Making Connections: Primary Texts to Themes

Title

Making Connections: Primary Texts to Themes

Description This is a brainstorming activity to allow students to make scholarly connections between a primary text and related themes, historical or social connections, and relevant disciplines. This activity works well for research assignments that take a literary, or primary text, analysis approach.
Steps
  1. Prior to the library session, ask students to select a theme and a text that they’re interested in
  2. In the library session, show students an example of a completed connections map on a topic/text that relates to a topic or text that they’ve studied in class. Talk through the sections on the map
  3. Pass out worksheet and ask students to take 10 minutes brainstorming connections between their selected primary text and sub-themes, historical, social, theoretical, and disciplinary connections
  4. As a class, work through one example from a student’s topic. Ask other students to give feedback
  5. Ask students to keep the worksheet, so they can add to it during the class. Remind students that research is a complex, iterative, and messy process, so their topics may evolve as they begin reading sources
Tags  pre-assignment; in-class; refining-topic
Variations This activity could be adapted for works of art, images, ads, artifact, music, etc.
Time  20 minutes
Attachments noun_229116Connections Worksheet; noun_204955Connections (Example)