The bulk of my ten years’ teaching experience was at NYIT Old Westbury. I taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln while completing the coursework part of my PhD, and some years later I taught at Hofstra as well. Most of my students at NYIT were studying architecture, engineering, or the health sciences, which gave me a lot of insight into and experience with teaching literature and composition in a classroom of STEM-oriented students. I taught classes in almost every general area covered by the English department catalog: first year composition, business writing and tech writing, 200 level introductory literary surveys, 300 level courses titled The Art of Fiction and The Art of Drama, and I also helped pilot courses on inquiry offered with the Philosophy and Ethics department that became part of the core curriculum. I was using the MLA International Bibliography in the classroom long before I became an index editor. In lieu of a midterm exam, I had students work in groups of 3 to 5 to develop a ten minute presentation that used the bibliography to trace the history of scholarship on a single work of fiction or drama that we'd read during the first half of the course. You can find a full outline of this assignment, which I called the History of Scholarship Project on the MLA Style Center website. The MLA International Bibliography is so much more than a lookup tool. You can use it to trace scholarly and disciplinary histories, and this assignment shows students that these histories exist and that literary scholarship is an ever developing, non-static field. The first year composition curriculum included an overview of the library's databases, given in both the library and in the classroom. So the library part was basically a how-to including some search strategies. The classroom part for me was about what contexts in which to use different databases. You need both search strategies and also an understanding of the contexts in which the MLA International Bibliography casts exactly the right size net for your research. I taught rhetoric in three different types of courses: composition, literature, and the inquiry courses that I helped to pilot. The bibliography covers rhetoric in all of these areas. Rhetoric and composition, which has had its own dedicated section in pedagogy since 2000, covers the teaching of writing, writing studies and discourse studies. For more information on how writing studies in particular is covered, you'll want to see the researching, writing studies in the MLA International Bibliography on EBSCO tutorial. In addition, rhetoric in a linguistics context is classified under Stylistics. I think the History of Scholarship project translates well here when we're looking at rhetoric as a literary term, or rhetorical criticism as a type of literary theory and criticism. “Rhetorical criticism” is indeed a heading under literary theory and criticism in the bibliography, so we can search for that term to get an overview of how exactly it's been covered. To really hone in, we'll use the MLA thesaurus and add the term “rhetorical criticism” to our search. I'd recommend having students start at the thesaurus to make sure they're using the preferred term, which will ensure that their search captures everything it needs to. We can then sort by publication date, or even better, we can filter by publication date to trace the history of how the term is used. The first appearance of “rhetorical criticism” in the bibliography is in College Composition and Communication in 1963. This is the publication where the term appears most often throughout the 1970s. Now, part of the reason for this is that there's no separate pedagogy category in the bibliography until 2000, but it's also worth noting that “rhetorical criticism” simply isn't used very often at all until the 1980s, and then it seems to spike in the 1990s. Encourage students to look for patterns. Whether they were researching a term or literary text, I tried not to get in the way with what I supposedly already knew as a scholar. So this is effectively how I taught with the MLA International Bibliography. I would definitely encourage instructors in literature surveys to think of the bibliography as more than a lookup tool. Novel assignments and research and learning can come out of seeing the bibliography as an evolving document of disciplinary history in literary studies and elsewhere.