Please describe your project
Designed for new course, Women in Theatre, a seminar focused on cultural studies, history, and literature. Could be modified for use in range of courses with research focus. Includes assignment description and justification, instructions, goals, SLOs for assignment aligned with new IL SLOs proposed for implementation in Fall 2021, and a proposed assessment tool.

For this assignment, students are asked to choose a woman artist whose work is performed on stage (with whom they are unfamiliar) featured in an issue of The Billboard. Using The Billboard online archive only, they must find, read, and analyze a minimum of ten different articles or references to this artist. Each reference should come from a different published issue. Each reference should be quoted, cited, and explained in the style of an annotated bibliography. Using these ten sources, the student should then construct a 1-2 paragraph summary of this performer using only information from those sources (no additional Googling, searches, reading allowed). This will require students to make educated guesses and inferences based on context within the periodical and prior knowledge only. Finally, each student will compile a list of questions they were not able to answer solely based on The Billboard articles. What words, ideas, slang were unfamiliar? What did they want to look up? Where would they go to find that information? What would have helped them to understand the context? What gaps do they see in the report they were able to construct? What kinds of information does reading The Billboard offer and what kinds of information can it not offer?

The goal of this assignment is to encourage students to see themselves as researchers, rather than re-iterators, of knowledge. It also strengthens their understanding of the ways in which strong research questions can be formed, as opposed to constructed in advance of the actual beginning of the process.*

*Full assignment details available in attached document