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Structuring Your Course |
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We chose to introduce the research report as the first genre in the textbook (Chapter 3) because it is the most common type of scientific discourse, and students are more likely to be familiar with it—or to need to be familiar with it—early in their careers than they are with the research review or proposal. We use it to introduce such skills as situating new research in the context of the field's prior knowledge, establishing rationale, describing and supporting methods, integrating visual and verbal information, and arguing for an interpretation of results, all of which we see as basic skills on which other genres also rely. We follow Chapter 3 with a chapter on reviewing prior research and documenting sources: Chapter 4, which can be used in conjunction with students' work on the research report or can be treated as a separate unit in the course.
We see Chapter 3, on the research report, and Chapter 5, on conference presentations, as closely related, and we typically treat them as an integrated unit in our courses. If students have written a research report in Chapter 3, Chapter 5 can be used to help them adapt that report for formal oral presentation or present it in a poster format for an appropriate conference audience. (Another alternative is to have students present their oral reports or posters before a formal written report is due, leaving time for additional feedback from you and/or the in-class audience before the written document is finalized.) We have, however, designed the exercises to enable students to practice these skills even if they have not written a formal research report of their own. The time devoted to Chapter 5 in your course can be expanded or condensed, depending on students' previous preparation in oral presentation skills.
After the written and oral research report, the text moves to the research proposal in Chapter 6. Though the proposal logically precedes the report in the research process (see Sequence #3 below), its more complex audience leads us to place it later in the course. The proposal can easily be seen as the next step in the research process after students have become familiar with the basic research reports in which proposal arguments are grounded. Students who have written a research report in Chapter 3 can develop a proposal for a follow-up study; students who have not written a report will have had the opportunity in Chapters 3 and 4 to notice the "future research directions" described in the discussion sections of reports in their respective fields. They should be able to build on those discussions to generate topics for new proposals.
In Chapters 7 and 8, the text moves beyond the genres of the research community to consideration of other contexts, purposes, and audiences for science. Chapter 7 offers opportunities to analyze and practice more applied genres, such as the standard operating procedures (SOPs) common in governmental and industrial contexts. Chapter 8 examines strategies for writing for the even more diverse readers that constitute the general public. Thus, following the sequence above, students address the most specialized audiences in their fields at the beginning of the course (journal readers, conference audiences, and the mixed audience of the grant proposal) and gradually broaden their focus to address varied users in applied contexts, and finally the diverse audiences of the public domain.
Finally, Chapter 9, which deals with ethics in scientific communication, reflects on the needs and interests of these various audiences and on the scientist's goals and responsibilities in communicating with them. You may want to incorporate this chapter into class discussion of particular genres, to introduce it along with the general issues raised in Chapter 1, or to treat it as a separate unit elsewhere in the course. [Suggestions for combining sections of Chapter 9 with other sections of the book are contained in the Instructor's Manual.]
We've listed below the major assignments that could be used when following the sequence of chapters just described (Sequence #1), but clearly other sequences would be equally logical. We outline two variations below, following organizational principles that colleagues at NC State have used. In Sequence #2, the course begins with familiar, general audiences, and then moves to increasingly more specialized audiences within the research community. In Sequence #3, the proposal is introduced before the research report in order to allow students to follow a single research project from start to finish. Thus, Sequence #1 foregrounds the genre of the research report, Sequence #2 focuses on communicating with public audiences, and Sequence #3 highlights the research proposal.
Sequence #1. Moving from more specialized to more diverse audiences
Major assignments:Sequence #2. Moving from more diverse to more specialized audiences
Major assignments:Sequence #3. Following the research process
Major assignments:
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