Research is inevitable in a course such as E 110, but as a realist, I know that students are often only motivated to research because they have no other choice. Mathieu, in “A Guiding Question, Some Primary Research, and a Dash of Rhetorical Awareness” provides a logical and cunning way to change this mindset of our students with her approach on primary research. Through implementing this move into my course, I feel I can give students a rationale for library research, as Mathieu states, “While each project is grounded in what might be considered personal, primary research, library research is essential in asking the right questions…” (120).
As I read through her essay, fragments of ideas for my course started to come together. I had originally wanted to incorporate Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried as it uniquely wavers between fiction and nonfiction, and I knew what I wanted students to get out of the assignment, but I needed to see an existent structure for a clear starting point. From what I’ve drafted so far in my syllabus, in the third marking period students would begin with an assignment similar to “Writing 3.1: Interviewing Someone Older Than You.” Only, instead of just interviewing a family member or friend, they would search for someone who has experience to provide on a historic event, such as O’Brien and his experience with fellow soldiers in Vietnam. However, students could find family, friends, or reach out to a stranger with experience ranging from a monumental event such as 9/11 or something more local such as the shooting which occurred in the New Castle County Courthouse in 2013.
From there, they would follow a similar assignment to “Writing 3.2: Interview Transcript” in order to organize and identify what specific aspect of that person’s life they would focus on along with additional questions for a follow-up interview and the background research similar to “Writing 3.3: Background Research” This would help them understand the context of the story they would be using in their final piece, and it would give them both motivation and purpose in getting a minimum of five sources to complete an annotated bibliography.
Though I give Mathieu credit for planting the seed in my head as to a starting point, the final piece was my own brainchild. Here, the students would take on the approach of O’Brien to use to tell the story they have gathered. Perhaps it was Harris’ analogy of “the cover song, in which one musician reinterprets a song associated with another, is a staple of rock and roll” (75) which really inspired me to have students use primary to background research to a final project where they get to take O’Brien’s mode and employ it to tell the unique story they have discovered. Overall, to go back to a comment made by a colleague in an earlier post, one way help students research and write is to work along with them, and for me, if the assignment gets me excited, it is guaranteed it will excite and inspire my students as well.
Coxwell-Teague, Deborah, and Ronald F. Lunsford. First-year Composition: From Theory to Practice. , 2014. Print.
Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts. U of Colorado, 2006. Print.
E688: Seminar in Teaching Composition 
Tim,
Mostly what I have to say is that this strikes me as a terrific assignment! I love how the different stages of the project build (“scaffold”) on each other —and the last step, in which you send students back to O’Brien as a kind of stylistic model, is just brilliant. (I suspect you’ll need to give students the chance to revise this final version at least once, since the distinction between simply trying to “sound like” O’Brien and “taking his approach” can be a hard one to get at first.) But that’s really the way to make use of literature in a writing course!
I’m eager to see how you phrase these assignments for students. Let me know how I can help!
Joe
I do love the idea of using research to build a story similar to Tim O’Brien’s method of writing: blending fact and fiction to tell the “real” story behind the experiences. Such writing forces students to play with perspectives of reality and how the “word” transforms ways to communicate different realities. I had the honor to hear about Nikky Finney’s poetry reading of one of her poems on professional night at the Louisville Kentucky Convention Center this past Wednesday night that describes what happened to Lavena Johnson, the first military women to die in Iraq from Missiouri. The military ruled her death a suicide, but the injuries on her body told a different story. According to a friend, the poem’s reading kept her up at night because the graphic imagery mixed with the coverup disturbed her so much she could not sleep. That is powerful writing. Mixing truth, facts, empirical knowledge, and lived knowledge into a message with a purpose changes people. Your students could create the story of “what really happens in school” using real/fiction stories or “what really happens in the locker room” or whatever is in their world. What is real? Literature attempts to answer that question. I love your idea.
I use a similar creative method but not to the degree of sophistication you do. I ask my students to write a 12-15 page short story based on any true moment in time prior to 1946 and as far back as Stonehenge to illuminate a small window of that time period, such as a story about living in the trenches during WWI or what Queen Anne Boylen must have been thinking the night before her execution as she prepared her death speech or or how a single Danish warrior held off nearly an entire army at Stirling Bridge so his comrades could regroup themselves. The students choose their own topics, research, create an annotated bibliography, and then write the story. All of the short story facts must come from research as Michael Crichton or James Michner do with their stories. That way, as in your assignment too, the ability to plagiarize is nearly nil, yet they still need to incorporate research through facts about setting, character, plot, and point of view. Students create their own interpretive point of view using this information.
We all learn so much from interviews. I wish someone had assigned me the interview project. There are so many things I would like to ask my grandparents now, but it is too late, and heirlooms without history surround me. I have scans of redacted military records, postcards, photos of unnamed people, even a mysterious letter written in the late 1800s (tucked behind an 1810s painting that was re-framed in Buffalo during the 1860s), but I have no story to accompany my research. Research fascinates me, and I wish I could spend my days doing it. I really like the idea of combining research with interviews to write a truly meaningful research paper. When I read about this assignment, the idea really made me think about how the project makes research make sense. Students would not be searching for data; rather, they would be learning and using what they learn to synthesize.
I am familiar with Mary Kay’s short story assignment, and it is a great example, minus the interview–unless a few students did so as part of their research. With today’s technology, they can research so many ways. I know of several students who used YouTube to find news reels and watch documentaries about their time periods. They probably learned more from that assignment alone than all of their other research papers combined. This is such an intriguing assignment.