Learning Objectives

In this course, you will certainly learn some things about climate change. However, our main emphasis will be on skills, and by the end of the course you will be able to

 

 

• distinguish between scholarly and non-scholarly writing, accounting for each in terms of its characteristic forms and social situations
• identify differences in the methods, citation practices, and characteristic vocabularies of different academic disciplines
• locate and evaluate appropriate research materials in the UBC library system
• write summaries, proposals, research papers, and essay exams that make appropriate use of the characteristic styles and citation practices of scholarly writing

 

 

 

 

When students come to the library with a research statement, the original context of use is erased. For example, a student approaching the library with the aim of researching trees is going to find a variety of orientations to that knowledge: they will retrieve resources that see trees through the lens of forest management, or species diversity, or environmental biosphere positions. And even within these different perspectives, the results will include what Bazerman (1994) refers to as systems of genres--for instance, activist or commercial genres, judicial genres dealing with aboriginal law, or eco-criticism-- encompassing a variety of popular, legal, or scholarly genres. Differences in an information situation are reflected in the kind of document that is considered helpful. The course of study might be about the biosphere or gymnosperms, and a student looking for information might find information from Weyerhouser dealing with the lifecycles of the Douglas fir, or about insects. Students must access sources that are written in a certain genre, and they are also required to construct a particular genre out of these different resources, yet these retrieved genres reflect a different situation. 

 

 

gives students practice in the kinds of writing that commonly figure in university research.  In this section of the course, we will concentrate on research into climate change from the perspectives of ecology, sociology, and policy studies. Our goals will be threefold.  First, we will examine the ways in which the ‘shape’ or style of academic writing is determined by the university’s status as a research institution—the kinds of questions researchers pose, the methods they use, the ways they cite one another, and the nature of academic originality.  Second, through close attention to research studies published in scholarly journals, we will explore how different research situations give rise to different disciplinary writing practices.  Third, we will practice some of the research skills and written forms that figure prominently in the undergraduate curriculum. The former involve library searches and the evaluation of sources, while the latter include research proposals, critical summaries of published research, research papers, and essay exams.