CASTL Application Questions #4 & 5

4) How do you plan to make your work available to others in ways that facilitate scholarly critique and review, and that contribute to thought and practice beyond the local?

We see several avenues for publishing and presenting the results of our research. We will submit a conference presentation proposal this spring, prior to the CASTL workshop, so we might begin to present the results next spring (2009) at the major conference in our field: the Conference on College Composition and Communication. While developing the presentation, we will draft with the journal College Composition and Communication (CCC), the pedagogically oriented major journal in our field, in mind. CCC is a strong venue for this sort of study because its focus is on teaching writing and using writing to teach and learn. Reflection has periodically been a topic of interest to this audience but much of the educational theory on the topic does not cross into our disciplinary discussions. Further, longitudinal studies of pedagogical approaches are much needed--much of the pedagogical research in our field is case study or single-classroom, single-teacher research. Should our findings prove to have broad and significant implications interdisciplinarily, we may move the work forward to a book length project and pursue a contract with a publisher such as Jossey-Bass.


5) What aspects of the design and character of this work are you not yet fully prepared to describe? What questions do you have and what do you still need to know?

While we have IRB approval for our study, have collected multiple semesters worth of data, and have honed the question and general approach we'd like to take to interpret the data, we still need to work on the details of our data analysis process, including starting to build the categories and develop a pedagogical theory for moving students from reflection to critical reflection.