w h at w o r k s f o r m e
Teaching Students to Engage
Scholarly Sources: A Sequential
Assignment
Teaching students to engage scholarship
and distinguish their own voices and
claims from those of other authors can
be challenging. For example, many of
my English 201: Introduction to Literature students do not incorporate quotes
from secondary sources in ways that
provide necessary context or critical
distance when they begin the course.1
They use “dropped” quotations that
stand alone as sentences, echo the
claims of sources rather than developing
original theses, or only use sources that
support their claims.Thus, I decided to
adjust my pedagogical practices to address their needs. In particular, I turned
the process for introducing quotes and
engaging sources into steps within a
sequence of assignments that provide
scaffolding for writing about sources
in research papers. The assignments I
discuss below allow students to practice
discrete rhetorical skills as they move
from simple to complex tasks that build
the critical reading and writing skills
needed to organize information when
engaging sources.
First, I ask students to read
and respond to a short passage I have
selected from a primary text. Students
are asked to read the passage before
identifying the main idea and explaining the significance of it in a paragraph.
This part of the assignment requires
close reading and allows students to
form and privilege their own claims
about the significance of a passage from
a primary text before engaging a source.
After students complete these
tasks, I ask them to engage an excerpt
from a scholarly source that analyzes the
same passage to which they responded.
I distribute a handout that guides their
engagement with an excerpt from a
scholarly article and poses the following questions:
1. Summarize the scholar’s main
point or idea in the passage in
one or two sentences.
2. Select a quote from the text to
discuss: In an essay on [add the
topic or title of the primary
text], [add the author of the
scholarly article’s full name]
contends: “[add quote here]”
([cite]).
3. Discuss and engage the scholar’s
quote by noting why the quote
is important in one or two sentences.
4. Explain why you agree or disagree with the author in two or
three sentences. Or, note how
the passage or quote from the
article reinforced or altered your
interpretation of the primary
text in two or three sentences.
5. Explain how the scholarly passage you just read relates to the
paragraph you wrote about the
primary text at the beginning of
class in two or three sentences.
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These questions ask students to
add additional layers to what Gerald
Graff and Cathy Birkenstein call a
“quotation sandwich” in They Say / I
Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic
Writing (46).2 However, my assignment
encourages students to create a much
larger sandwich, which I call a “source
Dagwood.”3
When students finish the above
questions, I give them a synthesis assignment that requires them to develop
the in-class assignments in a threeparagraph response paper. Paragraph
one introduces the main idea of the
primary text along with the student’s
claim about the significance of the
passage. Paragraph two discusses the
scholar’s main idea as well as a quote.
And paragraph three asks students to
consider the relationship between what
they wrote about the primary text and
what the scholarly author wrote about
it. Once students complete this recursive sequence of assignments, most of
them continue to model the steps they
practiced when engaging sources in
their formal papers.
Notes
1. English 201, the second course
in the composition sequence at my
community college (Borough of
Manhattan Community College, City
244
University of New York), requires
students to write research papers
about works of literature from three
or more genres.
2. Elements of Graff and Birkenstein’s “quote sandwich” (claim, quote,
explanation) in the chapter “As He
Himself Puts It: The Art of Quoting”
along with their suggestions for
responding to claims in “Yes / No /
Okay, But: Three Ways to Respond”
in They Say / I Say inform my practices and assignments on engaging
sources.
3. “Dagwood” is a term for a
multilayered sandwich consisting of
two slices of bread and many meats,
cheeses, and condiments that originated in the Blondie comic strip in
the 1930s, according to “Blondie and
Dagwood: Comic Strip Characters,”
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2011, https://
www.britannica.com/topic/Blondieand-Dagwood (accessed October 9,
2018).
Work Cited
Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein.
They Say / I Say:The Moves That
Matter in Academic Writing. 2nd
ed., W. W. Norton, 2010.
Trisha Brady
Borough of Manhattan Community College
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