The Drudgery and the Discovery: Students as Research Partners

Abstract

to help me with the mechanics of the project as well as with the collection and analysis of data. In the preface to Reclaiming the Classroom, Dixie Goswami writes that working with teachers to answer real questions provides students with intrinsic motivation for talking, reading, and writing, and has the potential for helping them achieve mature language skills (Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/ Cook, 1987). In addition to conducting research with a whole class, I worked intensely with a pair of students as research partners. Quickly I found that collaborating with two student research assistants was as interesting to me and as educational as the information we were digging up. Students become active learners when they are engaged in a discovery process. They also observe and save data a teacher may miss. In two writing classes I explained to all of my students that we were involved in an inquiry and that I would be conducting research as they were. The focus of the research, for them, was a comparison of three communities who shared writing on an electronic network: Sewickley Academy, their private school outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Wilsall High School, a school of only forty-nine students in a ranching town in Montana; and Little Wound High School, run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Pine Ridge Reservation in Kyle, South