Source Euphoria: Teaching Effective Source Use and Evaluation To First Year Students
Type of Presentation
Workshop
Conference Strand
Critical Literacy
Target Audience
Higher Education
Second Target Audience
K-12
Location
Ballroom C
Relevance
My approach dives directly into a piece of both professional and student writing to "reverse engineer" the ways, either effective or needing improvement, the author found and used sources to strengthen their argument.
Proposal
Welber will present her strategy for integrating source use and evaluation into first year writing courses to emphasize critical thinking about ideas of any kind--from scholarly publications to social media posts. She will explain how she teaches research to first year writing students at Princeton University by "reverse engineering" a piece of scholarly writing for the way sources are used to enter into a scholarly conversation, drawing on theorists such as Mark Gaipa.
In addition to explaining in detail how a professional essay can be deconstructed in terms of source deployment, Welber will show how a piece of student writing can be "workshopped" to model critical thinking about sources, use of library tools (e.g., databases) to help to identify the scholarly debate surrounding a topic, and how to effectively search for all sides of the argument (which can be tricky). These are techniques that can also be used to train librarians how to teach information literacy.
Short Description
Welber will explain how she uses the technique of "reverse engineering" a piece of both professional scholarly and student writing to teach effective source identification, evaluation, and deployment to first year writing students.
Keywords
source use, source evaluation, information literacy, reverse engineering, first year writing, expository writing
Publication Type and Release Option
Presentation (Open Access)
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Welber, Audrey Betsy, "Source Euphoria: Teaching Effective Source Use and Evaluation To First Year Students" (2025). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 28.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2025/2025/28
Source Euphoria: Teaching Effective Source Use and Evaluation To First Year Students
Ballroom C
Welber will present her strategy for integrating source use and evaluation into first year writing courses to emphasize critical thinking about ideas of any kind--from scholarly publications to social media posts. She will explain how she teaches research to first year writing students at Princeton University by "reverse engineering" a piece of scholarly writing for the way sources are used to enter into a scholarly conversation, drawing on theorists such as Mark Gaipa.
In addition to explaining in detail how a professional essay can be deconstructed in terms of source deployment, Welber will show how a piece of student writing can be "workshopped" to model critical thinking about sources, use of library tools (e.g., databases) to help to identify the scholarly debate surrounding a topic, and how to effectively search for all sides of the argument (which can be tricky). These are techniques that can also be used to train librarians how to teach information literacy.
