I use this lesson across three, 50-minute class periods to introduce students to the idea of public writing and launch their public writing research projects. The lesson showcases the ways my research on picture books, arts-based pedagogies, and writing inform my teaching.

Part 1: Public Writing Frayer 

1. Revisit the rhetorical triangle. Instructional point: Writers write for audiences for different purposes. Exigences are the reasons people write; these are our motivations. 

2. Instructional point: Public writing comes from the idea that writing can both name a public need and respond to it.

3. Draw the Frayer model on the board with "public writing" in the center. 

• Name several examples of public writing and note that it's writing we see "in the wild" or in our every day lives. 

• Discuss the purposes of public writing.

• Note the difference between audiences: public versus publics. 

Part 2: Last Stop on Market Street

1. Read the picture book Last Stop on Market Street with students. Instruct students to record public issues they see in the text during reading. 

2. Make a list of the issues students identify during the reading. Discuss ways writing might be used to respond to those issues. 

3. Think-Pair-Write-Share: Think about what you see in your community. What's going on in our campus, our town, our state, our country, our world? What issues would you like to investigate? What conversations do you want to be part of? What are you interested in learning more about?

Part 3: Research Walk

1. Dismiss students early to walk through the campus and take pictures of issues they see on campus. Note: I ask students to avoid taking pictures of people without consent. 

2. Instruct students to upload images to a collective research archive in a shared Google drive or LMS platform.

Part 1: Discussion 

1. Instructional point: The research process can make an issue feel very large. Climate change, for example, is a huge issue. The goal of this project is to make research feel manageable. We're looking for small bits to tackle in our writing that relate to bigger issues. 

2. Class discussion: What issues did you find on your walk through campus? Share a few images from students and discuss them. 

Part 2: Collage Workshop

Use collected materials (books, magazines, newspapers, etc.) to create a collage that represents your research topic. 

Note: I spend close to an hour across two class periods allowing students time to look through the materials and create their collages. The project gives students a chance to slow down and find words and/or images that resonate with their interests. 

Note: I collect materials from my local library to use for this project. Unused materials are recycled to avoid waste. 

Part 1: Locating A Research Focus

1. Allow students additional time to complete their collages. I usually give students 15 to 20 mintues.

2. Handout viewfinders. Instruct students to use the viewfinder to hone in on a more specific idea, question, or problem to explore. 

Part 2: Reflective Writing

Instruct students to contemplate their artwork and reflect on the following questions:

• What meanings do you find in the collage as a whole? 

• What did you focalize in your viewfinder? What meanings did you find in your viewfinder?

• What insights have you gained from the creative process? 

• How have your ideas or perspectives changed? 

Part 3: Developing A Research Question

1. Instructional point: You've created a visual representation of your research interest and used the viewfinder to find more specific areas to investigate. You may have discovered something about your topic that you're interested in learning more about. 

2. Make a list of student research topics on the board.

3. Instructional point: A research question is a clear, specific, focused question about a topic that can be answered through research. Effective questions cannot be answered with a yes/no; have an underlying problem; are socially significant; are answerable with evidence; and have appropriate scope (not too big, not too small). 

4. Choose a topic from the board to discuss. Write a research question and revise it together.

5. Identify potential search terms for the research question. 

In the next lesson, students spend time writing preliminary research questions from their collages and identify potential search terms in the first part of class. The last half of the class is devoted to library research searches.