Hi, I'm Angie Ecklund. I taught at Hunter College for about ten years. Part of the City University of New York system, It's known for its humanities departments, among other things. And it has a very highly diverse set of students in terms of age, background, educational goals. One thing I really love about the students there is how well they respond to a challenge, often in unexpected ways. There was never a dull class period. I taught classes in the English department, mainly in literature but also literary theory and writing courses. Literary theory, which is the course I’m going to talk about today, was a 300 level course. So the students were mostly upperclassmen, you know, juniors and seniors, a couple of sophomores and there were a fair number of English majors in there, but the class also fulfilled a general requirement so there were some non-majors, and there were about 25 students in the course. I used this assignment I call the Scholarly Conversation Project in my literary theory class, because the students were having a difficult time grasping how different phases of literary theory developed, why certain ideas took off at certain times and others didn't. And they asked questions that show that they were struggling with this. When we read isolated pieces of theory, even with the essays that contextualized them, it felt like we were doing more of, like great author's tours of literary theory rather than getting a more nuanced understanding, that ideas develop at particular points in time in response to other ideas and events. I wanted to take them into the weeds a bit and have them do some exploration on their own. I wanted them to see literary theory not just as a set of isolated spots of brilliant insight, but as an array of conversations and a community in which hundreds or even thousands of voices take part. This sounds like a large undertaking for undergraduates, but when you break it down into smaller parts, it becomes quite manageable, actually. And I'd stress that this assignment is teaching students to observe aspects of the scholarly conversation, not having students participate in that conversation yet. So it's about observation and so that takes a little bit of the pressure off. The other thing I'd noticed was that students were losing their sense of what a journal was and what a journal article was. And it seemed to me that these vessels of expression have been and continue to be vitally important to literary theory and criticism. It had been clear enough to students when I was an undergraduate and we mainly worked with print sources, but in the transition to electronic databases and internet searching, that distinction has been kind of lost. So students didn't understand the purpose of a journal or why it mattered which journal something was published in. And they didn't understand why they should include that bit of information, the journal title in a citation. The significance was lost on them and it was kind of an empty performative measure to include that journal title. So that was a secondary learning objective to get students interacting with a particular journal, with the format of the issues themselves, with the community that provides the content for that journal. I provided a list of seven journals for them to use - journals that I knew were being published for at least 50 years and that I knew had full indexing coverage in the MLA International Bibliography for that period of time. If you're using this assignment and you want to exercise a bit more control, you may want to assign your students a particular journal or, you know, one of two journals, perhaps. Or if you want them to explore beyond the details available in the database, you could provide them with a custom list of appropriate journals that are available at your institution in full text. Two of the journals on my students’ list were actually available for them to look at in print in the Hunter College library, but every single student chose to look at the journals via the database, and that really did surprise me a bit. To me, it seemed so much easier to look at the print, but, you know, and they have to master some basic database searching skills in order to be able to look at them electronically, but that's what they all chose to do. They need to be able to facet search by journal title and also to sort or narrow by publication date. These skills are, of course, crucial to research in any academic database, not just the MLA International Bibliography or even within the humanities. Having students look at trends in the MLA Bibliography’s indexing and titles for the journal articles is the shortest version of the assignment. I put them in small groups of 2 to 3 students, and I give them a week's worth of in-class time to work on the project. So I'm available, I’m there to answer any questions as they're working. And then they need to communicate outside of class in order to organize their presentation that they're going to give back to the rest of the students. I have them retrieve in class, sit at the computer, retrieve a set of records by doing an advanced search for their chosen journal’s title in the journal title field, and I have them limit the publication date to the first year of the first decade that they're examining. So I started with 1950. Make sure that the students know how to click through from the results list to the full record. At first, they should just take notes and discuss what they're seeing, making sure that they have a good understanding of what they're looking at. As they look at the subjects being written about in the later years, you know, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990 and so on, trends and revolutions will start to jump out at them. For a journal like American Literature or PMLA, they may make observations about the types of authors under study, their gender, their race, nationality. Many of the authors names will be familiar to them: Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Henry James. They may notice an expansion of the authors being studied over time. There will be more authors whose names are unfamiliar as time goes on. They will also notice shifts in terminology. New words and phrases begin to appear and will be repeated, and new types of readings will pop up. For example, they'll see, you'll start seeing feminist readings at some point. Looking at a journal like African American Review, which was previously published as Black American Review and prior to that as Negro American Review, they'll see a dramatic shift in terminology, even just in terms of how the field identifies its own focus. In a journal that has a narrower focus, like the Keats-Shelley Journal or Shakespeare Quarterly, the students will probably be more likely to observe changes in the types of articles being written. And they may notice articles being written in direct response to earlier articles in the same journal, and you can encourage them to go back and look at, you know, the article that is being responded to. And of course, the students will always surprise you by what they notice. They will see things that you've never even thought about before. For the longer version of this, of the assignment, you might have students look at the journals in full text and skim over one full issue for each decade. And encourage them to look especially at the peripheral writing, the writing justifying the dedication of a special issue to a particular topic or literary work, for example, or the commentary explaining the rationale behind a change in a journal’s area of focus. Sometimes they expand in focus, sometimes they narrow, sometimes they're just changing the title and there's a rationale behind that. The assignment gets students thinking about the way a journal can represent a community of study, a set of people studying the same subject. Observing that journal over time can reveal a lot about how scholars influence each other and respond to larger trends in scholarship. My students also became more adept at using academic databases for research, and I think they became a lot more confident in their ability to understand what they were looking at in the database. Their initial reactions to this assignment varied. The assignment takes them out of their comfort zone, and some enjoy that a lot more than others do. We spent a class period in the library, where a librarian demonstrated how to navigate to the MLA International Bibliography and how to perform the types of searches that they would need to do. Assigning students the MLA’s course “Understanding the MLA International Bibliography” will also prepare them for the type of searching that they'll need to do. It helps to stress that this assignment is mainly about generating observations and questions that can't necessarily be answered within the parameters of this assignment. They know that I don't expect them to understand all the whys. I want to see them noticing patterns and starting to wonder about them. And I also want them to have a chance to air questions about anything they don't understand about research and databases, about journals and publishing. By the end of the assignment, reactions were more universally positive to the assignment. They appreciated the opportunity to explore without having a paper due at the end. And they also, in the end, really appreciated working in groups, although they were questioning, they kind of questioned that in the beginning. Approaching an unconventional assignment as a group takes some of the pressure off each individual. This assignment came at the end of our semester as a culmination of what we had learned over the course of the semester. Students presented their findings to each other with examples. And we discussed patterns of development that could be seen to exist across journals of different types, and how they might relate to those great theorists that we'd read earlier and other cultural trends, such as the professionalization of literary study.