Issues Overviews for Improving Research and Writing - posted by Mike Nix

At the Retreat in June, I showed some examples of 'issues overviews' that students in my Improving Research and Writing class had just finished. After that, my students wrote another overview for their second composition of the semester and examples of these (and templates for them) are on the website for my IRW class.

These issues overviews are an attempt to find an alternative genre to the standard academic essay for students to use to write an introduction/overview to a political, legal, social and global issues they are interested in. The idea came from Jamelea (thanks for that, Jamelea) who suggested the 'Briefing' page in The Week magazine as a model. I also used 'The Facts' section from New Internationalist magazine, which has lots of graphics, as a model for students.

One aim with the overviews (following the format of The Week briefings) is for students to give each section of the overview a clear sub-heading, usually a question. These questions can be developed during the process of researching the issue; their research questions become the sub-headings in the overview. Another aim is for students to combine textual and visual modes of communicating information about the issue, so they include photos, graphs, charts, cartoons, etc. Hopefully structuring the overview with questions and using visual material not only makes the overviews clear and interesting for the readers but helps less experienced researcher-writers to produce informative and stimulating work on the issues they choose to look at.

Another more general aim is to help students develop a textual-visual form of academic literacy that makes a bit more use of the possibilities (affordances) of information technology for communicating their research than just word-processing an academic essay. To help them with this, I have prepared some templates in Word that student can adapt for their overviews, also on my IRW website. Feel free to download these and use them in your classes - or adapt them and make the new versions available via this blog.

I hope the issues overviews provide a more visual, more contemporary framework for students to communicate their research clearly and effectively, one that doesn't dumb down or take the critical edge off their engagement with content, and doesn't constrain them with too rigid a structure. Once you've had a look at some examples (I've included the good, the bad and the ugly), it would great to get your thoughts on this.

One other idea with the overviews was that these could become the starting points for research by other students on an issue. So instead of reading, say, a BBC article on nuclear power in Japan as a way into that issue, a student could read an issue overview about it to start their research. If this seems like a good idea, we can start to explore a way to make the overviews available online to students as starting research resources.

And if you're teaching research and writing classes, please post here about the types of genres you're students are using to communicate their research. It would be great to see some other approaches.