Michael Kleine decided to write this article after walking into the library and seeing a lot of high school and college students writing "research papers." While watching them, he realized that they were doing actual research as much as they were translating textual fragments from different books and encyclopedias. He decided to write an article about what college-level academics-teachers do when they engage in an academic research.
In his article, "What is it we do when we write articles like this one and how can we get students to join us?," Kleine defines writing as a process that includes research, data-gathering and reading from start to finish. He believes that writing that includes research of any kind must be strategic, since the writer has to collect data and with an established and focused sense on their goal; and heuristic because he has to accommodate and consider unexpected data and insights that are discovered in the process.
The author developed a metaphor for strategic and heuristic modes of work based on Joseph Campbell's Primitive Mythology. He distinguishes "hunters" and "gatherers." A hunter is the one who strategically finds what he's looking for, and the gatherer is the one that heuristically discovers that which might be useful. Kleine realizes that writers are both hunters and gatherers during different stages of their research.
Keeping with his research, Kleine segmented the process of writing into four stages according to what he thinks that researchers/writers need to do. The four stages are collecting data, sifting the data rhetorically, seeking patterns in the data and translating their findings into writing.
Based on his metaphor of the hunters and gatherers, and the four stage process of writing; Kleine interviewed eight professors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Three of them were from the English department, two from the Natural Sciences department, two from the Social Sciences department, and one from the History department.
As he was interviewing them, he found a lot of similarities between the writers. Kleine found out that all of them wrote out of interest based on conversations, reading the work of a peer or listening to a paper by a peer. They all agree that writing is a complex academic process where they move freely and flexible between strategic hunting and heuristic gathering.
Kleine also found differences between the professors from different areas. He noticed that the scientists, the social scientists, and the composition theorist remembered more about the research process itself. They think of research as the process of gathering, observing and quantifying that is prior to writing. They only write to communicate the results of their research. Meanwhile the subjects in the humanities talked about the audience and purpose, problems of establishing authority, about the rhetorical dimension of their thinking and writing. They think of writing and reading as activities inseparable from the research process.
Kleine also analyzed the different disciplines using James Kinneavy's discourse triangulation. This means, classifying a discourse according to it's purpose, and by the element of the total discourse situation that it emphasizes. Hence, a discourse that emphasizes the encoder is expressive; a discourse that emphasizes the decoder is persuasive; a discourse that emphasizes the reality or the world is referential; and a discourse that emphasizes the signal or language itself is literary. Based on this definitions, he classifies the scientists' discourse as referential and the humanities professors' discourse as persuasive.
Kleine concludes his article talking to the teaching community and giving advises about how to teach academic writing. He believes in creating genuine research communities in the classes and wants the classroom to become a place of researching, reading, writing and talking. He thinks that they need to encourage students to select, intelligently and critically, research procedures relevant to their own questions and problems. Kleine thinks that among academics, the research process is recursive, too complicated to code and incredibly rich that students must be a part of.
Pensonaly, I found myself described in the scene in the library when Kleine sees all those students copying information from books to their paper without doing an actual research process. Worst than that, my primary source is the internet and I'm sure I'm not the only one who does her research this way. After reading this article i totally agree with Kleine about the research process. It has not to be about translating information, but about selecting, analyzing, synthesizing, selecting and rejecting. It's a lot of hard work but I think it's worth doing it.
Hi Luciana,
ReplyDeleteWow! This is a really thorough summary that gets to a lot of the main elements of the text. I like how you really do try to cover everything, but I don't want you to be spending too much time on the summary-- you need to get to the other elements of the assignment as well. So for this particular reading response, there were specific questions assigned that you need to attend to. You also need to try to do some synthesis with Greene and other texts we've read this quarter. I know we're trying these things for the first time, though, so that's fine if you want to go back and revise this post. You'll also want to be very careful about how much text you use from the article. Really, when you use more than a word or two from the original, you need to quote the source. I noticed a number of passages where the text is just too close to the original. We haven't talked about this too much in class, but it's something that's very important to remember. When we summarize, we need to do it in our own words. And if you want to set up a quote, you need to use quote marks. Good work here, but you'll want to go back and add the specific questions assigned on the schedule and be more careful about using your own language in the future.