Different ways of writing about issues

Hi folks,


During the coming academic year, we want to keep exploring different genres of writing that help students engage with content and that are alternatives to the standard academic essay.


As part of this ongoing exploration, we have put online some new examples of different genres of writing by Chuo Law students. There are now six examples of research narratives and seven examples of issues overviews on the Different Ways of Writing about Issues webpage. (This used to be called Research and Writing by Chuo Law Students).


For the research narratives, students write weekly research diaries and then rework these into a reflexive narrative of the development of their understanding about an issue. See Andy's earlier post for a bit more on this.


In the issues overviews students combine text with visuals to give a multi-modal introduction to an issue. My earlier post has a bit more about these.


The Different Ways of Writing about Issues webpage is open access so you can send students to it to find examples of the different genres to help them with their own writing, or to read a composition as a starting point for their own research. The site can be searched by type of writing (research narrative or issue overview) and by topics and issues.


If you have examples of different kinds of writing on issues that your students have done, it would be great if you added some to the website. Contact Mike for an invite to be a contributor and details of how to upload to it.


And feel free to use this blog to share ideas about how students in your writing classes are engaging with content and, more generally, about how you are approaching the Common Areas of Focus in your classes.


In the first cycle of my Improving Research and Writing class, I'm going have students do research narratives and focus on developing note-taking, writing research diaries, and asking questions about research (their own and others) in order to build knowledge and a more critical understanding of an issue. 


I look forward to hearing about what other people are working on in their writing classes this year.


Cheers,


Mike

Moshi moshi?

Hi everyone. Is anyone still using this blog? Can we start up something for the new year, perhaps?

Looking forward to collaborating with other teachers, on this blog or elsewhere.

Hope you're all having a good vacation.

Ellen

2nd Semester - Keeping them engaged

Hi Everyone,

First of all I like the idea of a blog where we can post ideas and thoughts on our classes, thank you for setting this up.

As the first day of the 2nd semester nears, I find myself thinking of activities to continue to keep my students engaged in the process, whether writing or presenting. I want to be able to keep it interesting for them throughout this next semester. And so I have set up a website for both my BRW and BRD classes as a place for them to add comments, ideas, sites and videos of interest. In some ways this is an experiment to both see how tech savvy and interested they are in discussing and continuing to be engaged in the material outside of class. I know there are some folks at Chuo who have blog sites set up for their students. As the 2nd semester progresses it will be interesting to see how students utilize the site. Also it is in a primitive stage, but I will be adding more information and sections.

Allen

BRW writing genres

Hi everyone,

Somewhat in parallel with (perhaps) the ideas that Mike mentions in his blog post about guiding students to write overviews of issues in his Improving Research and Writing course and, by doing so, to develop alternative genres, I have been trying to encourage students to create their own report formats in my Basic Research and Writing course.

I’ve explained to students that there is no set way to write a report so they should try to develop their own way for a particular research and writing cycle. As the students were keeping weekly research diaries in the Spring semester, I encouraged them also to see a report as a way of writing the story of their research and of combining and re-working their research dairies into a report.

You can find some examples on my website here. In some cases the sense of personal narrative and voice is very clear (see this report on climate change for example). In other cases the students there is perhaps a more conventional feel to the final reports as in this one on the aging society for instance. However, in another the writer has decided to include a few visual elements to enliven their report (see this report on space exploration).

Now in September as I look at these reports from distance in Geneva, I am wondering how things will develop for the students in the coming semester. I hope they continue to diversify, and I am wondering what near-peer models of alternative genres would be useful for the students to look at.

Cheers

Andy

Getting Students' Writing Online: Another New Blog - posted by Mike Nix

In addition to the bog you're reading now, I just have set up a Wordpress blog for student writing called, rather predictably, the Research & Writing by Chuo Law Students blog. This is a place where examples of students' writing can easily be put online for other students to read and download. Anyone can access the blog, read the writing up there and download examples of writing, so if you want your students to look at it, just give them the URL: http://mikenix1.wordpress.com/

It would be great if you added some writing by students in your Chuo Law classes. To do that, you will need an invite to join the blog; please email me at mikenix1 at mark tamacc.chuo-u.ac.jp for an invite (if you haven't already had one)

(At the moment, the blog only has examples of the issues overviews written last semester by my Improving Research and Writing class, that I talked about in the previous post.)

As well as providing different examples of compositions by students, the Research & Writing by Chuo Law Students blog is a first attempt at making students' writing available as a research resource for other students. The idea is that if a student wants to do some research on, for example, nuclear power in Japan, they can use the blog to find writing on that topic as a starting point for their research (as an alternative or complement to looking for, say, a BBC article on that topic).

This is how the blog is set up for students (or teachers) to find writing on different topics and issues:

1. Each post to the blog shows the title of one composition, a one paragraph summary of the content (could be the introductory paragraph of the composition or an abstract specially written for the blog), anda 'Read more...' link to download a pdf file of the composition.

2. There is a search engine, at the top right of the blog, that searches in the titles and summary paragraphs (but not in the full pdf of the composition).

3. There is cloud of topics and issues tags (e.g. developing countries, environment, welfare state, etc) below the search engine. Click on a tag to go to all the writing on that topic or issue on the blog.

4. There is a list of types of writing, below the tag cloud. Click on a type of writing to go to all the examples of that on the blog. (At the moment, the only type of writing on the blog is 'issues overviews' from my IRW class, but as we add different types of writing, we can add more categories to the list.)

Have a try at with different ways of finding writing and let us know what you think.

To keep these systems working, we need to follow some protocols when uploading writing to the blog. I'll make a step by step guide for this and put it on the blog, but some key points are:

• compositions can only be uploaded as pdfs (not word.docs);

• the person posting the writing to the blog needs to identify key words for the content of the writing and add these as tags for the post;

• the type of writing (e.g. issues overview, essay, research report, summary-response) also needs adding as the category of the post. We may need to co-ordinate on the categories we use for different types of writing.

A final important point: students can upload their writing themselves if they have an invite to the blog. In fact, my aim is to move to an open-access system where students do all the uploading of their writing themselves (with guidance from their teacher). If you want to students in your writing class to have this access you need to do two things: i) send me their email addresses so I can invite them on to the blog; and ii) make sure they know how to register themselves for the blog, make a post including putting up a summary of their composition (abstract or introduction); make a pdf file of their work and upload that, add topic and issue tags and the type of writing category to their post.

If we can move to making this a kind of wiki for students' writing as examples and research reosurces that would be wonderful, I think. But, please let us know what you think by commenting and posting on this yourself.

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.