The Secondary Source Sitting Next To You
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 3 Like a lot of people who teach in the humanities, I have spent years complaining about the ways my students use secondary sources in their papers. Most often, a choice quotation gets dropped into a paragraph with only quotation marks separating it from the surrounding prose. Slightly better, a student may call out the author of the source—“Smith writes, ‘The Great Gatsby is a scathing critique of the American Dream’”—without showing any awareness of what Smith has to say beyond the single quoted sentence. Students come to my office hours and tell me, “I’m in good shape with this paper—I have a lot of sources that support my point.” When I explain why a writer shouldn’t be citing only those sources which support his or her point, students generally look at me as if I am extolling the virtues of driving on the wrong side of the road. Why cite a source, they seem to think, if not to borrow its authority for my argument? 1
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 2 I had been interested for awhile in moving more of my students’ writing on to the public web, but I didn’t have a precise pedagogical rationale until last year, when something clicked: if I could “publish” my students’ writing on the web—and I very easily could, using WordPress—my students could begin to see their peers’ essays as secondary sources. And if I asked them to cite sources written by the very people sitting next to them in the classroom—to see secondary literature as the work of actual peers, rather than of invisible “authorities”—they would see those sources not just as reservoirs of ready-to-use quotations but as the reflections of particular thinkers with particular points of view.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 In a first-year seminar devoted to the history and literature of a single year, 1862, I first asked students to conduct primary-source research on the events of a single day in that year. Their reports of that research were posted to a WordPress site, which then became required reading for the class. For a subsequent assignment, the students had to construct an argument about continuity or change over time in 1862. They needed to cite at least three essays written by their peers (about three different days), supplementing that with additional secondary research. These final essays were published online, too, to form a student-authored anthology on America in 1862. 2
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Click to view the student-authored anthology, “1862: American Undeceived,” in a new tab/window.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 4 Not every problem with student use of secondary sources was instantly solved. But some of my students did do a notably better job at situating their arguments in the context of a scholarly conversation. Some showed a refreshing sensitivity to nuance when they expressed respect for a peer’s research while disagreeing with the peer’s analysis. And there were some unforeseen ancillary benefits of this web-based assignment, too, in addition to modest progress on the issue I set out to address. One student reported feeling “very motivated to do great work since I knew all my classmates were going to see my work.” Another found that seeing—and reading carefully—other students’ essays “allowed me to get a better grasp for what I was and was not doing right in my own writing.” And several students appreciated the way in which online publication dignified their writing; as one student put it, turning student writing into assigned reading was a way of “giving our hard work the credit it deserves.”
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 3 Moreover, the class did come to function as a small scholarly community. Near the beginning, I had sought to liven up the assignment by announcing that, at the end, I would measure each class member’s “impact factor”—how many times was each of the first-round essays cited during the second phase?—and award a prize to the most frequently cited author. My first-year students were universally unaware of the role impact factor plays as a metric in academic literature, and they at first only dimly grasped the idea that citations register kinds of influence. But my end-of-term review showed the students to have been astute readers of their secondary sources. Although I feared they might tend to cite essays they found easy to pull quotations from—ones about high-profile topics, for instance—the essay with the highest impact factor turned out to be the one to which I had given the highest grade: a subtle analysis with little topical connection to other students’ essays but with a thoughtful and illuminating perspective.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Notes:
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- An earlier version of this essay first appeared in Christopher Hager, “The Secondary Source Sitting Next to You,” MediaCommons, May 20, 2013, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/question/what-does-use-digital-teaching-tools-look-classroom/response/secondary-source-sitting-next. ↩
- “1862: America Undeceived: A student-authored anthology on Civil War America,” First-Year Seminar with Christopher Hager, Trinity College, Fall 2012, http://commons.trincoll.edu/1862. ↩
I think this was a wonderful enterprise. It addresses the “secondary source” problem and does, indeed, help create a community of scholars among your FY seminar students.
I wonder, though, about your decision not to credit individual students in their final essays (unless I missed something). The preliminary writings on the individual days are identified by the name of the student who wrote. Why not the final product?
Very perceptive, Susan! Actually, the individual days (first phase) aren’t credited either, but you probably spotted a name other than mine next to the ‘posted by’ line on one or more of those early essays. That was the class’s peer mentor, or TA, who did some of the back-end work on the WordPress site. So that particular discrepancy is a technical accident, rather than a decision.
But the larger issue — identifying students publicly or not — is certainly something I thought about and did make a decision about. I considered having essays appear under students’ names by default but allowing students to tell me they would prefer to be anonymous or pseudonymous. But I decided instead to make anonymity the default and allow students to tell me they’d like to see their names in lights. I erred on the side of less-public because the students were in their first semester of college and, I thought (rightly or wrongly), might not have been ready to be thrust into public view.
As it happens, none of the students asked to have their names added, and so the online essays remain anonymous. As a practical matter, the authorship of the first-round essays was known to the class, because they had an internal document showing who was doing which date.
How did citing anonymous sources work, especially when integrating quotations into an essay?
I really like this short reflection on an assignment, and think the book can work with a varied length of pieces. I would like a bit more reflection at the end, and maybe further consideration about the idea of quotation itself as it functions as a form of citation. Too often I find my students quote from a secondary source as a voice of authority, and feel constrained by the language that sounds “above them” in terms of academic prose style. (I always insist that they only quote a source if the phrasing adds something significant to the ideas; if not, paraphrase & cite.) I wonder how students found quoting each other – were they more likely to quote at length or paraphrase?
In response to your question above, Jason, the essays students were citing weren’t anonymous to them — they knew which of their peers had written which essays — and they cited them by name (so although the first round of essays was posted online anonymously, anyone who really wants to can figure out the authorship of them by looking through the footnotes of second-round essays). But that leads right into the really interesting question in your second comment, just above: did having personal acquaintance with the authors of secondary sources lead student writers actually to quote or paraphrase differently? I think I’d have to re-scrutinize the data. I don’t exactly have a control, at least not with this group of students, but it would still be interesting for me to revisit the essays with that question in mind. Thanks!
I love this essay and the way it sets up the problem, describes a pedagogical approach to the problem, and reports on how it went. It’s both beautifully clear and insightful about a significant problem for undergraduates learning to write from sources.
I’m wondering if as a kind of appendix (or tear-off recipe card?) you might be able to put assignment prompts online and link to those. This is the kind of idea a lot of people may want to emulate, but may get bogged down in details. Maybe there’s even a way people could add their variations online.
Thanks, Barbara, for the great suggestion — yes, including assignment prompts might be helpful.
Chris, as we have discussed, the editors have accepted your essay, “The Secondary Source Sitting Next to You,” for the final volume, with the expectation that you will expand and revise it in light of the comments received here.
The current draft word count is 777 (as measured by WordPress), and the final version should be expanded to approximately 2000 words. The deadline for submitting your final draft is Thursday May 15th, though sooner is always better. More instructions will follow in the next few days on how to resubmit and edit your text in our PressBooks/WordPress platform.