Let’s face it. Most college research assignments don’t get students excited about research. Here is an article about a history instructor (and librarian) whose innovative assignments sparked her students’ interest and got them to do some fantastic research:
Mudrock, Theresa. Engaging Students in the Game of Research. Perspectives, December 2005 p. 15-17.
Instead of having students write yet another annotated bibliography about WWI, Mudrock assigned students the roles of archetypal young people of the era: Earnest Hitchens, a pilot from Chicago; Henry Lewis, an infantryman; or Viola Williams, a civil rights activist. Students were no longer researching abstract ideas like "Treatment of prisoners in German POW camps" or "Race relations in American cities during WWI." They were researching their characters’ lives.
Enthusiasm swelled, as did the number of sources that the students used in their assignments. Not bad.
Here’s the article:
http://www.historians.org/perspectives/Issues/2005/0512/0512tea1.cfm
and Mudrock’s syllabus and course materials:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/History/perspectives/
—
Posted by Tom to langsdale at 12/12/2005 05:05:00 PM