Olin Library Research Guides: Education: rFLA 300 Constructing the Common Read

Assignments

Annotated Bibliography

Before you come to your final selection for the class readings, you’ll review and discard a lot of other texts. This is part of the intellectual labor involved. Along with your selected texts, your group will submit an annotated bibliography including both texts you choose and ones you read, but didn’t select. This paper is due the day of your class presentation, and should be done individually (not with your group):

Must include at least 10 sources You must include at least 2 sources from each of the genres listed above (art, film, popular, academic, etc.). Your additional sources can repeat any of these categories.

You may use any citation style with which you are familiar. If you have no preference, please use Chicago Manual of Style citations. For each source, please include the following:

1) The full reference
2) A paragraph evaluating the quality of the source. Why did you/did you not choose to include it in your final selection?
3) A paragraph summarizing the source
4) A few sentences about how this source might fit into the Common Read

Text Selection Assignment

You will work in small groups to select texts for the class’s consideration. These texts will fall under a particular lens (for example, “Florida and Empathy” or “Empathy in Historical Perspective). Your group will post your selected texts to a Canvas page for your classmates to read for the following week. (For example, if you are presenting on Wednesday, texts must be posted the previous Wednesday).

Details:

Selected texts should take about 2-3 total hours to read/watch/listen.

You must offer at least 4 texts and you must include Visual art (like a painting, sculpture, or photograph); a poem; or a song
Documentary; film; TED Talk; or podcast
Popular source (e.g. article in a newspaper or magazine, Twitter thread, or blog post)
Academic source (from a peer reviewed journal or an excerpt from a scholarly book)

As long as you cover at least the categories listed above, you can meet the 2-3 hour requirement with 4 substantial texts or 6-8 shorter pieces. Your call.

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