The research paper is a perennial problem in the composition course, and there are those who maintain, as Richard Larson has argued, that it is not even a separate form of writing. Larson and others also insist that English departments have no business teaching the research paper, because the techniques and methodologies of research are so site-specific that they should be taught only within particular disciplines. On the other hand, we cannot ignore an institutional setting where almost 85 percent of all compo­sition courses include a research paper component (Ford and Perry 827). The gap, however, between research paper writing and composition has never been successfully bridged, and that gap has only been widened by many of our prevailing orthodoxies about teaching the two forms. The incompat­ible paradigms and discursive practices of our teaching strategies illustrate the incoherence of Composition Studies as a field. For instance, working within the paradigm of composition as a genre, Lad Tobin can say that the preferred kind of essay is “the autobiographical narrative of a self-actualizing event” (337). In contrast, Schwegler and Shamoon have argued that most students view the research paper as a test and the teacher as “the audience. . .who already knows about the subject and is testing the student’s knowledge and information-gathering ability” (819). In addition, students “view the research paper as a close-ended, informative, skills-oriented exercise” rather than an “act of discovery” (820,819). Even if we grant that most students are incorrect in their assessment of our assumptions about the research paper, there would seem to be a certain incompatibility between writing that is overtly autobiographical and writing that demands that students suppress the autobiographical, between expressive writing and writing that is assumed to be the antithesis of expressive. No wonder students become confused. We spend half or two-thirds of a composition course encouraging students to reflect on and shape autobiographical experience, then we introduce them to the research paper and assume that, because both activities involve writing, skills will transfer from one discursive practice to another. When the skills fail to transfer, we either blame the students or give up teaching the research paper. Rarely have we thought it necessary to examine the incoherence of our own disciplinary assumptions.

Responding to this incoherence, Richard Larson has argued that, be­cause of its institutional setting, “the generic ‘research paper’ as a concept, and as a form of writing taught in a department of English, is not defensible” (812). The skills of research should be taught in individual departments because “research in different academic disciplines works from distinctive assumptions and follows distinctive patterns of inquiry” (815-16). Larson’s point about the particularity of academic inquiry is one that we should not forget, but his washing-his-hands-of-the-whole-mess solution is certainly an inadequate one where the great majority of composition programs do teach research paper writing, and where the great majority of academic depart­ments are unprepared to teach it. His solution, as radical as it sounds, is a response to a sense of profound unease about the kinds of texts students produce when writing research papers. As a former colleague remarked about the research paper course at Rutgers University: “There’s a poltergeist haunting this course!” Less hyperbolically, Schwegler and Shamoon register the results of this sense of unease when they begin their essay by stating that “many members ofour department—and yours too, we suspect—have stopped teaching the research paper in composition courses” (817). Whether re­search paper courses have been dropped because of their perceived “failure” or because they are seen to perpetuate a set of false distinctions, this gesture of abnegation is, I believe, a potentially self-defeating one for Composition Studies. If we can teach students nothing about how to write a multiple source paper, what makes us think that we have anything to say to colleagues in other disciplines that they should listen to? If we can teach students nothing about how to write a paper using research in an art history course, or an evaluation of the causes for the outbreak of World War I, then why should our colleagues think of us as more than the language police, as those who fix up “the dinglers and the danglers”? I think we can deal with the research paper neither by orphaning it nor by benign neglect, but by looking more closely and critically at our own pedagogical practices in teaching the research paper and in composition courses.

Writing Technologies of the Research Paper

When Ibegan teaching twenty years ago, practically the first class I taught was a required course in research writing. The texts were interesting and “relevant,” the students earnest, the class discussions lively, and the papers uniformly dull. After teaching the course for three consecutive years, I had no interest in ever teaching a research writing course again. My experience, I am sure, was a typical one: teachers and students dread that part of the first­ year course given over to the research paper. After teaching research paper writing again for the past few years, I have begun to suspect that our theoretical neglect of this form is connected to the quality of the texts that the students produce for us. What we have done is to treat a form, which has its own history, as if it were a given, an immutable and “natural” fact. As David Russell has observed, “this genre has come to be ubiquitous, relatively uniform~ and almost synonymous with extended school writing” (78). Once we realize, in the words of Steven Mailloux, that the research paper is “a methodology . . . used for the classroom practices derived from the German scientific model,” then we are in the position to rehistoricize not only the research paper but the function it plays in contemporary composition courses (23). Russell has shown in his Writing in the Academic Disciplines that when the research paper was introduced into the American university system, the institutional gap between teachers and students was narrow enough that the students’ research paper writing bore some resemblance to that of their teachers’, and the roles of teacher and student were conceived as practitioner and apprentice. But as the research paper became institution­alized and routinized, and as scientific knowledge simultaneously exploded and segmented, the pedagogical uses of the research paper

Very soon in its history, the research paper became an “imitation of the writing that the institution valued most,” but an imitation devoid of the raision d’être of the original (72). For if in the model of the German scientific paper, the scientist is to communicate the results of his objective research, the student, using the same model can only communicate a second order truth, can only re-discover what has already been discovered. Russell argues that the

If we look at what textbooks say about research paper writing, their pervasive and fundamental assumption is positivist—that the work a student does in writing a research paper is like the work of a scientist. The writers of these textbooks, in using the model of what they conceive of as scientific research, adopt a “scientific” vocabulary (“observations,” “facts,” “experi­mentation,” “evidence”) which denies uncertainty and ambiguity and which completely excludes the act of writing from their discussion. For these writers, facts are unambiguous, either true or false, and this belief has its basis in their assumption about the unambiguous nature of scientific research. If we accept Thomas Kuhn’s definition of the scientist as one “concerned to understand the world and to extend the precision and scope with which it has been ordered,” then the project of the student writer bears no relation to that of the scientist (42). Most scientists, Kuhn argues, are engaged in the “mopping-up operations” which constitute “normal science” (24). The scientist’s ability to “do” normal science is predicated on his or her accep­tance of a “paradigm,” and those scientists “whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scien­tific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i.e., for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition” (11). Within that research tradition, Kuhn’s “mopping-up operations” consist almost wholly of “three classes of problems—determination of significant fact, matching facts with theory, and articulation of theory” (34).

When they work within this paradigm, scientists accept a set of assump­tions which make that work possible, assumptions which define the nature of the questions they can ask. In Foucault’s terms, this means that “the founding of a science can always be reintroduced within the machinery of those transformations that derive from it” (“Author” 115). Kuhn would probably argue that the “founding act” of a paradigm is always “present,” but Foucault makes a crucial distinction between “science” and “discursive practice” which is “heterogeneous to its subsequent transformations” (“Author” 115). Science, since it incorporates the founding act, does not demand, what Foucault calls, a “‘return to the origin.’ This return, which is part of the discursive field itself, never stops modifying it. The return is not a historical supplement which would be added to discursivity . . . on the contrary, it constitutes an effective and necessary task of transforming the discursive practice itself’ (“Author” 116). A reexamination of Galileo’s writing, Foucault says, may change our sense of “the history of mechanics, but it will never be able to change mechanics itself’ (“Author” 116), while a reexami­nation of Freud or Marx would, of necessity, modify Freudianism or Marx­ism.

Kuhn and Foucault allow us to see how the writers of research textbooks who use the scientific model are at once relying on a simplistic notion of science, and how they ignore differences in discursive practices. The return which Foucault speaks of, for instance, has its necessity buried in the word “research” itself. As the OED states the prefix re has “the general sense of ‘back’ or ‘again,”’ while the origin of the word “search” is in the late Latin “circare” which means “to go round.” The return of research, within the scientific model, renders no modification; one can only report on Galileo or mechanics or Egyptian education, and that is why this model relegates the act of writing to the periphery. After all, the scientist writes her report, the model implies, after the conclusion of her experiments, after all the important work has been done. The scientist may indeed write only after the work is done (although writing, I suspect, is continuous throughout the process), but for the scientist the paradigm governs practice. The student researcher, on the other hand, is not consciously working within a research tradition; she has no access to informing theory, and the “rules and standards” of research are particularly opaque. In fact, the practice of the student writer is quite similar to that of the scientist before a paradigm has been established; without a “paradigm...all...facts...are likely to be seen equally relevant” (Kuhn 15).The student, then, is nothing like a scientist working within the tradition of normal science. The student, without the comfort of a theoretical envelope, a paradigm, faces the bewildering equality of “facts,” and it is only in the writing, and not before it, that the student can find a way to distinguish among and weigh those facts and thus shape her research.

The scientific assumptions undergirding research paper pedagogy are so strong that even common sense can be claimed as a form of science. In Gaston and Smith’s The Research Paper: A Common Sense Approach, the authors claim that

The first oversimplification in this passage is the writers’ supposition that research is simply “common sense” (the subtitle of their textbook). As Clifford Geertz has argued, common sense is, in its content, neither trans­cultural, nor can it be used, unproblematically, as a kind of foundational principle. “[I]t is an inherent characteristic of common sense thought. . . to affirm that its tenets are immediate deliverances of experience, not deliber­ated reflections upon it” Geertz writes (75). Common sense, he goes on to say,

If the analogies that the textbooks employ (research is common sense, research is like science) are less than useful, the pedagogical assumptions of these books are often quite archaic. As an example, take the matter of outlines: composition textbooks from earlier in this century placed heavy emphasis on outlines. These outlines are always to be crafted before any writing of sentences begin, and outlining is often troped as the activity of an architect as in this sentence from a 1926 textbook, Claxton and McGinniss’ Effective English: “Did the paper read as if a good outline had been made at the outset, and as if the writer had referred to it in preparing this paper, as the builder refers to the architect’s plans? It not, it lacks coherence” (10). For Claxton and McGinniss, writing itself is not so much an act of thought as it is a transcription of thought or a remembering of thought. The conceptual work in producing an essay, as Porter Perrin claims in his 1950 Writer’s Guide and Index to English, precedes the writing: “The real process of composing is gathering ideas together [and] grouping them” (13). A more recent text, like Lunsford and Connor’s The St. Martin’s Handbook (1989), discusses the formal outline only in the context of the research paper, and stresses that it is “a double-edged sword” because, on one hand, it allows a writer to see how “ideas relate [and] what the overall structure of your argument will be,” while, on the other hand, “most people find a full formal outline devilishly hard to write”(575). Not only can the outline, in its rigid structure, be an impediment in writing, but Lunsford and Connors also acknowledge that insight often occurs in the act of writing: “Whatever form your organization­al plan takes.. . you may want or need to change it as you begin drafting. Writing has a way of stimulating thought, and you may find yourself getting ideas in the process of drafting” (29). Those shifts from Claxton and McGinniss to Lunsford and Conners are telling; the latter pair do not discuss the outline at all in reference to “composition,” and what they do say is more balanced and informed by revisionary work in Composition Studies from the last twenty years.

When one contrasts, however, the advice of older composition textbooks with more recent textbooks devoted solely to research paper writing, it becomes obvious that very little has changed. For instance, Manley and Rickert, in their 1923 book, The Writing of English, stress two stages in the outlining process for research papers: first, “when you have in mind the general bearing and content of your subject, do not fail to jot it down in the form of a rough, preliminary outline” (170). Second, “when you have read and taken notes to the limit of available material or of time, you are ready to make the final outline of your paper. If the work of reading and of arranging notes has been carefully done, the outlining is almost automatic,” and, it would be fair to say, once the outline is crafted, the writing itself is also “almost automatic” (172). If one looks at Lester’s 1990 Writing Research Papers, one sees a similar stress on outlining, but in addition one also sees a set of working pedagogical assumptions that appear at first very close to those of Lunsford and Connors. Although he writes that “before progressing very far into note-taking you should prepare a preliminary outline” (65)—ad­vice consonant with that of Manley and Rickert—when it comes to the formal outlines, Lester writes: “Understand that not all papers require the formal outline. ... After all, the outline and first draft are preliminary steps to discovering what needs expression” (114). Such advice would seem to signal a shift in pedagogical assumptions, and it would, except for Lester’s appara­tus: almost six pages on how to outline. Even though Lester makes gestures toward a pedagogy based on process and on discovery, the overall thrust of his advice is even more retrograde than that of Manley and Rickert from 1923. They, at least, have a paragraph on revision in which they admit that significant work can be done at this stage; new paragraphs should be written, and the student’s “main attention” should be “focused on general revision of structure” (177). In his single page on revision, Lester nowhere recognizes that revision might mean more than tinkering with and adjusting the paper. It is astonishing how little has changed in this pedagogy in almost seventy years.

Because so little has changed over these seventy years, the form of the research paper has fossilized. Too often, though, we fail to look at our own practice in teaching research papers, and instead scapegoat and blame the students. I have heard it said, derisively, at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, that most college research writing in­volves “carting dead bones from one graveyard to another.” After our rueful laugh of recognition, we should also recognize that we have provided and, in many cases, continue to provide, the cart and the destination, a place of interment, a destination that brings the students full circle. This cart, the model of a scientific and objective paper, can be so disabling that many students find a course in writing research essays one of their most difficult and frustrating experiences in the university. This disabling is probably, at the last remove, a product of a general cultural resistance to conceding, as Edward Said has written, that all knowledge “has been historically constituted and constructed,” and that research is not a matter of collecting “facts,” but a matter of “constituting and constructing” knowledge (211). This resistance means that students are unaware of how knowledge is “made”; instead, they are inculcated with a “scientific” model of knowledge and research writing. This model of the research “paper” has remained largely resistant to the kind of intellectual move in which knowledge is constituted and constructed by the overlappings of institutional boundaries, a move that Clifford Geertz has written of in an essay entitled “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought”: “[T]here has been an enormous amount of genre mixing in intellectual life in recent years, and it is, such blurring of kinds, continuing apace... . Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think” (20,21). But something is not happening to the way we expect students to think in the research paper. Research paper pedagogy has been resistant to “genre mixing” and the critical self-awareness Geertz discusses.

A symptom of this resistance is the use of the term “research paper” by most writing textbooks and by our students. When they use and hear the term “research paper,” they conceive of it as something like a scientific report, objective and neutral. I sometimes wonder what would happen if we called the form a “research essay.” The semantic shift would not be a frivolous one; it would emphasize that the “essay” does not, as Adorno has observed “obey the rules of the game of organized science and theory;... [it] does not strive for closed, deductive or inductive, construction” (158). It should strive, I would argue, for a kind of openness, a delight in the unexpected and incongruous. As Hayden White has argued of historical writing, the inten­tion of the essay is to render the “unfamiliar, or the ‘uncanny’ in Freud’s sense of the term, familiar; of removing it from the domain of things felt to be ‘exotic’ and unclassified into one or another domain of experience encoded adequately enough to be felt humanly useful, nonthreatening, or simply known by association” (5). White also argues that this is “only one side of [a] two-fold operation,” and the “other side ‘to render the familiar strange”’ is also a move essential to the essay (256).

The research paper is seen by the students then as a closed and monologic form, one that prevents them from rendering either the familiar strange or the strange familiar. The reason they view the research paper in this light is social: it is not only a product of their previous schooling, but also a result of the insistence of American culture on binaries, on point-counterpoint. There can be only two views on any possible subject, and when the students adopt a “scientific” model, it conflates with their cultural presuppositions to think in binaries. So rather than the research paper being a hermeneutical process in which one begins with certain tentative questions, ones which are subsequently modified by the process of investigation and of writing, the research paper is conceived in a positivistic sense, as a method that produces binary results, which either confirm or deny. These “scientific” presupposi­tions are encoded in Packer and Timpane’s advice that “a tentative thesis can help you organize your thoughts and direct your research. A tentative thesis is like a working hypothesis in a scientific experiment. It is the ‘idea’ the research will examine, so it serves as the basis for further investigation” (341). This advice not only simplifies the necessary messiness of research by implying that “a tentative thesis,” like “a working hypothesis,” can serve as a way of controlling the process of research, but also, in ignoring the differences between the scientist and the student writer, it falsifies the situation of the student. The scientist’s “hypothesis” comes out of praxis, the set of assumptions linking theory and practice, but our students, in thinking of science, focus exclusively on practice, and thus understand the scientific method as less than tentative, as something that bears little resemblance to Kuhn’s idea of normal science. In their view, the hypothesis is either confirmed or denied, and the scientist goes on from there. What they fail to see is how the process of trying to answer a question raises a whole set of unforeseen questions. So in their hurry to provide students with writing technologies, the authors of textbooks advise students to set aside tentative­ness and purge it from the process of their research because it can only serve as an impediment.

The “closed” model proposed by the textbooks implies to the student that the outcome of writing a research essay can be controlled and is relatively predictable, and that it provides the comforting illusion that a process is under control (remember, a “tentative thesis can help.. . organize.. . and direct”). When we begin to write, though, we relinquish control; real writing is a complicated and unpredictable interaction between the writer and the texts of her research, a dynamic suppressed by most writers of textbooks. This interaction, however, can only be initiated once the student begins to write. Essentially, an essay must be able to be eventful, must be able to turn back on itself and interrogate its own assumptions, a quality that Adorno helps us to understand when he writes that the essay does not achieve “something scientifically, or . . . artistically”:

The Juncture Between Research and Composition

If writing technologies govern the practice of research writing, then the autobiographical essay seems to govern composition pedagogy. Maxine Hairston has claimed (somewhat infamously) that having students “write about other people’s ideas doesn’t work well” (B1). If this is a composition teacher’s working assumption, then the only possible subject for writing would be the students’ own ideas as reflected in their own experience. As Lad Tobin has written: “There is . . . a certain type of essay (I will call it the autobiographical narrative of a self-actualizing event) that most of us in this interpretative community prefer” (337). Contrast Tobin’s claim with Larson’s statement that research “furnishes the substance of much discourse and can furnish substance to almost any discourse except, possibly, one’s personal reflections on one’s own experience” (813). This juxtaposition illustrates perfectly a basic incoherence in composition pedagogy. Students, taught to write expressivist essays, cannot extend that interest in the autobiographical when they are asked to write about something outside the self. In fact, the anecdote that Tobin uses to open his essay illustrates this bind perfectly. A student who was doing well, apparently, in Tobin’s composition course was struggling with the writing in her humanities course. In a final essay in Tobin’s course on her image of herself as a writer, this student

Both Tobin and the student argue, however, that her difficulty in the humanities course was a result of two incompatible conceptions of the function of writing. In Tobin’s words, she was empowered “by the encourage­ment I gave her to explore ideas that mattered to her in personal and informal language. Her humanities professor, she complained, had denied her this access by insisting on numerous references to the text and ‘impeccable English prose”’ (333). It may be that the humanities professor was simply being over-prescriptive and that he was acting as an agent of the language police rather than as a reader within a discipline, but even if the case is this extreme there is still a problem with Tobin’s expressivist pedagogy. Are students who are taught to write autobiographical narratives of self-actual­izing events unable to switch gears? Are they unable to adapt to the demands of different audiences? By Tobin’s account, his pedagogy may have succeed­ed at “helping another student establish her identity,” but it has not given her much flexibility as a writer (335).

Furthermore, if we assume that the humanities professor was not overly prescriptive, then there is an even more disturbing implication to Tobin’s narrative. He seems to assume, along with his student, that the transition from expressivist writing (“her own form of expression”) to academic dis­course means that the student’s “actual ideas were lost or distorted.” This example leads to my first conclusion about the relation between composition and the research paper: expressivist pedagogy of Tobin’s variety is a kind of shell game that in promising to empower students actually disempowers them, and we see this disempowerment in their struggles with research paper writing. Susan Miller has argued much the same point in a wider context in her Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition; she claims that composi­tion marginalizes students, and she asserts that “the purposes and practices for the composition course ... indicated that it was set up to be a national course in silence” (55). It is here, at this juncture between an expressivist composition pedagogy and the research paper, that the silence falls. David Bartholomae has spoken to this problem when he observed that, “I think it wrong to teach late-adolescents that writing is an expression of individual thoughts and feelings. It makes them. . . powerless.. . blind to tradition, power and authority as they are present in language and culture” (128-129). Taught to value her own form of expression, taught to develop her own ideas at the exclusion of all else, the student fails utterly to write a productive essay dealing with the ideas of others.

Since we live in a culture that views itself as largely ahistorical and that has been founded on a repudiation of the past (the kind of ideology found in Emerson’s early essays), I am tempted, at this point, by the “junking” solution because I find the ahistorical, visionary impulse a dangerously narrow one (as indeed did Emerson himself later in his career). But I have also beenwarned by my former colleague, Kurt Spellmeyer, that the opposite is just as dangerous: that students have to be more than just slaves to history and discourse communities. What we see, though, in the presently impossi­ble transition from composition to the research paper is a double silencing; the student, in composition, is left in a world of solipsism. Her narrative of self-actualization may well give her greater insight into her personal life, but she has no ability to connect those narratives to history, culture, or commu­nity. On the other hand, if the student were to write a research paper on “Homer, Cicero, ... [or] the Hebrew prophets,” she would remain unable to converse with them, because her experience (narrowly construed) would be totally irrelevant. One way out of this bind of double silence, which would preserve some of the visionary quality of the best of the expressivist pedagogy, would be to have students continue to reflect on their experience, but to do so within a context of cultural studies, using what I have come to call an ethnographic perspective. In the absence of any such context, all that a student can be taught, as David Bartholomae said in his debate with Peter Elbow, is to write reasonably competent sentimental narratives, with nothing to provide resistance to or complication of these narratives.

The Model of Postmodern Ethnography

In contrast to both expressivist and “scientific” research paper writing, I would like to offer another disciplinary model for research, that of the contemporary ethnographer who, in renouncing the role of the “objective” scientist, has found a way to position herself not outside of, but in the midst of, her research. In an essay entitled “On Ethnographic Authority,” James Clifford has written that in the early part of this century the authority of the “fieldworker-theorist” replaced that of the “earlier ‘men on the spot’—the missionary, the administrator, the trader, and the traveller—whose knowl­edge of indigenous peoples, they argued, was not informed by the best scientific hypotheses or a sufficient neutrality” (27). This fieldworker ­theorist as “objective” scientist saw no need to call into question her status as observer or the cultural dominance of her Eurocentric point-of-view, and in constructing the others of her field work as a text, this traditional ethnog­rapher, Clifford argues “transforms the research situation’s ambiguities and diversities of meaning into an integrated portrait. The research process is separated from the texts it generates, and . . . [t]he dialogical, situational aspects of ethnographic interpretation tend to be banished from the final representative text” (40). Our students are like this traditional ethnographer in valuing integration over ambiguity and diversity, in separating the “re­search process” from the text, and in their inability to see the relevance of the “dialogical [and] situational aspects of.. . interpretation.”

The traditional ethnographer and the student in a research essay course are further allied in the way in which they assume the authority of “objective” knowledge. The traditional ethnographer assumes—takes on—the authority of representation, while the student assumes—takes for granted—the au­thority of all such representations. Neither, it seems to me, aspires to what Hayden White has defined as “genuine discourse,” that is discourse which is “as self critical as it is critical of others” (4). Both, through an exclusionary tactic, try to govern the texts they write through “monologic authority” (Clifford 52), which simplifies by defining certain questions, certain textual practices, as irrelevant. This tactic of exclusion, of course, differs in inten­tionality: the student, imitating “monologic authority,” unreflectingly excludes, while the traditional ethnographer consciously excludes. For in­stance, in writing about Malinowski and the difference between his 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific and his posthumously published Diaiy (1967), Clifford remarks on the “anger” and “ambivalence” which was excluded from the ethnographic text. In the Diaiy, Malinowski was

An ethnographic model would give students—allow students to take—the authority to claim the borderland, the liminal space between discourses, something that the scientific model actually prevents. As an example of how the monologic, scientific model can be disabling, a female student of mine once wrote a well-researched essay, exploring various theories of the incest taboo, and another student, after reading her essay, commented: “I distinctly missed the author’s own feelings on the subject.” The writer’s rather puzzled response to this comment is revealing:

One way to try to encourage students to include the ongoing negotiation of research in their writing and to foster an ethnographic view of research might be to focus a research paper course on another culture. Such a course could begin by using an autobiography from a radically different culture, such as Wole Soyinka’s Aké: The Years of Childhood, as a way of immediately providing a cultural contrast to the students’ first autobiographical narra­tives. As the course continued, the students’ sense of their place in the world could be complicated by reading ethnographies, like Michael Moffat’s Com­ing ofAge in New Jersey or Douglas Foley’s Learning Capitalist Culture: Deep in the Heart of Tejas. The advantages of a course like this would be obvious. Most importantly, the students’ experience would not be jettisoned as irrelevant, rather it would be problematized and historicized by having been seen through various academic lenses. Furthermore, when it came to writing a research paper, a context would already exist for the student to work in. As a researcher into her own experience, history, and culture, the student would be motivated in a way that she often is not in writing a research paper. The project would seem, inevitably, less of an exercise. The student could begin to see some of the reasons for, and the relevance of, academic inquiry, and there would be an organic connection between composition and the research paper. As Nancy Barnes has written, “the most impressive, breathtaking developments in students’ thinking often happen as they move back and forth between individual experience (their own, and also that of unfamiliar people and remote places) and structural analyses or theories” (149).

What I am advocating here is not so much a particular course content (ethnography or cultural studies) as I am advocating a conceptual shift. When students write expressivist essays, they conceive of themselves as the Emersonian, sovereign, ahistorical individual; when they write research papers, they think of themselves as objective conduits for information. In both forms, they are absolutists. An ethnographical model would encourage them to move back and forth among experience, conviction, and theory. But to move intellectually in this way, there has to be more at stake than what I called earlier a “second order discovery”; liminality can not be fostered when students are assigned ersatz writing. As Brown, Collins, and Dugid have written in “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning,” teaching often fails to “provide the important insights into either the culture or the authentic activities of that culture that learners need” (33). This ersatz quality is as equally pronounced in composition as it is in the research paper. In composition based on the expressivist model, students write autobio­graphical narratives, which we can feel safely superior to, in part because our writing is of a very different sort. Even Peter Elbow has acknowledged that there is a kind of professonalized self-protection involved in our expectation of student writing. Usually, Elbow has written, a teacher “isn’t in a position where he can be genuinely affected by your words. He doesn’t expect your words actually to make a dent on him. He doesn’t treat your words like real reading. He has to read them as an exercise” (Elbow 127).

If we are able to respond to our students’ autobiographical writing with readerly empathy (although as writers within the academic discourse com­munity we only very rarely write this way ourselves), the divorce from the work of practitioners is especially marked in that portion of a composition course given over to the research paper. For instance, James Lester in Writing Research Papers tries to illustrate how to use one’s imagination to develop a topic:

An Alternative Intellectual Lineage

At the heart of the problem I am trying to articulate is a set of different attitudes toward reading and consequently toward knowledge. Current-traditionalists and conservatives of Maxine Hairston’s ilk do not believe in the efficacy of reading in a college composition course. As Hairs ton wrote in the May 1992 issue of College Composition and Communication: students “do not need to be assigned essays to read so that they will have something to write about—they bring their subjects with them. The writing of others, except for that of their fellow students, should be supplementary, used to illustrate or reinforce” (186). Students should only read, according to Hairston, in order to provide themselves with models; she does not want other people’s writing to distract them from their own ideas. But because her pedagogy makes no place for other people’s ideas, the students are hamstrung when asked to write research papers. Their previous writing experience acts as an imped­iment; their personal experience is irrelevant. Consequently, they fall back on summary—they act as “text processors “—and we excoriate them for “carting dead bones.” As Donald Lazare has pointed out in the essay that followed Hairston’s, this attitude in Composition Studies toward reading and knowledge emphasizes “basic writing and the generation and exposition of one’s own ideas to the neglect of more advanced levels of writing that involve critical thinking in evaluating others’ ideas” (194). And, of course, the primary sustained site in the academy for students to evaluate others’ ideas and to think critically is the research paper.

As a way of trying to bride the gap between attitudes like Hairston’s and the pedagogies of the traditional research paper, Ken Macrorie has argued in The I-Search Paper for an approach to writing research papers that would recontextualize knowledge. Instead of “the ideas, methods, principles, and knowledge of authorities . . . ~being] abstracted and detached from the experience that generates them,” (Preface), Macrorie advocates something he calls the I-Search paper which “tells stories of quests” (Preface). In this type of paper, the student is not doing an exercise, but rather is recovering something of the origins of the form in the nineteenth century German university. The students do “original searches,” and thus they become  “authors reading authorities,” a process that allows them to become author­ities themselves, “however limited and naive” (14). This quest as a narrative, Macrorie argues, restores the cultural and affective context within which all researchers work, a context that we, as purveyors of academic discourse have been trained to eliminate from our own writing.

As appealing as this model might be in its effort to overcome binaries—the split between subjective and objective, expressivism and the research paper—the I-Search paper strikes me as an expressivist and romantic version of research-paper writing, and I seriously doubt how effectively its lessons transfer to other writing contexts. This model establishes the same dynamic I described at work with Tobin and his student who is powerfully enabled within the course, and is equally powerfully disabled outside it. For instance, I suspect that when the student is asked to write a more traditionally academic research paper she would founder, and furthermore I suspect that few if any of my colleagues in my interdisciplinary Humanities Division would accept a quest-narrative as a research paper. In other words, Macrorie’s model does not take the demands of academic discourse fully enough into consideration; indeed, one could argue that the I-Search paper, like expressivism itself, is a liberatory response to the oppressiveness of academic discourse. But the liberation it promises is illusory, in part because of Macrorie’s romantic (one might even say mystical) notions of how one begins to define a research paper topic. “Allow something to choose you that you want intensely to know or possess,” Macrorie intones, and his examples of what to research are telling: a stereo or tape player, a motorcycle, a technical school, a vacation spot (62). Here, Lazare’s criticism of Hairston is particu­larly apposite; this model neglects “more advanced levels of writing that involve critical thinking in evaluating other’s ideas” (194). Furthermore, the process of being “chosen” simplifies what Flower and Hayes point to when they say that even though “a teacher gives 20 students the same assignment, the writers themselves create the problem they solve” (93). Macrorie’s model gives the students no experience in defining a problem that interests them within a field of inquiry, nor does it give them any training in how to chart a course among competing voices and points of view.

What we see in the incompatibility of pedagogies like expressivism, the traditional research paper, and the I-Search paper is a larger struggle over what constitutes knowledge, a struggle that conceals an underlying congru­ity. One might want to argue, for instance, that I have described a struggle between subjective and objective ways of knowing and conceptions of the truth, a struggle that began with the humanistic disciplines trying to become scientific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but I would like to argue that both pedagogies, expressivism and the research paper, are both absolutist and assume that Truth is knowable (albeit in different fashions), and because of their absolutism neither form can speak to the other. I would like tentatively to suggest that these seeming binaries can trace their absolut­ist heritage back to Plato, who formulates for the Western Tradition a theory of the oneness of Truth (as opposed to the plurality of truths). The expressivists, for instance, share an assumption, in the words of Foucault, that “truth, lodged in our secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation” (History of Sexuality 60). Tobin’s student was brought to establish “her identity” through the liberation of expressivism; her truth is incontestable, just as is the truth of positivism is incontestable. What I am proposing here is a third way, a way of knowing allied with the Sophists for whom, Richard Enos argues, “meaning... [was] an act of abstraction through social consensus” (99).

I realize that this sounds like social construction under another name, but I see the example of the Sophists as being crucially different from twentieth century social constructionists. For social constructionists, dis­course communities are monolithic and disciplining. Students, as Pat Bizzell has argued in several essays, must subject themselves to the authority of the discipline; only once they’ve become initiates have they acquired the author­ity to speak. For the Sophists, on the other hand, knowledge is a product of social negotiation open to all, even to students and their teachers. Susan Jarratt has observed (quoting Havelock’s The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics) that the “sophist ‘did not seek to place the pupil at an intellectual disadvantage as compared with the teacher,’ waiting instead to hear a response which the teacher would take into serious consideration toward the outcome of the discussion” (106). The openness to the negotiation of knowledge is a product of the early alliance of rhetoric and democracy (see Enos), and also of the Sophists’ ethnographic observations as they traveled throughout the Greek-speaking world (Jarratt 11). As Jarratt and others have recognized, the Sophists can provide us with an alternative intellectual lineage, a perspective from which we can begin to critique absolutist claims in both expressivism and the research paper.

If I have argued here for a move toward a borderland, an ethnographic center between composition and research pedagogies, I am also forced to recognize that research paper pedagogy has been much more conservative than composition pedagogy. Part of the reason for this fossilized pedagogy is that the juncture between composition and the research paper illustrates our failure to think through the issue of process and product. Clearly, research paper pedagogy has not been able to integrate process theory because a tyranny of the product reigns in research paper pedagogy. Con­versely, as Susan Miller has argued, process theory, as presently constructed, has not taken “responsibility for showing students the variability of writing processes, nor has it shown how their variety connects to contingencies in larger cultural systems that privilege some writers over others” (119). And it is here, in the juncture between the paradigms of composition and the research paper, that we must examine how process theory and how expressivist writing connect to “larger cultural systems” as discovered in the research paper, and it is also here, in this backwater of research paper pedagogy, that we must begin to integrate process and product—so that students can see the research paper as an act rather than a transcription or a test. Not until we find a way to bring these paradigms closer together will we be able to present ourselves as members of a field which has important insights for teachers in all disciplines.