Research Guides: Information Literacy: Scholarship is a Conversation

Scholarship Is a Conversation

Scholarship as a Conversation
"Scholarship Is a Conversation refers to the idea of sustained discourse within a community of scholars, researchers, or professionals, with new insights and discoveries occurring over time as a result of competing perspectives and interpretations."

Some Learning Objectives

Students will examine the bibliography, footnotes, and references section of sources they find to locate additional sources of information.
Recognize the metaphor of “conversation” to describe the purpose of research
Identify the contribution of specific scholarly pieces and varying perspectives to a disciplinary knowledge “conversation”
Contribute to the scholarly conversation at an appropriate level, through the lens of becoming a creator/critic
Students will be able to understand citation chaining in order to evaluate the impact of a work (and find more info on the topic).
Students will understand how to understand and analyze a scholarly peer-reviewed article and identify and understand all the parts of the article

Learning Activities

1. Provide students with a list of 3-5 sources from different perspectives that shape the conversation surrounding a topic of interest.

Example sources: a news article, a tweet from a reputable source, a scholarly article & a literature review.

Ask:

What perspectives are presented?
Who has the strongest voice in this conversation? Why?
How would you involve yourself in this conversation?

2. Ask students to conduct an investigation of a particular topic from its treatment in the popular media, and then trace its origin in conversations among scholars and researchers. How have perspectives changed and why?

Example sources: news articles, tweets from reputable sources, magazine articles, blog entries, bestselling novels.

- From University of Washington Libraries

Some Resources

"Scholarship is discursive practice in which ideas are formulated, debated, and weighed against one another over extended periods of time. Instead of seeking discrete answers to complex problems, scholars understand that a given issue may be characterized by several competing perspectives."