Race and Social Justice Research Guide: Learning Activities

This is an activity we introduced at one of our Engaging Our Digital Natives workshops last year.  Since then, we’ve been told that many faculty have used this resource with great success.

• Use the slides to discuss how information is delivered in various formats.   How do you determine which formats are the most reliable?  Which formats are appropriate for academic research?  What is the difference between scholarly and academic resources?   Are these primary or secondary resources
   
• If you have room to move around your classroom space, give each student a different format (tweet, library book, article, etc.) and have them work together to determine the sequence in which these different forms of information were created.

We have used this activity with some of the Freshmen writing classes to introduce students to some advanced research skills such as how to:

• access subject specific academic databases
• use GoogleScholar to create a “citation chain”

This activity was developed by Cindy McCullagh and Joan Hopkins in an effort to help students become familiar with how to access primary source materials.  Through these primary sources, students will learn about the atmosphere and conditions that prompted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to compose his Letter from A Birmingham Jail.