By theorizing, students produce new knowledge and contribute meaningfully to intellectual conversations. While research is often a first step, when students theorize, they are doing more than interpreting, summarizing, or applying others’ ideas. They are creating something that could be interpreted or applied by someone else. Of course, creating new knowledge doesn’t always mean providing answers; more often, it means crafting new questions and lines of inquiry, developing new terms, or crafting a critical vocabulary.
Theorizing Learning Objectives
- Determine how you will contribute to, change, or provide new ways of seeing a conversation, question, topic, or issue
- Demonstrate ways media affects aims;
- Change the direction of a conversation;
- Develop a new line of inquiry;
- Propose a new question and demonstrate its significance;
- Create a new term or change the terms of a debate;
- Extend, adapt, revise entirely someone else's argument;
- Devise a new method for analysis
Information Literacy Threshold Concepts
- Research as inquiry
- Information creation as a process
- Authority is constructed and contextual
Habits of Mind
- Creativity
- Persistence
- Responsibility
- Metacognition
Examples
| Assignment | Writing goals | Theorizing work |
| Blog | Critically question and examine accepted ways of thinking | Work through a problem and posing questions over time through a series of posts |
| Poster | Question the difference between information and theories | Present a visual heuristic for conceptualizing a problem |
| Conference-style presentation | Craft and follow new lines of inquiry | Present findings and implications of a brief study the student conducted |
| Article | Create connections between texts to add to/diverge from them - question differences between information and theories | Make a persuasive, data-driven argument |
Resources
Scholarly Bibliography
Warnick, Chris. “Texts to Be Worked on and Worked with: Encouraging Students to See Their Writing as Theoretical.” Teaching with Student Texts: Essays Toward an Informed Practice, edited by Joseph Harris et al., Utah State University Press, 2010, pp. 163-70.