In January, I made some offhand comments on the recent movement that has hailed the end to the formal research paper for college students. After some banter with Mick Beltz, the editor of Teaching Thursday, we thought that it would be an ideal conversation to have in that space.
To that end, I put together some very brief thoughts:
Since the 19th century, the term paper has stood as a central component of the professional training of historians. Inseparable from the seminar system developed by the first professional historians in Germany, the term paper represented the basic method to train aspiring scholars and closely aligned with the standard delivery methods for new historical knowledge. Grounded in primary sources and situated in relation to secondary literature, the term paper encapsulated the professional standard of the discipline and formed a first step in training students to produce theses, dissertation, scholarly articles, and eventually monographs. As higher education democratized and instruction in history shifted away from explicitly professional goals, historians came to argue that term papers introduced students to a number of transferable skills ranging from clear writing and organization to research skills, precise argumentation, and respect for the work of others.
The digital revolution and the changing landscape of higher education has continued to challenge the value of traditional terms papers with their roots in professional, vocational training of historians. In my classes, I am shifting to shorter (<1500 word), more structured and focused assignments that have less room for creativity, but also owe less to traditional models for professional training. I suspect that these shorter more focused assignments have more obvious applications in a wide range of non-academic settings (such as web writing, memo and report writing, and other professional areas of work).
I am also starting to include more “public” types of writing into my class with students having to prepare discussion posts – for example – that can be read by their fellow students. This not only adds a level of peer pressure to the assignment, but also creates an immediate and easily recognizable audience for their work. One of the most consistent critiques of the traditional term paper is that the audience for this kind of work is ambiguous. Having students write discussion posts for their fellow students clearly defines an audience. I hope to experiment more with this kind of writing in a survey history course that asks students to work as teams to produce a textbook for their peers.
This kind of assignment represents my growing interest in more collective writing assignments that would leverage resources like the Scale-up classroom (where students work in teams linked digitally) or using Wiki type interfaces that allow students to produce synthetic works but still get recognized for their contributions to the final product. These kinds of corporate, public, and focused writing assignments mark a serious departure from the traditional practices of term paper writing and the goals of those assignment.
In short, we are training students at the intersection of changing professional needs and a particularly dynamic (and unsettled) period in the history of writing. New technologies are changing how our students communicate with one another as well as the nature of knowledge production. While there is no doubt that term papers can provide students with a robust skill set for the collection, organization, and analysis of information (a key skill in the so-called “information age”), I am no longer convinced that this is best or the only way to train these students in these skills.
Check out other peoples’ perspectives on this issue over at Teaching Thursday in the coming weeks.
