Staffordshire lecturer’s illustrated activity book introduces students to research techniques
By the time students get to university, it will probably have been a couple of years because they came across an activity book that is illustrated.
But Writing Essays by Pictures is no activity book that is ordinary. With a nautical theme, it casts essays as icebergs and sources as sea creatures in a cutting-edge make an effort to introduce first-year students towards the practice of academic research and writing.
Author Alke Grцppel-Wegener, senior lecturer in contextual studies at Staffordshire University, based the handsomely presented book on the essay-writing sessions with art and design students.
After raising nearly Ј2,000 from supporters from the Kickstarter crowdfunding website to fund a preliminary print run, the book was released this week and it is hoped that wider distribution will follow.
It opens because of the call for students to think about their essays as icebergs, with a focused argument “above the water” backed up by research and thinking below.
After that it introduces students to reading, note-taking and thinking that is critical, inviting them to carry out practical, creative activities as you go along.
It implies that readers try drawing pictures in an attempt to demonstrate the level of http://www.evolutionwriters.biz engagement that texts require while they examine sources, rather than taking notes, and encourages students to walk a familiar route at a quarter of their usual speed while taking notes on what they see around them.
The book advises students to categorise sources by thinking about them as different sea creatures, also to judge their academic rigour in terms associated with the depth from which they reside in the ocean.
Other suggested techniques that are learning writing poems that condense source material and creating greeting cards as reminders of texts.
Dr Grцppel-Wegener said that she found in first years that she had developed her use of analogies and activities as a way to address, in an engaging and non-threatening way, the lack of confidence around academic writing.
“Giving students images that they might remember better, like the fish together with iceberg, will hopefully assist them to to consider whatever they meant and also to comprehend the explanation better,” said Dr Grцppel-Wegener, a bookmaker and printmaker by training. “I thought that, it will never you should be something which is a reference, it would be their particular as well as would like to keep it. if it absolutely was something students could add what to,”
Dr Grцppel-Wegener argued that the book could prove useful across a range that is wide of.
“People who want to think visually are not merely present in arts and design,” she said. “There could be more in art and design, but I make an effort to explain things for everyone and hopefully there are a great number of people who can respond to it.”
Dr Grцppel-Wegener rejected the idea that creating an action book represented “dumbing down” of academic practice, arguing in a different way”, and that better critical thinking ability would flow from stronger research skills that she was simply “framing it.
But she acknowledged that her approach will never suit every learner.
“When I am teaching, i realize that this method does work for everybody n’t; many people don’t make use of metaphors after all,” she said. “I always use this as one option.”
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