Starting to Focus

After composing my bibliography, and having it reviewed by Florence and Kris, I am feeling much better about this research project. I think it is starting to take shape.

Florence provided very helpful feedback for my bibliography, and based on her comments, I believe I can add some additional sources to provide a more well-rounded examination of research. I’m looking at narrowing my topic to focusing on teaching writing to engineering students or students with other technical majors, as opposed to teaching writing to students in the humanities/arts majors.

Florence suggested some additional journals and sources, such as WAC journals, and even mentioned a specific WAC bibliography that she created in a previous class which is posted on the R &W website. My materials cover a range of topics including WAC, learning styles, interdisciplinary writing, the use of technology in teaching writing, and strategies for writing pedagogy. There is scarce information on teaching writing specifically to engineering students, so that is a gap in the research. We also both recognized that there is not much of a feminist voice found among these sources (or at least, apparent at this point). However, with about 95 percent of engineering students being male, we were not sure whether that would become a problem.

The journals of Educational Psychology and Community College Journal of Research and Practice, plus a number of papers presented at CCCC conferences seem to be the most fruitful so far. Florence also pointed out the NCTE website with its explanations of positions, including one on WAC, should be helpful. These also are the sources I plan to look at first to learn about the background issues. Additionally, I found some books on Kolb’s learning styles, which I need to familiarize myself with early on in this research project.

Kris' feedback was highly helpful, as she suggested focusing on technical communication journals, such as Journal of Business and Technical Communication or Technical Communication Quarterly. I am hoping a search of these (and similar) publications will focus a little more on the population in question. I find it very interesting that this subject (teaching writing with methodologies based on student disciples) does not seemed to have been addressed in any broad way.

I obtained hard copies of many of the articles this week, and I am finding they are very interesting, especially in dealing with the learning styles/preferences. Overall, I feel good about this project, but I realize I have A LOT to learn!