This essay concerns the ways in which qualitative social science research characters are constructed, and in turn read, by others. The persuasiveness of narratives is based as much on the reader’s response to the character—similar to the ways in which readers respond to literary characters—in emotional ways as it is on the rational presentation of evidence. This essay acknowledges the author’s subjectivity in relation to this topic; reviews the notions of narrative perspective, fidelity, emplotment, and verisimilitude; explores the role of narrative in social science research reports; presents background on how readers respond to literary characters; and applies these understandings to make the case that reading the presentation of social science research characters shares much with the ways in which readers respond to the actions of literary characters. The essay concludes with an argument that the construction of social science research reports includes the selective construction of participants as actors in a drama that in turn has an emotional impact on readers and with a description of the implications of this phenomenon for writers and readers of qualitative social science research reports.

This eight-year longitudinal case study follows one high school English teacher from her practicum and student teaching through three subsequent job sites, with one year off due to prohibitive job stress. To study the developmental path of Caitlin, the teacher, we rely on the metaphor of the twisting path, which comes from Vygotsky’s attention to socially mediated concept development. This development is reliant on engagement with obstacles that promote growth and conceptual synthesis, with some obstacles becoming prohibitive and discouraging and with the path proceeding in a serpentine rather than straightforward way. Our principal data source is a series of biannual interviews conducted either in person or via video-conferencing platforms. We trace Caitlin’s developmental path by attending to her encounters with competing perspectives, policies, and practices informing the English curriculum, especially as they were enforced by different stakeholders. These obstacles were at times internal to her own thinking (e.g., the tension between relational, student-centered instruction and the belief that students need guidance to reach their potential), at times local in terms of English department and schoolwide tensions (especially, contentious battles over canonical versus relational and contemporary teaching), and at times from distant sources in the form of community pressures and externally created policies affecting instruction (in particular, imposed standardized teaching and assessment in conflict with instruction predicated on relationships and teacher judgment). These conflicts were virtually nonexistent in the fourth school she taught in, an alternative school where test scores were far less important than establishing supportive relationships with students through which they experienced care and cultivation. This eight-year longitudinal case study contributes to research that investigates how school contexts affect teachers’ persistence and attrition, with attention to which sorts of environments provided obstacles that benefitted Caitlin’s development, and which were prohibitive.

Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices. EightyUS baccalaureate institutions appended questions to the NSSE instrument based on these 27practices, yielding responses from 29,634 first-year students and 41,802 seniors. Confirmatoryfactor analysis identified three constructs: Interactive Writing Processes, Meaning-Making WritingTasks, and Clear Writing Expectations. Regression analyses indicated that the constructs werepositively associated with two sets of established constructs in the regular NSSE instrument “DeepApproaches to Learning (Higher-Order Learning, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Learning)and Perceived Gains in Learning and Development as defined by the institution’s contributionsto growth in Practical Competence, Personal and Social Development, and General EducationLearning” with effect sizes that were consistently greater than those for the number of pageswritten. These were net results after controlling for institutional and student characteristics, aswell as other factors that might contribute to enhanced learning. The study adds three empiricallyestablished constructs to research on writing and learning. It extends the positive impact of writing beyond learning course material to include Personal and Social Development. Although correlational, it can provide guidance to instructors, institutions, accreditors, and other stakeholders because of the nature of the questions associated with the effective writing constructs.

This article reports a study of one high school senior’s process of academic bullshitting as she wrote an analytic essay interpreting Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. The construct of bullshit has received little scholarly attention; although it is known as a common phenomenon in academic speech and writing, it has rarely been the subject of empirical research. This study is comprised of a protocol analysis of one writer as she attempted to produce an academic essay on a topic in which her understanding of the play’s content was insufficient for the task of producing the essay. The coding system identified subcodes within the major categories of content, genre, and process that enabled the researchers to infer what is involved in academic bullshitting. The analysis found that, in the absence of sufficient content knowledge, a writer familiar in discourse conventions may employ knowledge of the genre of academic writing and processes for producing generic features to create the impression that her content knowledge is adequate. The study concludes with a discussion of the phenomenon of academic bullshitting and its implications for teaching and learning academic writing.

In this article, the author argues that Method sections in social science research reports, particularly those that employ qualitative methods, often lack sufficient detail to make any results that follow from the analytic method trustworthy. The author provides a brief review of the evolution of the Method section from the 1960s to the present, makes a case for a more robust reporting of research method, and then outlines one way to achieve the end of providing a detailed, specific account of research methods that enable readers to understand unambiguously the means by which data are rendered into results. This consideration includes attention to the reporting of data collection, data reduction, data analysis, and the context of the investigation to make it clear why an illustrative presentation of data supports the claim that it offers.

This research analyzed the composing processes of one high school student as she designed the interiors of homes for a course in interior design. Data included field notes, an interview with the teacher, artifacts from the class, and the focal student’s concurrent and retrospective protocols in relation to her design of home interiors. The analysis revealed that the object of activity in this setting included aspects of the motive (including the teacher’s constructed environment and attendant expectations, the teacher’s governing logic and common sense with respect to interior design, and the broader field of interior design as interpreted and implemented in the class) and both fixed and emergent goals. The student’s object-related problem-solving involved a hierarchy of problem-solving decisions and employed a variety of tools in solving these problems, particularly those derived from culture, reliant on knowledge from a discipline or field, and following from images such as narratives.

This research analyzed the composing processes of two high school students designing horse ranch plans for a course in equine management and production. The investigation focused on understanding the problems driving the design process, the tools through which the students inscribed and encoded meaning in their compositions, and the integration, representation, and mediation of their emerging identities through the design process. The analysis revealed that the students solved problems suggested by the particular culture surrounding the production of a specific breed of horse and constructed unique problems based on their knowledge of horses and ranch facilities. The tools through which they constructed these texts suggested both the cultural dimensions and narrative inscriptions of their designs. The culturally mediated narratives in particular contributed to students’ construction of identities, especially with respect to their orientation as members of the managerial (Darin) and working (Riley) classes.

Last spring our profession lost one of its leading voices—Stephen P. Witte, Knight Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Kent State University. Here, a few of his close friends and colleagues remember Steve and his many contributions to our field.

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Researchers are freer now than ever before to pursue a wide variety of research questions approached from diverse theoretical perspectives through the use of many different research tools. The cost of this freedom is the necessity to outline theoretical frameworks for study and to explain how that theory informs the tools of research. The studies in this issue of RTE serve as models of the methodological clarity and rigor that are now required in scholarly research.

Dewey and other theorists have proposed that conflict or dissonance is a necessary precursor to investigation. The articles in this issue focus on the problematic, and illustrate the ways in which productive tensions can help move the field forward.

Argues that what matters in being a good student is not an innate set of skills and dispositions but an understanding of what, where, when, and how to perform through particular situations. Teachers set the ground rules for what kinds of performances are acceptable in the classroom, and a classroom is a contact zone in which different sets of values, skills, and expectations coexist. The articles in this issue demonstrate how teachers and students manage to negotiate this contact.

The editors note how the variant meanings of context shape research, and return to the etymology of the word to define context as a relationship among people and their settings, which typically include multiple sets of overlapping goals, values, discourses, tools, and other artifacts of social life. The articles appearing in this issue suggest the multiple ways in which attention to context can inform literacy research.

The editors discuss the concept voice and its implied author as it is defined in both Romantic and cultural perspectives. Differences in conceptions of teaching reading follow from these two traditions. According to he Romantic tradition, the reader should have a personal response to text, free from culture or any outside influence. By the cultural perspective, readers interpret texts through frameworks that are developed through engagement in cultural practice.

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The editors expound on the term telos, the concept of an optimal developmental outcome that provides the motive for the ways in which people are socialized within a culture. The notion of a telos for schooling is important because it provides the ideal toward which all are expected to gravitate. Conceptions of how students should develop suggest ways of being a teacher and paths for improving practice, which in turn suggest ways of being a teacher educator.

Researchers have begun to focus on the role of culture in teaching and learning, drawing on other disciplines to reconsider literacy activities as socially purposeful and culturally grounded. The interest raises two questions: what aspects of culture are more important than others? And what impact does the researcher’s perspective on culture have on the focus and contact of the study? The articles in this issue suggest a range of answers that scholars or offering to these questions.

In search of criteria that characterize the research most likely to have an impact in the field of literacy research, the editors include reduction and reciprocity. Writers and readers build a reciprocal relationship - one in which the writer and author are in tune with one another - when the writer considers the processes in which the reader is likely to engage to comprehend the text. Reduction is one such process. Arguments that include images, metaphors, or phrasings that help readers reduce the text become the most memorable and the most influential in the field.

Traditionally, university faculty have been evaluated and promoted according to their ability to produce sole-authored publications. The age of copyright also pushed to discourage acknowledgement of contributions made by others. However, it has long been acknowledged that new scholarship is based on citation, and social researchers contend that all thought is socially meditated and therefore collaborative. The issue becomes more complicated when research is conducted in conjunction with classroom teachers, whose classroom practices and insights are imperative to the observer’s analysis, and should, therefore, be co-authors.

The different emphases that theorists and teachers place on the product and process of writing in their accounts of how writers construct meaning have been influenced by different traditions of Western thought that have historically been at odds: Whereas the designative tradition focuses on the ways in which artifacts of speech mediate people's thinking, the expressive tradition focuses on the transformation of inner speech to public speech, thus emphasizing the ways in which the activities of speaking and writing promote changes in consciousness. In this article, through the analysis of the writing of a high school senior, it is argued that these two positions are not mutually exclusive, but rather are complementary aspects of a semiotic view on writing. The primary data set is a “situated protocol”—that is, a think-aloud protocol, including both concurrent and retrospective accounts of writing process, conducted over a 4-month period. Through the protocol analysis and analysis of related data, I examine the ways in which this student's writing experiences reveal the interrelated roles of both designative and expressive functions of writing. The analysis also reveals that the writer found the situated protocol itself to be an enduring means of development and reflection and a tool for meditation.

That writing has unique powers for promoting learning has become a given among many composition teachers and researchers. Peircean semiotics suggest that writing is one of many forms of composing available for mediating thought and activity, and that the value of any form of mediation depends on the context in which it takes place. The present study used stimulated recall to elicit a retrospective account from an alternative school student following his production of an artistic text representing his view of the relationship between the two central characters in a short story. The student's account indicates that in composing his text he (a) initiated his interpretation by empathizing with one of the characters, (b) produced a graphic representation and transformation of the relationship between the two central characters, (c) situated his text in an intertext, and (d) produced a text that both shaped and was shaped by his thinking. Furthermore, the “text” he produced through the stimulated recall interview likely involved a reconsideration as well as re-representation of the graphic text he had drawn, thus enmeshing the investigative method itself with the student's growing realization of the meaning of his work. His account suggests that nonlinguistic texts—when part of an environment that broadens the range of communication genres available to students—can help students construct meanings that are appropriate to school activities and learning.

This study used on-line protocol analysis to contrast the effects on the writing process of knowledge taught in three instructional treatments: Models (declarative knowledge of form), General Procedures (declarative knowledge of form plus general procedural knowledge related to content plus procedural knowledge related to form), and Task-Specific Procedures (declarative knowledge of form plus task-specific procedural knowledge related to content plus procedural knowledge related to form). Pretest and posttest protocols from six students in each treatment measured treatment effects on the processes of students writing essays involving extended definition. Students in the Models treatment made weak improvements in relating the elements of definition and did not think critically about the concepts being defined. Students in the General Procedures treatment made gains in linking ideas according to particular task constraints and improved their critical thinking skills. Students in the Task-Specific Procedures integrated their ideas purposefully, thought critically about the concepts being defined, and appeared to establish a conversational voice to anticipate composing needs.

Rhetoricians and researchers have vigorously debated the reliability and validity of protocol analysis findings. Social science scholars have contended the value of verbal data since their original use in the 1920s. This article reviews the history of verbal data in a variety of fields, places protocol analysis in its historical context, and examines more recent claims and criticisms regarding protocol analysis, concluding that protocol analysis, when conducted according to certain principles, can be an important addition to the repertoire of tools for researching the composing process.

Donald Graves has achieved wide recognition for propounding a method for teaching elementary students how to write that stresses unstructured expression of personal experiences. He uses his case study of sixteen New Hampshire children as a research base providing proof of the efficacy of this method. However, his observations from this study qualify as reportage more than research. The work of the Graves team in New Hampshire represents a demonstration of teaching ideas that work well under favorable circumstances. Because he never considers negative evidence for the hypotheses he is testing, his work does not constitute research.

Many researchers in composition instruction assume that free and journal writing exclusively and necessarily produce “meaningful” writing. This is not substantiated in their limited case study research, or in the research of anyone else. We need to establish a precise definition of “meaningful” writing, determine its place in the curriculum, and determine better means of designing instruction that produces writing that is both meaningful and of high quality. The meta-analysis of Hillocks (1984) indicates that structured composition assignments produce better writing than nondirectional writing experiences. This article explores the reasons for this, and establishes hypotheses based on these reasons for developing a theory of composition instruction. The hypotheses support a need for structured instruction, rather than student-generated direction.