We’ve probably all overheard students discussing the required research methods course for their majors. Personally I’ve heard some students refer to these courses as “boring,” “scary hard,” “free labor for the professor’s research,” and “completely unhelpful for the job market.”

So when it was my turn to teach what is essentially the writing research methods course for the Professional Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) program in which I teach, I had concerns about how students would perceive the class, how I could engage them in the concept of “Writing as Inquiry” (the course title), and how I could draw on my own teaching strengths to enhance learning and engagement.

Because I have had success integrating client-based projects with authentic goals, audiences and interactions into my other courses, I decided to work these strategies into my Writing as Inquiry course. My pedagogy fits nicely into what Randy Bass and a group at Georgetown University call social pedagogies, in which community participation is required for learning and through which students learn “adaptive expertise,” or the ability to adapt content knowledge successfully based on different personal, situational, and audience requirements.