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