"Dear Librarian, I need 3 quotes for my research paper."

I know that this Chronicle article on teaching citation styles ("Citation Obsession? Get Over It!") has been generating some buzz and making the rounds on Twitter, but I also came across a recent blog post in the same vein: “'I need three peer reviewed articles' or the Freshman research paper" by librarian Meredith Farkas.

Both are worth reading and considering. Farkas makes a good point: why teach students that good research only comes from scholarly conversations which they must inevitably only approach as outsiders? Do requirements for sources from peer-reviewed publications for FYC research papers result in students actually learning how to work with these texts?

cc nnc07

If informal conversations with the librarians at my university are any indication, it doesn't—instead, it encourages students to write the paper and then search for sources so that they can plant the requisite "three quotes" somewhere into their paper after the fact.

This isn't to say that I'm against teaching students to encounter scholarly work. I'm actually a huge fan of the introduction to writing studies model for FYC, and am currently teaching my intermediate composition students from Wardle and Downs' Writing About Writing composition reader. But here's the difference: in my classroom, I'm actively working to initiate my students into the discourse community of writing studies. We work with the dissonance they experience, as outsiders to these disciplinary conversations, and work with the analytical moves of recognizing genres, conventions, and social contexts that will show them how to negotiate other discourses in other writing situations they encounter in the future.

Farkas points to 8 separate cognitive moves a student needs to master in order to work with these sources successfully in a research paper—everything from successful searching to understanding and then synthesizing the actual article. Asking a student to suddenly do all of this work at once, on their own, in an unfamiliar discourse context, and without any scaffolding work, is not a recipe for success.