academia, only then will truly serious academic inquiry occur.