Intro & Outcomes: Researching Readers & Writers

Our goal is to help our students see themselves as researching readers and writers. Reading, writing, and researching as a singular process, a process that is inquiry-rich, highly recursive, very rewarding and very meaningful.  Without this integrated sense of the process, students artificially separate the three activities and frequently avoid whichever activity they see as most timely and/or difficult.  Before we can let our students experience some manageable small successes with this integrated process, we will explore our own understanding of being a researching reader and writer. 

• What does it mean to read and engage someone else's text with the eyes of a fellow writer? 
• What does it mean to plan, compose, and write a text with the expectations of the reader in mind?
• What does it mean to "do research" in relation to a fellow writer's text or when writing a text for another reader?

As academics, we intuitively integrate reading/writing/research in many ways.  But we rarely slow down enough to make more strategic and explicit use of these moves. This explicitness forms the very foundation of our Fearless Learning program: to identify and use a common language for specific integrated read/write/research strategies amongst ourselves and for our students.