21 April 2017: "I called my friends and I was like, 'This article is really interesting!'" --a student in my ENGL 301 class, reflecting on her experience compiling her annotated bibliography.
The Annotated Bibliography is the big, semester-long project in ENGL 301, introducing them to citation and research. It's a bear: they complete three sets of entries, each with four sources, revise them all, and then hand in the completed version at semester's end. Most of them are easily 20 pages. Again, a bear! But they are proud of those bears.
Anyway, we had our last regular class of the semester today and were done reviewing for the exam with about 15 minutes left. So I asked them if we could talk about the class as a whole--what worked, what they liked, what they would change. Because they are awesome, they were eager to participate. I shared some of my ideas, too. And a lot of the comments were about the Annotated Bibliography. The quotation above reflects a common idea from students: they spend all semester creating these things but don't do much with them beyond that. And they kind of want to do more--they want to make their own arguments with/against/towards these critics. That's awesome.
So we talked what that kind of an assignment would look like, how it could fit into the class (something would have to go to make room for it), etc. It was a terrific discussion and I think I have some good ideas for moving forward.
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