I need to get something off my chest. I've been thinking a lot about the format of dissertations. I recently read five dissertations for a class assignment and was beyond bored with the experience. The writing is just so formulaic and seems to defy everything I was taught about effective, engaging writing.
Last year I read a dissertation for the first time, and I just shook my head. The structure seems contrived, simplistic, and not far from what Tom Romano refers to the "five paragraph you-know-what." To me, the dissertation looks like a five paragraph "you-know-what" on steroids.
Nystand, (1993) in "Where Did Composition Studies Come From: An Intellectural History," describes the "five-paragraph theme" (p. 275) as an innovation of the formalist period tied to the tenets of New Criticism. I can't tell you how many education professors, in both my undergraduate and graduate education, have criticized the five-paragraph essay as a contrived school genre which is ineffective because it is inauthentic to the real work of writers. Let face it, how many of us have written a five paragraph essay outside of school in our adult lives.
In Ohio, we coach students to write five paragraph essays in high school so they can pass the OGT and get their diplomas. Is what we do to graduate students, advising them to write five chapter dissertations, really that much different? Isn't the dissertation format also a contrived school genre? How many published books about educational research are exactly five chapters?
I'm frustrated that compositionists recognize the limitation of the five-paragraph essay for college freshmen, but at the doctoral level, the highest level of study, we are less innovative and forward-thinking.
I've been talking to students and professors about this. Some professors have encouraged me to NOT write a five chapter dissertation while warning me I might not get my dissertation approved if I divert too far off the beaten path. One professor argued that the dissertation format in many way parallels the structure of intro, lit. review, question/methods, findings, and analysis that we see in journal articles and is hence an appropriate way to require graduate students to write.
The statistics of graduate students being ABD is depressing. Is it possible that the dissertation genre is part of the problem? We recognize that many middle and high school writers struggle with five paragraph essays but shine when they write poetry and other creative genres. Do some PhD students give up because they find themselves writing in an academic voice which isn't their own? In an attempt to provide a model of perfection for struggling writers to emulate, has graduate education done a disservice to their students?
It wouldn't be fair to criticize without suggesting an alternative, so let me suggest an alternative assessment. If the dissertation prepares PhD students for academic research and writing, could a student prove this competency by conducting X research studies and writing them as authentic journal articles which are submitted to peer reviewed journals? Wouldn't that also build a student's CV, impact the larger research community, and validate the student's scholarship by unbiased reviewers?
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Wow! I applaud your deep thinking here. You are so on target with this notion of dissertations being contrived and formulaic. I would think, though, that having a guided formula like that would make writing it easier, although possibly more boring. I wonder why there can't be some choice in the format like 21st century skills proponents suggest for students. Those who would prefer the standard format could follow that and those who prefer something different could choose to do so without fear of not being accepted just because they wanted to write outside the box.
ReplyDeleteI love this sentence -> "Last year I read a dissertation for the first time, and I just shook my head. The structure seems contrived, simplistic, and not far from what Tom Romano refers to the "five paragraph you-know-what." To me, the dissertation looks like a five paragraph "you-know-what" on steroids". I couldn't agree with you more, Katie!! You raise a very important point about the social and cultural meaning attached to a written document like the dissertation. The dissertation can feel like the ultimate right of passage...a test to see if one can master a 5 paragraph essay on steroids.
ReplyDeleteI too have read a number of dissertations and have wanted to pluck my eyes out not because of their content but because of their guided formula. I'm sure that this approach holds merit for some research projects, but there are certainly other possibilities. This reminds me of a comment Rachel made on my blog post for this week. She raised the question if we’re practicing what we preach when it comes to multimodality. If we truly want to honor writing as a multimodal process, then we need to be open to multiple ways of presenting it...and that includes dissertations!
Your comments and thoughts are interesting, and I've wrestled with many of the same ideas myself. Yet, you put them into the perfect language and words!
ReplyDeleteLast semester in Forms of Inquiry, Dr. Gershon invited to dance instructors from KSU to perform for our class and talk about what research meant for their professional field. It was a fascinating conversation, and it was helpful to reflect on alternative ways to be a scholar artist (or artist scholar...)
Sometimes I get so frustrated when the theories I learn in grad classes don't match my 'real world' K-12 everyday job, BUT then I look at some of the grad class work (or overall program work such as the dissertation) and it doesn't always follow the line of theory either....
It seems like every educational level is trying to translate research theory into some sort of practice that makes sense....
I enjoyed reading your thoughts on the dissertation process and the freedom to explore additional avenues in terms of formalized writing. I would be interested in learning of alternative formats that you may be considering, that may disseminate your research in a more personal way.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your post, I immediately thought about Sameshima's Seeing Red: A Pedagogy of Parralax that several of us read last semester in Dr. Henderson's Curriculum Theory and Research course. Sameshima's work was her dissertation, if I am understanding correctly. However, the epistolary format, was far different than a traditional dissertation. I recall many of us discussing in our roundtables how complex a read her work was, and how it was difficult to view as a dissertation based on its structure.
Are you aware of any other formats that have been used to write a dissertation, that may be a balance between Seeing Red and a traditional format?
In the past few years, I've started to see small cracks forming in the rigid formats of dissertations. Perhaps it will be your generation of academics who will finally "tear the wall down!"
ReplyDeleteRochelle, I would LOVE to write a multigenre dissertation. I'm collecting alternative dissertation formats when I come across them, like Seeing Red. I figure I'll need it as part of my argument to the graduate school that there is some precedent for alternative dissertation genres.
ReplyDeleteI know of one multigenre dissertation written about the National Writing Project by Jennifer Bird at Miami University in 2005. It's available electronically if you want to read it.
Thank you so much for sharing this post, I appreciate your work
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