Pull quote: “I talk about cropping photographs, and how the images gesture toward vast amounts of information that are left out of the frame, but that viewers can easily imagine. Similarly, papers gesture towards whole swaths of the literature that they don’t deal with directly. And that isn’t a sign of weakness — of not managing to fit everything in. Rather it’s a sign of careful decision making, of thinking ‘what do my readers most need to focus on and what can they fill in for themselves’ and ‘what do I most want them to see that they may not have seen in this way before.’”
Pull quote: “So, with all this in mind, the professor and I encouraged the students to see their annotated bibliographies as their chance to map out the boundaries of the conversation they’d be entering, selecting key works for theoretical foundations, background information, and the main voices in the conversation their papers will be adding to. The annotations should point out why and how each source functions in the context of their papers. And all of this will help them and their professor see the major landmarks on the emerging landscape of their topic.”
Pull quote: “I think we gain opportunities and motivation to examine our practice, to have difficult discussions, to encourage and pull stragglers along, to mollify and reign in renegades, and to shift emphasis from one point to another in the vast matrix of professional goals. I think we lose a sense of the complexity of our past. New concepts or emphases do not spring fully formed into being, and new pedagogies retain large portions of old pedagogies, but a new name assignes concepts and pedagogies an artificial start date.”
