Teaching Research

In The Craft of Research (U of Chicago P, 1995), Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb, and Joseph Williams offer a wealth of excellent advice for student-writers who are working on research papers. Much of this advice, of course, is easily translated into advice for teachers who require their students to do research, and hence what follows is a synopsis and adaptation of the ideas of Booth, Colomb, and Williams for teachers of writing.

In the second unit of their book, they describe a process by which student-writers can find worthwhile subjects for their research-papers, a process that begins with a general interest, which then becomes a topic, and, in turn, a question, and then the question becomes a problem, and the problem yields a set of sources where its solution can be found. This process can structure a series of class-discussions or student-teacher conversations or writing exercises over a span of a week or so, as the teacher guides the students through these steps toward the launch of a worthwhile research project.

Booth et al divide some of these steps into useful sub-steps. Before a topic can become a question, for example, the writer must focus the topic: to focus the topic, the writer must turn a phrase into a sentence, and that sentence, in turn, into a claim. In their example, they begin with a very general phrase: “Free will in War and Peace.” By adding words like conflict or development or description or contribution, they begin to focus this topic and move it toward a contestable and hence interesting claim, one worth articulating as a research-question: “In War and Peace, Tolstoy describes three battles in a way that makes free will conflict with historical inevitability.” This claim becomes a question thus: “How does Tolstoy describe the three battles in War and Peace to draw free will and historical inevitability into conflict?”

Booth et al suggest another sub-step, one by which the question takes on wider significance. To lead students through this step, encourage them to ask “So what?” and to articulate, explicitly, why they want an answer to the question. Students might find it very difficult to answer the question at a practical level, and hence the question of so what? should be framed as an academic one – not one that calls for some material action that will change a set of circumstances in the world, but rather one that points toward a flawed or incomplete understanding, a misunderstanding of some circumstances in the world that constitutes a problem that good research will resolve. The question above becomes: “Many people assume that their lives are determined by either their own free will or by some historical inevitability, but how might both play an equal role?” Of course, this question can point to the original interest in Tolstoy in the very next sentence: “The foolishness of reducing the complexity of our lives to one or the other explanation can be traced in Tolstoy’s description of three battles in War and Peace, especially if those descriptions are contrasted to actual newspaper accounts of the battles and compared to certain debates that were raging in the church at the time Tolstoy wrote.” In the draft of the research paper itself, especially in the introduction, the foolishness and danger of wholly separating free will and historical inevitability can be elaborated and detailed somewhat as the essential raison d’etre of the project, something approaching a crisis, as delineated by Tolstoy, that the writing and research itself will help to assuage.

But how did those particular sources – newspaper accounts and church debates – appear as the best, most productive basis of research? In other words, once the student has managed to fill in blanks 1, 2, 3, and 4 in the rubric below, how do they fill in 5, 6, and 7?

I am working on the topic of __1___, so that I can find out ___2___, because I want my readers to better understand ____3____; for if they don’t better understand it, ____4___ might happen to them. To keep this from happening, I will share information unknown to them from ___ 5__ , ___ 6___, ____7__.

The task of filling in 5, 6, 7 is difficult to the degree that the writer fills in the first four blanks without anticipating the latter three. More to the point, its difficult to fill in those last three blanks to the degree that the process is seen as purely linear, rather than recursive. In a sense, some thinking about 5, 6, and 7 can and should crop up as part of the work of filling in the earlier blanks.

Therefore, as teachers guide their students through the steps of developing a research project, they encourage students to browse among potential sources in advance of defining their interest/topic/claim/question/problem – even guide them in this browsing by directing their attention to the Works Cited sections of assigned articles that particularly caught their interest, by recommending some sources, or introducing them to the reference librarian during a brief tour of the library and encouraging them to ask this person to suggest resources linked to their general interest. Perhaps the simplest way to guide them toward a recursive view of this process is to use assigned readings as the starting point for the research process, thus making those latter blanks, to an extent, already at least tentatively and partially filled-in before the work of completing 1, 2, 3, and 4 goes very far.

Teachers should also contact CLUE (Center for Library User Education) to plan a visit to the library with their classes. See the link to CLUE under “important links” on this website.