Wendy BishopFor the last twenty years, it has been a strong tenant of composition writing classrooms that instruction should start where the student is-that it should engage students and encourage them to view themselves as literate citizens while developing their literacy skills. While a great deal of composition research was completed to understand how writers compose, how writing students respond to teacher-commentary on their work, and so on, far less research has provided context-based insights into the general classroom experiences of first-year writing students, asking:

When researchers have asked such questions, they've uncovered perplexing issues. For instance, Jennie Nelson found students evaluating assignments far more pragmatically than their professors might have assumed they were doing; Susan Wyche-Smith found writing classrooms playing a minor role in complicated student lives; and Susan Miller and five student-researchers uncovered strongly conflicting views of literacy, among college professors across the curriculum and among the student/researchers who visited those professors' classrooms:

I consequently also need to reconsider the students' repeatedly documented isolation, even from their classmates, and the distancing strategies, humor, and anger they found to naturalize it. It took no special training in psychology to realize that our frequent group discussions of how often each one fell asleep in class and while studying, Alycia's legalistic view of attendance, Worth's calculated visits to professors, and John's assessment of what he pays professors to do were all expressions of admittedly WASP students, stinging and stung by a system they fully expect to join. ( Anderson31)

Although composition professionals have rightly and usefully looked at curriculum and program design and institutional politics, composing processes and workplace practices--all with the goal of improving instruction in the classroom--they have, perhaps, overlooked the more difficult to study arena of college composition students' experiences.

This chapter will explore the ways composition research, at least recently, has focused more on the needs of professionalization in composition and on writing programs than on the results of instruction and experiences of student writers in classroom contexts. A refocusing of our research could lead us to insights into why--despite the best of intentions--some of our classroom practices are having less than stellar success.

And in fact, as I continue on I'd point out how much I'm part of the problem.

What you've just read is my academic voice. My write-a-prospectus-andaim-it-from-one-professional-to-another-professional voice. What gets lost between these lines is an examination of what research really is at its simplest, most bedrock, most engaging, and most productive levels. Is the answer to, why would anyone do something that so often feels--as I explained again last fall to students in my research methods course--like making the obvious certifiably obvious? Why are the final results of our research as reported often so much like . . . "duh"? Why do we appear to be seemingly just confirming common sense or general experience?

So, a forewarning. This parenthetical wandering you're now entangled in is more actually me, the me as writer of the last five to ten years, which is a me as thinker as I write, the me as active researcher.

To explain why I'm perturbed about composition research, I want to think of what research has most informed my teaching over the fourteen years I've officially been a compositionist, dating from my enrollment in graduate school to achieve that end. I also want to think about what my personal definition of research is and what that means for my teaching. Essayist rather than scholar that I choose to be here, I want to see if these intuitive strands lead to any insight into this topic--what has been right but not right enough in this area of our field and what now could be made better?

Okay, honestly. What, if any, composition research has changed me as a teacher, informed my classrooms, illuminated my understandings of students-aswriters and as individuals I might help to write more proficiently?

Well, really a lot of it--but it all was part of my research into who I was and would be as a teacher of writing. I certainly benefited by reading the cognitivists and linguists I was assigned to read in the late 1980s and the cultural and critical theorists I read in the early 1990s, but I always was reading them to find out about life in my own petri dishes: what was cooking in my classrooms or in my own writing projects. That is, active researchers search for research that will inform and illuminate their own concerns as they undertake exploratory and explanatory journeys. And then later, learning to naturalistic research methods gave me a vocabulary and an identifiable set of practices for active research as I'm attempting to define it in this chapter.

For instance, after being "taught" about the Daly-Miller Writing Apprehension Survey (and reading across the other essays in When a Writer Can't Write: Studies in Writer's Block and Other Composing Problems, edited by Mike Rose), I took that information immediately to my writing classroom in the mid 1980s. I was not a highly apprehensive writer but my students seemingly were--at the time many were basic writers, Native American, and/or rural white Alaskans coming as first-time college students or as older, re-entry adults to the university in Fairbanks where I was teaching. And once I found many of the students scoring as highly apprehensive writers on the surveys I administered, this data led me into a search for research that would help me understand how to intervene in (or at least more fully understand) the writing processes of writers whose text-making experiences were so different from my own. And as most writing teachers know, text-making experiences in a classroom of twenty-five writers are similar to some degree and different to twenty-five degrees.

However, to talk via publications to other teachers about what I was finding out required that I switch from my classroom voice to the voice that opens this chapter, losing touch, to some degree with the very constituencies I was trying to share my work with: working teachers and their writing students. Thus, to enter my disciplinary community of fellow researchers, I did my academic scholarly job and reported what I learned, seeking always to place those reports in more and more prestigious journals as I had been trained to do. At the same time, I was removing my voice from the classroom. (And I need to another time examine the urge to do that--the potlatch sharing urge of an engaged research versus the institution-driven sharing of a tenure-line faculty, both of which I've been and will continue to be.) Mary Louise Pratt once pointed to a similar problem among anthropologists in a way I'd echo here when she wondered why so many interesting people with interesting projects in her field could write them up in such dull ways.

Too often we've agreed to dull ourselves. Isn't it ironic, as Alanis Morissette sings?

So, research is as important as we let it be and as we make it. It is as important as our institutions make it. Those two importances are often very different in degree, creating, in the first, research to understand and exhilarate, to inform and complicate. In the second, creating research for the research community and the researcher's sake (and if we're lucky, also to inform and complicate).

The movement from research primarily as informing educators to research as performing professionally was part, I suspect, of what led Sheryl Fontaine and Susan Hunter to solicit essays for a collection titled Writing Ourselves into the Story: Unheard Voices from Composition Studies. Just as "the research paper" was deadened when institutionalized in English classes around the nation, thereby obscuring the true and exciting research processes all learners need to undertake, so too "academic research" can become wooden, an albatross of a category, too often done for the worst reasons and under less than inspired conditions.

In Writing Ourselves into the Story, I argued that often we're researching at or on students when we could simply ask them and find out as much, or more; how, say, procrastination is a huge part of their writing process. I've still not seen any substantive research on procrastination, silence in writing, students who actively choose not to write or read and why they do so. Information is sparse on students' views of writing teachers and classrooms and where school fits in their lives and world views (see "Students' Stories").

To explore these issues would of course entail that we redefine research and/or deploy research in very different ways. It might mean we ask very different literacy questions--the types Mina Shaughnessey was asking in her still often cited Errors and Expectations, the kind asked in Language Stories and Literacy Lessons. The types Deborah Brandt is asking when she interviews a cross section of Americans to understand who sponsored their literacy, who helped them to become the readers and writers they are (no matter what the proficiency level they have attained (see "Remembering," "Accumulating").

When we ask why and what writing students aren't learning and why and what they are learning; how children learn to read; how we grade papers and what feelings of being graded affect a student's next composing experience; what students' writing processes really look like; what writers actually do and feel like (and feet like not doing) when asked to write in ways, in locations, and under conditions they would rather not be in; and how do nonacademics learn to read and write--we're asking them to speak to their own experience and address crucial classroom issues.

The fact that I generally have to seek these discussions out speaks to the problems we may be experiencing as a field. These issues are not in the forefront of journal discussions today that are much taken up with institutional pressures and conditions of teachers' and composition scholars' lives. Such is the bad news. There are reasons, of course. Current market forces, a population of teachers striving to turn scholars and encouraged to do so in our proliferating Ph.D. programs, immediately come to mind.  

Still, the fact that I can name any research of this sort speaks to our good intentions and potentials. Such is the good news. It is possible to stay tuned into and attuned to our writing classrooms, to view and practice research as a process and part of our everyday practice.

To do this, we will need to continue to struggle to reconsider and reconceptualize research as part of the active life of teaching: posing and gaining insight into problems; theorizing and trying out answers and reporting those results in different venues. Consider, for instance, what it would mean if we saw innovative composition textbooks--and argued for them within evaluating department committees--as valid, perhaps even the preferred genre for research reports?

Dear reader, when was the last time you asked yourself: what do I really want to know? What do I think writing research can tell me, do for my classroom conditions and for students' literacy learning? What are the crucial questions, the fun questions, the silly and the sublime questions that could and should be explored?

Ask yourself: When I look out across the desks and into the eyes of these colearners, when standing at the chalkboard or before a computer monitor that holds my teaching outline for the day, when I go home and avoid a stack of papers but still stay engaged with the class's work, what do I speculate on, wonder--idly and intelligently, facetiously or not?

Here's something that I've come up with that might strike a reader of this chapter as frivolous, but I'll use it throughout to test out the ideas I'm raising here.

Simply put--of all the things that confuse me in writing classrooms still--and many things do, and I use confuse in the positive sense of perplex, intrigue, make me think about my work when I'm not working, when I'm jogging or walking the dog--one odd but recurrent one is the issue of names.

Contemporary spellings of names are getting wild. The other day I found myself saying to a store clerk filling out a form and asking for my name: "It's Wendy with a y." I was trying to forestall the question about Wendi, Wendie, or Wendy, and maybe even Wendee. I've noticed in my years on earth that my name has moved from unusual to usual to complicated vowelings of independence. But I realized too at this moment that "It's Wendy with a y" was no longer sufficient. The clerk had paused, so I spelled: W E N D Y. Realizing he was wondering: Wynde, or Wyndy.

When I call roll in first-year writing--I could be concerned with (but I'm not) the elision of a lot to alot or the switch from his/her to their or the loss of whom to who. No, I spend far more time speculating on why I seem every year to see names spelled ever more inventively: Katina and Katrina in one class. Indee, Jadee (pronounced Judy), and Taquisha (aka Tiki) in another. [Should I investigate why women's names are most inventively spelled--the vowels and diminutive endings rife?] Jenni not Jenny. Alys or Alice. Andree, Lysa. Current best-selling singer, CD: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Why do I misspell it and my students don't? What does it mean for me to inhabit their world as I order a copy on Amazon.com? Who is reading and writing what and what for and how well? And how does, how can composition research(ers) help?

I know some of this inventive spelling provides a strong and healthy crosscultural infusion of dialect and dazzle (the desire to keep naming similar/family and original/my way). But . . . the writing teacher in me wonders if there's a clue in all this to general literacy issues--how students view language conventions, authorship, individuality, and conformity. I'd like to know more--to talk to other teachers about it as I know I will tonight when a local rhetoric reading group meets in Tallahassee, and I'll inevitably share current work-in-progress that is always thinking-in-progress.

I've already suggested one form of research we seem to neglect--that of simply asking students. That's where I might begin. What happens when I hold a classroom discussion on this naming issue? I'm continuously surprised by students' significant (to my teaching) answers to informal classroom questioning. Reading a graduate student's master's thesis draft last week, I noted how strongly the students in her study responded when asked how they felt about the first-year writing teacher whose class was being observed, and about that teacher's practices of sharing or not sharing personal information with them. One interviewee said boldly: "She is not needed to give any credentials, or background to the student. We are not here for her--she is here for us . . . I think she should be more concerned about what we have inside of us, instead of us knowing what she has inside of her." And, as happens when I read research that intrigues me, I mused for the rest of the afternoon on writing students' beliefs, asking myself, not for the first time, what I really knew about how they perceived teachers and what and where those perceptions impacted effective instruction?

Mulling over the student's interview response, I recognized how deflating this calm assessment and this claim would be to my teaching persona if he were my student. I also thought: this is my student. My students have strong opinions that I so often don't elicit. The have strong beliefs and long-inculcated practices that are often underlying and contributing causes to our classroom successes or problems. Nowadays, I believe, I'm simply not reading much about such tacit, undercover, unasked things because composition research, in general does not seem to be doing this type of asking.

Susan Peck MacDonald critiques the line I'm following here--she feels that my focus on researching into student-writers-as-people-who-write assumes that researchers like myself don't care as well how well students write: "Writing proficiency has dropped from view as a key purpose. There might be little role for research on student writing if writing proficiency is not the key purpose of the writing classroom"

I'll focus on her use of "might" and insist that there is much to be studied when we consider writers as people, since it is the very humanity of the student I quoted above that accelerates, interferes with, impedes, or enhances his writing proficiency. I believe that as writers our worldviews are intricately entwined with our in-the-world performances in general. And I argue that composition research was on the threshold of considering these complicated interweavings when it took an abrupt (and sometimes but not always necessary) turn toward studying the material conditions of writing programs, writing teachers, and the relationships--often theoretical--between English literature faculty and English composition faculty. A turn that has absorbed us in the 1990s when such work has been prominent in our journals and often completed with an eye toward our tenure reviews.

So, this is more of the bad news--right when cognitive research and classroom-based naturalistic research were about to intersect, we moved away from asking the questions that might have allowed us to join in seeking to understand person-linked-to-personal-performance, in real contexts.

In the same volume, Under Construction, edited by Christine Farris and Chris Anson, that presents Susan Peck MacDonald's critique, we find a counterargument to the same that functions also as one explanation for what has happened. Basically, the professionalization of composition has created a class of scholar-researchers --rhetoricians or compositionists as you might name them, as I often name myself--and proletariat teachers who have been excluded from production yet continue to man and woman our classrooms and are even expected to consume the compositionist's often very dry and nearly irrelevant research product. Peter Vandenberg argues:

The reorientation of some compositionists and rhetoricians from "hapless bottom feeders" ( Connors, 1991, 72) to endowed chairs has come about, in part, by the privileging of research, a signifier vacated of specific meaning for the purpose of establishing its necessity and, therefore, the necessity of those who produce it. 

To see this ever more plainly, ask the institutional researcher if he or she is interested in my classroom musing--why are invented spelling names gaining hold and do those unconventional spelling practices say anything to our students about literacy and/or speak for their attitudes toward learning standard English? Not a likely question of interest, though I continue to insist on how much it interests me.

As researchers, we also don't seem to be considering our work in another light.

What changes, I propose to ask now, if we view research as a type of active (sometimes activist) reading? The kind of reading searching teachers do, students do, theorists do, and testers of hypotheses do. But they all do their searching with different degrees of fluency, and self-consciousness, and for different goals and purposes.

This is my last point for the space I have here. We have cut off the search for information from the site of using at the exact historical moment when we're participating in the largest changes in information-accessing technology--the World Wide Web--that most of us will experience in our lifetimes. Certainly for me, as a writing teacher, the way I teach, the way I research, the way I write has been vastly changed and rapidly altered.

Consider the process of composing this chapter: e-mail proposal submission, on-line searching of the ERIC database to find any missing citations, checking Amazon.com for the spelling of Alanis Morissette because it's faster than walking into the back room and finding the CD. Think about the difference between finding a citation on-line and going to my shelf to look through the journal to walking into my classroom and--because I'm thinking of my "research" question--reading that classroom in a new light. All this information, all these ways of readings. Consider now re-reading the classroom as forum for intelligent hypothesis and doing the same for a student-teacher writing conference later that day. What I like best about my profession is this intense cognitive and contextual interactivity, intertextuality--something the availability of information on the web has actually accentuated.

I can e-mail my editor to ask for more writing time, I can query a colleague or student to gain preliminary answers to my "what is this spelling thing and have you noticed it too" question.

I can check my word processor for writing-about-naming exercises I've done in classes and think forward to how I might embody whatever I learn in this as yet inchoate "research" phase into future classrooms, or into an essay or a textbook exercise/discussion.

In all this, I'm reading my professional world for the good of my professional life.

Teaching the research paper as set of steps doesn't teach my writing students how to think like researchers. Neither does conducting writing research primarily for credentialing committees (though I have ultimately no problem with research functioning that way in an and capacity). Understanding composition research as part of my teaching process keeps me alive in the profession. And I'm finding this critical since many of my best buddies, my teaching cronies, my composition colleagues, are producing much talk about burnout--whether day-to-day classroom burnout or tired-of-the-elitist academy burnout, or both. Burnout comes from repetitive, wearing, unimaginative often-conflicted action. From policing and producing without speculating and renewing. It comes from divorcing research from practice (and assuming theory doesn't live here either).

So thanks for the pep talk, you may be saying, if you're still here at all. We should like our jobs. Research our classrooms. Seek to understand the intellectual, material, social conditions under which our students write and which keep them from writing more ably. We should renew and network, ask silly and sublime research questions. But how? Who and what will reward us? When and where can that work take place in our very busy lives?

No easy answers. But small suggestions.

Foremost among them. When you come upon interesting problems--honor them with a teacher's journal entry. When you're writing collegial e-mails, enliven them with those questions (every teacher likes to be asked teaching questions if the conditions are right). When you're wasting time on the web (face it--these days most all of us do), try out some of those questions on ERIC or other databases. Give yourself a reading (research) holiday and read an essay or article or book that you "assign" yourself--not for profit but for feeding your professional mind. If you don't value these activities first, no other person will--not a student, not a fellow teacher, department chair, funding agency, editorial review board.

Don't be afraid of research. If you integrate questioning into your teaching life processes there's no good or bad research, there's no guinea pig. There's the classroom as intellectual scene. There's the teacher as co-learner.

Likewise--I'm not arguing for anti-intellectualism. Do read published research, but recast it to aid you in your own search for answers. Critique it as you would a play a poem an essay a film. Reformulate the question and make it your own. Better yet--or is this and/also--co-research with your writing students. Just as you write with them. Pose classroom questions to them and get the immediate relief their often insightful (though not necessarily intentionally so) answers can provide. And then push to continue exploring--double-check. Of course they are not always the best experts to ask, but they do have some expertise and we in composition have so often overlooked what is there. I agree with the big claim, made by Peter Vandenberg:

If the working conditions of writing teachers--not the disciplinary status of rhetoric, composition studies, or whatever one chooses to call the privileged institutional arrangement built on the backs of writing teachers--are to change,they will change as a result of physical and symbolic action outside the order of academic publishing. (29)