Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Follow the breadcrumbs

At a teaching workshop this morning, a colleague inspired an idea for an assignment in an upper-level literature class: Follow the Breadcrumbs. Make students read an academic journal article and choose a source cited in that article; read the cited source and choose another source it cites; follow the breadcrumbs back through five or six sources and then write some kind of short paper analyzing the scholarly conversation. Would this work? Would students simply select the shortest/easiest sources or would they engage deeply with challenging ideas? I'm accepting suggestions.

2 comments:

Laura said...

In my experience, the shortest articles don't tend to be cited as often. So by assigning at least 4 breadcrumbs you negate the possibility of slacking.

Nicole said...

I had to do a similar assignment in graduate school; it really drove home the concept of a "scholarly conversation."