Emily Spitler-Lawson
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
When I was a younger, less experienced writing instructor, I told a classroom full of first year composition students, “Write about whatever you want!” when introducing a major research-based assignment. As you can probably imagine, I very quickly learned that some student-generated topics and questions were more suited to the kind of academic research the prompt (and the course outline) required than others. Despite the chaos that ensued that semester, my instincts, I think, were good. I wanted students to have agency. I knew I was about to ask them to spend considerable time and energy navigating databases, reading difficult scholarly sources, drafting, and revising, and I wanted them to do all of this in service of a question they cared about because they had chosen it. This assignment gives students considerable agency in choosing a question to explore for a high-stakes research project while at the same time setting boundaries meant to guide developing researchers to questions that are likely to lead to successful writing projects. Clear communication of instructor expectations, along with Catherine Savini’s “Looking for Trouble,” provide a framework for the question development process, and students are given ample opportunity to develop, discuss, and reflect on possible research questions with their instructor and classmates. This assignment also suggests a way for instructors to provide quick, actionable feedback on student-generated research questions, and for students who need additional guidance to get it before they invest significant amounts of time in a question that will not serve them well. In addition to guiding students as they develop a research question, this assignment invites them to think of themselves as academic writers participating in an ongoing conversation about their topic. Ideally, developing their question helps them to understand the kinds of questions academics tend to ask, and why they ask them, and encourages students to channel their curiosity about a text in productive, academically “fruitful” directions.