Blog 9 - McCormick Chapter 5

Chapter 5:  On a topic of your own choosing and with a clear position of your own, use at least seven unbiased, accurate, and authoritative sources to write a balanced and objective paper that gives a complete picture of the subject you are investigating.

The title of this chapter reveals McCormick’s underlying premise in Chapter 5—the ridiculously flawed nature of the FYC  “research paper” assignment, its inherent contradictions and adherence to objectivist/cognitivist theory and deference to dominant views.

The research paper, as assigned in most textbooks, is a contradiction because while it tells students to “think independently and evaluatively,” the way the assignments asks students to read in fact prevents students from thinking or writing critically. The directions are mechanical:  how to take notes, find sources, use a card catalogue and online databases, how to outline, quote and document sources. Such skills, while useful, are purely “functional rather than contextual” (133).

McCormick finds that such research paper assignments are linked to residual practices and beliefs (133)—namely the objectivist’s view of knowable facts and correct readings and answers. There are some texts, according to McCormick, that have picked up on expressivist practices, and these will include discussion of the “biased nature” of sources, acknowledging that individuals may come to different conclusions about the same topics and events. Nonetheless, both approaches to the research project rely on students reporting information and coming to the correct (dominant) answer to a problem. As part of this discussion, McCormick points out that textbooks ask students to determine whether their sources are objective or biased based on their instinctive sense of the writer’s reliability. In other words, what is “valid” is what “feels valid,” a claim that the student’s own ideology will guide him or her to truth. (WTF, right?)  Whether objectivist or expressivist in its slant, the assignment tell students to favor objectivism and avoid controversy.

McCormick proposes a wholly different approach to the research paper:  “Students…will become able to analyse, intervene in and possibly change the systems of social relations in which they find themselves only when they learn discursive practices that enable them to interrogate the larger cultural, historical and political effects of the texts they encounter daily” (137). A McCormick research paper asks students to interrogate contradictions as the focus of their writing. She gives an example of a course called “Reading Texts,” taught a Carnegie Mellon in the late 80s/early 90s, in which students learn to read texts for their larger cultural assumptions. Early assignments in this class include a response paper that is followed up with an analysis of that response, requiring students to draw conclusions about their “personal retoires” and to see themselves as complex subjects drawn from specific ideologies and cultural viewpoints.

The research paper assignment can be found on pg 147 of the text. It requires students to perform an active critique of the existing social order. Students choose an American institution, current issue, or cultural myth to interrogate. They are required to read six diverse essays on the topic and analyse each viewpoint for its own assumptions and ideologies. Finally, students should come to their own conclusion about the topic AND analyse how those views are formed (what ideologies are at play in the student’s own reading?). This final act of meta-awareness is particularly difficult for students to perform. McCormick writes that successful papers, at the Freshman level, were generally able to analyse source texts for their cultural influences and biases but probably not their own assumptions. Still, the assignment moves students away from the traditional, objective way of writing a research paper, and students “made significant steps in recognizing the ideological embeddedness of what they had previously thought” about writing (149).