Over the years of teaching, the author has been more and more interested in making course content and goals relevant to the real, lived experiences of students. Based on this interest and spurred by an article on community-based research in "Teaching English in the Two-Year College" (TETYC) in September of 2005 as well as a move in composition to encourage student-scholarship, the author has put into practice a new, old kind of research paper, Ken Macrorie's "I-Search." In his books dating from the mid-1980s, Macrorie advocates a kind of research for students that begins from their perspective and encourages them to conduct "real research": that is, finding out the answer to a question that puzzles them. The intersection of the call for civic engagement and the call for student scholars at the center of writing pedagogy, along with the daunting challenge of introducing beginning students to the demands and rewards of academic writing, is an ideal location for a revival of Macrorie's "I-Search". In this article, the author talks about his own version of the I-Search paper that is a radical departure from the norm: Ken Macrorie's "I-Search" paper.