Category: In My Classroom

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it in these terms, before, but this morning just before a lightning-speed class I suddenly realized that if you have a good article in hand, you can look in four “directions” for more articles like it. (I use “article” because that’s what I was working with this morning, but it works for anything with citations, I guess.)

You can move backward by mining it’s bibliography. You can move forward by using Web of Knowledge to do a cited reference search. And you can move side to side (sort of) by reading it with an eye both for content and for vocabulary that you can use when constructing future searches.

8 Comments

I’ve recently (within the last year and a half) taken to the idea of handouts. Real, printed, paper handouts. I almost never list specific resources on those handouts, though, since I save that kind of thing for the online guide that goes with each class (unless I have a good reason to think the class will want a paper cheat-sheet). That kind of handout works well with some teachers and some students, but I’ve never been able to pull it off to my satisfaction. Instead I create what I’ve affectionately termed “subversive handouts.”

Before you get too worried, I should say that the name came from my very first incarnation of this thing and is no longer an accurate description of the genre. I’d been asked one too many times to do an “everything the class will need to know about research in 10-15 minutes, please” session. All efforts to get more time failed, so instead I paired the class down to the two small tasks that I thought the students would need most… and I created my very first subversive handout. This listed the two things they’d learn that day at the top, continued with a lengthy list of catchy and interesting/important sounding skills they could ask me about later, and concluded with my contact information and the URL for my calendar at the bottom.

The idea was threefold:
1) Students would still get a little concrete information and a chance to see my face (invaluable if they’re supposed to come make individual appointments with me later).
2) They’d have their imaginations jogged about the kinds of things they didn’t know were possible, or the skills they didn’t know they needed to learn.
3) The professor would see that “everything they need to know” encompassed a whole lot more than the library catalog and finding journal articles. And I won’t lie; in this original case, this third point was the most important to me.

And you know what? It worked. I ended up staying 15 minutes past time as the professor and students asked me questions off of that handout during class time. That meant I had effectively doubled my face-to-face time for with that class, and everyone was engaged and asking questions.

Since then I’ve used the “Here’s what we learned today… Here’s what you can ask me about any time… Here’s how you can get help…” handout in many, many classes. And while they’re useful for lots of kinds of classes, they’re particularly good for two kinds of sessions: those like the one I described above, and those where the professors know full well that the primary goal of a short session is to introduce their students to me so that the students will be more likely to come see me with their research conundrums later. And my original experience of having professors and students alike ask questions from the handout while still in class has held true of almost every session for which I’ve created one of these. (Here’s an example of one I created for English major thesis students.)

Even though I almost never create these handouts with the primary goal of educating the professor any more, the name has stuck. It’s just so fun to knuckle down to the task of creating a handout and be able to rub my fingers together and imagine myself scheming minor subversion. (Imagine shifty eyes and a monologue populated with mutterings such as “They didn’t know they’d want to know about THIS…. Mwa-ha-ha-ha.”) This little bit of fiction is all it takes to make a mundane task feel interesting every single time. Which I suppose means that I’m easily amused.

By popular request from my twitterish friends, here is the basic gist of the class I taught today.

Context:
One of the amazing professors here (I have to say that, she’s reading this :P ) teaches a class which, being interdisciplinary and being a lower level course, often ends up introducing students to the world of interdisciplinarity. So this professor and I have decided to prime the students’ brains early in the term for two concepts: there are different disciplines out there and they each have their own conventions for good reason, and you’ll have to follow one of these conventions soon, so here are the basics.

Class (PPT):

• Citation has many goals, and avoiding plagiarism is only one of these goals (and frankly, the least interesting of the bunch, in my opinion… see my opinion). These goals have to do with the fact that writing is enherently communicative, and communication happens primarily within a community of inquiry. As you read throughout this term, see if you can determine a little bit about each authors’ relationship to research and to his/her community of inquiry simply based on the citations included in each piece of writing. Citation…
  • Shows respect for your community
  • Communicates clearly within a community (like jargon)
  • Reveals what kinds of evidence are most important to a community
  • Builds context for your argument
  • Gives credit where credit is due
• There are three interlinked rules that all citation styles strive for:
  • Rule of Least Confusion (get your readers to exactly what you want them to see)
  • Rule of Brevity (Accomplish the first rule as succinctly as possible)
  • Rule of Readability (I know… doesn’t seem like any style accomplishes this one)
• EXERCISE: Working in groups, look at these three journal articles and build your own citation style that fulfills the three rules of citation and that reflects the values of the “community of inquiry” that is your class. Report back what you decided to include, exclude, and why.
• Comparing MLA, APA, and Chicago (show citation to the same work, three different ways)
  • MLA is designed specifically for the “softer” humanities, such as languages, literature, and the like. This style foregrounds authors and their works and chooses to mention but not highlight dates, since most of these disciplines don’t do as much time-sensitive research (works of literature rarely become “obsolete”). The important evidence in this field is often the words that particular authors wrote, so the author and title are the two most salient pieces of information.
  • APA highlights authors and dates. It serves many of the harder sciences, and information in these disciplines can quickly become obsolete. What would you think if a person gave you computer instructions based on a manual from 1992? Most of the information in that book would be out of date and therefore not useable.
  • Chicago Manual of Style is somewhere in between MLA and APA. It is especially useful for interdisciplinary work, which is as likely to use time-sensitive material as it is to use material that is not time-sensitive. It foregrounds the author and the work, but it acknowledges that the date and the publication itself may also be important to the author’s argument. Footnotes bring this information to the reader’s attention at the point when the author quotes or makes reference to another author. The bibliography provides a summary of all the works cited in the document, allowing the reader to go out and easily find all the author’s sources.
• Basic Elements of Chicago, and examples of citations for the primary kinds of works (this is the nitty-gritty details bit)

So there you have it. That’s what I was up to today. Since I wasn’t actually teaching the mechanics of Chicago style and was concentrating on how to read its citations and what the citations could tell you about how useful the works themselves would be, I didn’t spend long on the nitty gritty bits. In all, this was a 40-minute session.

Since we’re talking citation, I should mention that I out-n-out stole many of my views on citation as a function of disciplinary priorities from one of my esteemed co-workers. But I was really excited to see how that kind of thinking could help me move this class toward a richer understanding of interdisciplinarity.