So we all know that the MLA International Bibliography is an essential tool for research in all aspects of modern languages and literatures. But did you know that the bibliography can be brought into the classroom and used as an effective teaching tool as well? My name is Dan Connor. I am the associate editor of the MLA International Bibliography. I am also the head of an indexing team, working primarily in non-English language literatures and the section editor of Iberian and Latin American Literatures. I started out at the MLA over 20 years ago as an indexer, having worked previously in publishing, advertising, teaching, administration and community organizing. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to step back into teaching, but this time with a new focus, namely to incorporate a research instruction element into intro level literature courses using the MLA International Bibliography and its then-newly developed free online course. So for two years, during the pandemic no less when classes were either fully remote or hybrid, hybrid-curious, I taught a few literature courses at the University of Scranton. For the purposes of this video, I will focus mostly on my experience teaching the bibliography in the English Inquiry course I taught, which was a course designed to offer students a broad overview of literature written in the English language. In this class in particular, teaching the bibliography really came alive. As we were looking at many different national literatures in every conceivable genre, not only isolated as literature, but in relation to their film and even musical adaptations, and in relation to other fields of study, such as in this case, folklore. I started by tweaking the course description for ENLIT 140 English Inquiry to include the research instruction component. The template course description that I inherited read: “An exploration of fiction, poetry and drama. The approach is inductive. The aims are a greater understanding of literature and an introduction to techniques of literary scholarship, theory and research.” So the first thing I'm doing is writing the free online course “Understanding the MLA International Bibliography” into the syllabus, outlining steps to access the database directly through the library interface, and indicating deadlines for the completion of each of the course’s five units. Easy to set up and monitor, the free online course is self-grading, offering an autopilot solution for teaching research skills. Exposing students to relevant scholarly publications as well. So students earn digital badges upon completing each unit, which they can easily forward to the instructor via email as proof of completion. All in all, it takes about 90 minutes to complete the course in its entirety. While many students choose to complete it in 1 or 2 sessions, my expectation is that all students will have earned the final completion badge by the end of week three. Upon starting the online course, students will be prompted to watch the “What is the MLA International Bibliography?” tutorial video, which gives an informational overview of the database and how to navigate its search interface. We have produced versions of this video as well as other videos on a variety of search related subjects in numerous languages, all available for free on the MLA website. The course also offers optional modules that students may choose to complete as well. These include modules devoted to research in folklore, linguistics, film, literary studies, and rhetoric and composition. The free online course’s goals and desired learning outcomes include: teaching students to use the MLAIB database for college level research; to use keywords, subject terms and the thesaurus; to understand search results and recognize the parts of bibliography records in order to locate full text publications; to research the history of a scholarly topic or publication using advanced search techniques and publication date restrictions; and to describe the scope and purpose of the MLA International Bibliography. In addition to these, ENLIT 140 English Inquiry used the MLAIB course and database to expose students to relevant scholarly publications and to literary criticism in general to encourage intellectual curiosity and stimulate in-class discussion and to develop research writing skills. For example, the importance of using textual evidence to support your argument. How to use a work of literary criticism as a point of departure for original analysis. So a progression might start with an in-class introduction to the bibliography and the online course. Students create accounts and view introductory videos. Then we'll have maybe a discussion and do some searches in class. There will be homework to complete the introduction in unit one, including the quiz. Come back to class, have some discussions, dip into the database, check out a few things or repeat this until all the units are covered in week two or week three. Then I'll start introducing research exercises and presentation assignments. So something like identify 2 to 3 themes in a specific work using what you have learned from the online course. Search the full text database for this work or author. Choose at least two full text articles to read taking special note of any discussion of the themes you have identified. Present a review of these articles and their critical discussion of this work or author, nothing especially any focus on your chosen themes. How do these critical views of the work line up with your own? So just to get them thinking in different directions. So the first example I wanted to share with you comes from our study of the novel Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. Obviously, we use the database to explore the major and minor themes of the novel. At a certain point in our class discussions, I wanted to segue from talking about the novel as a novel to a discussion of the novel’s film adaptation by the director John Huston. To do this, I initiated a discussion of imagery in the novel and to support our analyses we jumped into the database, finding two full text articles treating O’Connor’s use of shadow and animal imagery. The team summarized the major points of these articles, which gave us a solid springboard into analyzing and comparing Huston's cinematic imagery in his film adaptation. We did this same exercise with all the novels we studied that had film adaptations: Jesus’ Son, Beloved, etc. In addition to using the database to explore literature’s intersection with film and the dramatic arts, we also use the bibliography to explore literature's connection with folklore. To do this, I assigned Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard. We started out by looking at this short novel as a sort of surreal, surrealist rewriting of Yoruba folktale, and we had some luck finding critical support for this approach in the bibliography. As we dug into the critical reception of this work, we uncovered a focus on the novel as a stinging critique of colonialism. From there, we use the database to help us understand how we could read this novel from a postcolonial perspective to be a work of subversive literature. Students had a blast with that. In the Intro to Poetry classes I taught, we used the database not only to help us explore themes and techniques, but also to find additional explanations and examples of poetic forms beyond those appearing in the assigned anthology. This 100-level course was designed with a focus on poetic forms: sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, haikus, odes, ballads, etc. As I introduced these forms in class, we were able to dip into the bibliography to find further explanations and examples. All written assignments were required to include a research component showing how at least two works of literary criticism - accessed via the MLA International Bibliography with Full Text database - supported their responses or arguments. Additionally, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the full text database offers access to some primary works usually excluded from the bibliography for not falling within its scope for coverage. So here the class was finding editions of poems published in literary journals like American Poetry Review or Plowshares, which proved to be quite useful in finding additional examples of various poetic forms. So in a certain moment, it became clear that the print anthology we were using as our guide was deficient in giving examples of some of the forms we wanted to study. So we jumped into the database to see what we could find knowing that often works of literary criticism will include such examples. In this case, we did some full text searches of pantoum to see what the critical literature might offer us. We found such works of criticism dealing with pantoum, but also discovered full text editions of actual pantoum poems published in literary journals. So, with about 20 different results, students could choose a pantoum to analyze for class discussion. I remember Paul Mariani’s Pantoum for East 51st was one of the poems or pantoums that we accessed via full text and discussed in class. So here, we were using the bibliography in a way that was expected - that is, searching for literary criticism - to support our study of primary works, and also in a way that was unexpected. That is, to find primary works of literature to analyze critically. So thank you all for joining me today and allowing me to walk you through some of the ways literature instructors can incorporate a research instruction element into their courses using the MLA International Bibliography with Full Text and its free online course. Happy teaching!