The research paper is of course a highly important intellectual exercise, and why should it be anything else? After all, writing is the bread and butter of the English major. Still, as teachers, it is useful to push ourselves to think of ways in which we can make the research paper novel and exciting for our students (which is, of course, to say nothing about our need to radically rethink and reshape existing and traditional assessment practices, since they so greatly impact our students and how writing-to-learn functions in higher ed).

One way I have tried to rethink the research paper is to allow students to be co-authors. Students in English 307 regularly participate in what I like to call The Reading Lab: a set of durable reading discussion groups–typically 3-5 students–that meet regularly throughout the semester to discuss readings amongst each other at the beginning of every class. In addition to these more casual group conversations, reading lab groups sign up to fishbowl a conversation about a given text on two group-selected dates. (To “fishbowl” in this instance means that group members discuss their ideas and talking points about a reading amongst themselves while the rest of the class listens and takes notes without interfering until the fishbowl is done and then opens into a whole class discussion.)

The purpose of these groups is to build a stable and consistent community of peers as well as make each class discussion centered around dialogue initiated and driven by students. In keeping with the the reading lab’s emphasis on learning through community, students have the option to co-author a research paper together with one or more of their reading lab group members, provided that their paper be longer than the paper assignment given to solo authors.

Writing with a writing partner gives students access to knowledge about themselves as writers that they would not otherwise have available to them. And writing, after all, is not a strictly solitary activity but to some extent a community-oriented endeavor. As any writer of any genre knows, no piece of writing ever makes its way into the world without the involvement of others.

Whether single-authored or co-authored, students are encouraged to draw on their previous work throughout the semester for their research papers, including their multimodal projects, which they can utilize both for revising and re-contextualizing their ideas, and building continuity from one assignment to the other gives students the opportunity to experiment with and reflect on the role of voice in and across genres, perhaps even blending the personal with the academic.

Hunter College has excellent resources for students writing research papers that can be found in the Hunter Library’s Research Paper Toolkit. One source I find particularly useful is the BEAM guide, which helps students conceptualize source use in more dynamic ways, in effect going beyond the schematically limiting (and familiar) binaries of agreement/disagreement, which in many cases hamper student writing in rote logics/habits of writing. Another useful source is the toolkit’s research questions page, which offers a series of steps and examples for posing effective research questions.