Project 1: Writers and Writing in the Early 21st Century

For your first project, conduct a small exploratory study of a writer.

Your subject can be virtually anyone living and accessible to you: a fellow graduate student, a friend, neighbor, family member, stranger; it can be someone close by or far away, someone in school or out; it can be a person of any age, any occupation, any educational level, any linguistic background, any socio-economic status.  Please be careful with subjects who are vulnerable in any way: in most cases, it’s not a good idea to do research on one of your own students while he or she is enrolled in your class; and you should secure permission from a parent to do any research on a child under 18.

Because this is a classroom exercise designed to teach research methods, and because neither data nor findings will be disseminated beyond our classroom, you won’t need formal IRB approval for this project.  Still, any research using human subjects should be conducted with great ethical care.  Always consider the position you’re potentially or actually putting others in when you collect data from or about them, whether it’s asking questions about their experiences; collecting samples of their writing; observing their behavior; or intervening or interacting with them in any other way.  Explain to your subject what you’re interested in and why, give them the chance to make informed and voluntary choices about whether and how they want to participate, give them ways to contact you or me if they have questions later, be honest about who you’ll be sharing the data with, and make every effort to protect their privacy.

There are many potential methods you can use in this project.  Here are a few:

  1. give your subject a brief writing task and ask him or her to compose aloud under controlled conditions as you record the process
  2. ask your subject to choose a text he or she has already written or is writing and conduct a discourse-based interview about it
  3. conduct an open-ended or semi-structured interview about some aspect of your subject’s literacy experiences (e.g., memories of reading and writing; experiences with high school English; role of writing on the job)
  4. conduct an interview like that above but also ask your subject to bring in samples of their writing and ask questions about them as well
  5. trace your subject’s “natural” writing of a particular text (have him or her fill out a process log, relate the final text to initiating or source text(s), track a drafting process, conduct discourse-based interviews, etc.)
  6. record some of the talk surrounding your subject’s writing of a text (from, e.g., a student-teacher conference or peer review session)
  7. observe a writer writing in some “natural” context (through participant observation, shadowing, videotaping, etc.)
  8. some combination of methods above or some alternative not listed here

Remember our time frame and restrict your data accordingly.  Keep tasks, observations, and interviews under one hour.  Do not try to transcribe recordings.

For February 10, write a 3-5 p. paper and prepare a brief, informal oral presentation about your study.  But think of these products less as formal analyses of data and more as reflective reports or narratives about your experiences with this project.

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