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