This class stresses the concept of "intertextuality" and the use of legal texts to add greater insight into the literature being studied. The professor has placed a number of historical and legal documents from the 18th and 19th centuries dealing with slavery in the United States on reserve in the library, to compliment the fiction being read for the class.. A mid-semester assignment has students choosing an historical legal document and "develop[ing] a fiction" about the issues it reflects.
This course stresses the importance of archives and newspaper holdings in the American Studies discipline. The class is held in the Humanities Research Center at the university, where the archives are kept. For each class, the students are assigned a reading, and are then required to bring to class a "connections" paragraph about a primary source she/he found (newspaper article from the period, another type of document from the period-advertisement, cartoon, legal document, or another work by the same author) and how that source sheds further insight into the issues of race and gender discussed in the class reading. Another assignment has each student taking turns as "facilitator" of a class during the semester. For each student's turn as facilitator, the student must give a report on the class reading's critical reception during its time of publication and what historical events and issues "illuminate the text and its reception."
ERIC abstract, a class where students learned library research skills while working on a Latin American Research project in a community college class.
Assignments
useful for teaching information literacy
Bibliography
of useful publications and resource materials
Isbell, Dennis, and Dorothy Broaddus."Teaching Writing and Research as : A Faculty-Librarian Teaching Team."Reference Services Review. 1995. 23(4): 51-62.
This article discusses a unique collaborative effort between a librarian and a professor in an Arizona State University-West American Studies class. The class is co-taught. Assignments include student presentations on library resources and what the resources helped them find an annotated bibliography. Handouts encourage critical thinking by discussing how to question sources.
This site, while it appears to be still under construction, has a lot of good information for teachers of American Literature. The "Archive of Teaching Materials" looks like it will be particularly useful. This part of the site links to class syllabuses. Two parts of this page which have not been linked to yet look like they will be especially helpful once they are up and running: "Pedagogy and Teaching Strategies" and the "Online Guide to Teaching Resources." The site also contains essays from high school teachers and college professors teaching a wide variety of courses in American literature and a link to "Issues in Teaching the American Literatures" which lets you read threads from the "T-AMLIT-Journal" which appears to operate much like a listserv-with online postings from educators.
Projects
funded by the Five Colleges of Ohio Mellon grant
Tutorials
that teach information literacy competencies
Last Modified:
Modified from work by Julie Elliot,
Indiana University School of Library and Information Science, June 2001
