Dialectical Journal: Kleine

Author/Title

Michael Kleine's "What Is It We Do When We Write Articles Like This One--and How Can We Get Students to Join Us?"

Summary

In this essay Kleine works through the differences between the student writing process (copy research), and the "professional" writer's process. He explains his four stage process based on Joseph Campbell's Hunter/Gather metaphor: collecting data, sifting data, seeking patterns, and translating findings into writing. Next, Kleine steps us through his research interviewing 8 faculty members about their writing process and attempts to code their processes into his model. He concludes with a list of Pedagogical Implications he developed after interpreting his research. Please refer to the following dialectical journal for specific quotes and comments.

Reflection	Quote
In this quote, Kleine is showing and explaining the trend of “copying” students do as part (or all) of their research.	“I knew they were writing research papers because they were not writing at all—merely copying” (23)
Now he is explicitly saying that these other necessary parts of research are not present in student research methodology.	“I detected no searching, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, selecting, rejecting, etc.” (23)
I thought it was interesting Kleine worked Kurtz’s famous line in from the Heart of Darkness, perhaps the library is akin to the African Jungle in that a student experiences college similarly to that of Kurtz in the jungle…	“The horror. The horror.” (23)
Making a connection to the student that is probably reading this and identifying similar habits of “copy research.”	“I recognized the transcribing behavior, I was one of them.” (24)
Next, Kleine makes the move directly questioning what it is exactly “professional” writers do and what is the value of that process—further, where is the value (public/private).	Do college level academics—teachers, I mean, who actually do academic writing—really live in the night library? Or do they participate in a rich process of discovery and communication, a process that might have both private and public values?” (24)
I found this section interesting because it shows the authors struggle with the system in place and his desire to change it—to create a more effective model for writing.	“[We became]Disenchanted with linear stage models of the writing process: not only do they fail to account for the role of data-gathering and reading in academic and professional writing, but they also, in their linearity, suggest that planning and inventing (“pre-writing) guides a writer through subsequent acts of text production and revision.” (24)
From Joseph Campbell’s “hunter/gather” idea—puts research into context with another model—gives us a new way to perceive research methodologies.	“A hunter finds what he is looking for, a gather discovers that which might be of use.” (25)
The four stage process of research writing	Four stage process Kleine and co. devised: (25) *collect data *sift data rhetorically *seek patterns in the data *translate findings into writing
This passage was important to me because it is dense and needs to be unpacked—specific words like “epistemic” and “rhetorical” need to be defined and placed into context for students to better understand what Kleine is saying here.	“Collecting data and seeking pattern in it seemed to us to be more intrinsically epistemic, while sifting the data nad translating knowledge into text seemed more intrinsically rhetorical.” (25)
This page poses only problems for me—as Kleine details his interview process, how he interpreted data, asked others to react to it, etc, it seems forced—I don’t get the impression Kleine found what he wanted, or was surprised by how much more complex the writing process seems to be (beyond his 8 cell table.) I guess this part makes me really question the author—he loses something here.	ALL OF PAGE 26
Okay, that’s great for those who actually find themselves in the position of writing academically because they want to—because they have found something to write about that interests them, but what about our students who really do have academic writing imposed on them? How do we get them engaged in the research process if the very topic, question, problem, etc., in outside of their authority?	The exigence, in all cases, was personal interest and dissonance: some problem, some question, some contradiction, some opposition, some surprise was worth exploring, thinking about, writing about. The remembered motivation to write academically was internal, not externally imposed.” (27)
This continues from the last passage, and again I question who we are supposed to take this to our students, who are having to write for an authority figure. There is a feeling of hypocrisy underlying this—but, despite this problematic area, this could be a great starting point into a really in-depth conversation with students about who they write for, and why.	“Never did a subject remember writing for an authority figure, a critic, or a subordinate: always, the subjects gestured at a concerned community of peers and found starting points within the ongoing discourse of such a community.” (27)
So this is a great passage to take to students—to show them that even “professional” writers have difficulty with their writing and there is a “sloppiness” to it! J	“[…] all subjects recalled complex academic processes and talked about both the sloppiness and richness of their processes…” (27)
This list is specifically directed towards instructors, calling on those of us teaching writing to look at theses as a list of goals to work towards. I would like to see what could happen in a conversation with students about this list—what would their input be? How can they contribute to this process?	The following is Klein’s list of implications: 1.       A hunting/gathering model of the research-writing process, while it has categorical limitations, has tremendous potential as a heuristic. 2.       All of us who teach academic writing need to work on building, in our classes, genuine research communities. 3.       We need to promote genuine reading in our classrooms and allow for research that might not involve the library alone. 4.       We need to invite students to participate in a range of research tasks—some that would be more characteristic of the natural and social sciences some more characteristic of the humanities. 5.       Finally, we need to help students who are already writing across the curuiculum enrich their own processes.