From Inquiry to Academic Writing A Practical Guide, 3rd edition

326 CHAPTER 11 | OTHER METHOdS Of InquIRy: InTERvIEwS And fOCuS GROuPS

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experience. They can use image, music, and text to confront how things

in their lives look and feel, to examine the decisions they have made,

and to consider the decisions they might make in confronting hardship,

discrimination, and loss. However, most research fails to provide a

satisfactory or compelling rationale for why new literacies should be used

in the classroom (Alverman, Marshall, McLean, Huddleston, Joaquin,

2012; Binder & Kotsopoulos, 2011; Hull and Katz, 2006; Ranker, 2007) or

how the seemingly unique gains could be positively integrated into the

standard curriculum. The lack of assessment focusing on how academic

and new literacies affect one another reveals a flaw in the conclusions

drawn from studies that neglect the realities of teaching in K-12 schools.

Increased emphasis on standards, testing, and accountability seem to

preclude the kind of focus that new literacies seem to require. Thus, if

educators are to allow for “new literate spaces,” they need to know how

to do so within the standard curriculum.

Specifically, few researchers explore students’ sense of their

literate identity in academic and creative writing or how context

matters in how students feel about themselves and their writing.

While most researchers (Binder & Kostopoulos, 2011; Hughes, 2009;

Hull & Katz, 2006; Vasudevan et al., 2010) refer to what they call “the

mono-literacy landscape” of schools, the limits of literate experience

to print, none really compare the opportunities that academic writing

gives students versus, say, creative writing before, during, and after

the study. That is, focusing only on the value of digital storytelling,

for example, or creative writing is not sufficient to effect reform in

school. Are there really significant differences between different kinds

of writing? What are these differences? Such a gap in research seems

to necessitate an inquiry into a student’s emergent sense of authorship

in different forms of composing, even academic writing in and out of

school. Therefore, I propose a study that will provide an analysis of

both academic and creative writing in an after-school program that

helps children develop as learners through tutoring and enrichment.

One implication of my research would be to show why educators might

expand the types of literate experiences that students have in school.

In order to investigate the possible differences between

multimodal, creative, and standardized academic writing, this proposed

study aims to explore (a) the unique opportunities afforded by the

3

4

Recognizing

this gap, she

explores what

she sees is a

common problem

in a number of

studies.

In turn, this

gap serves as

a rationale for

conducting her

own study. She

also points to

the possible

implications for

doing the study

she proposes.

Having defined

the problem,

she describes

the aims of her

study.

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