[{"id":338362,"date":"2026-09-24T09:55:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T13:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/daily.jstor.org?p=338362&preview=true&preview_id=338362"},"modified":"2026-09-18T16:24:40","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T20:24:40","slug":"teaching-students-to-follow-an-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daily.jstor.org\/teaching-students-to-follow-an-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Students to Follow an Idea"},"content":{"rendered":"

I teach first-year academic writing courses in the University of Georgia English Department. Lately, I have been using JSTOR<\/a> to help my students see research differently through an activity I call \u201cBiography of an Idea.\u201d Students begin with one scholarly article in JSTOR, usually from their discipline, and choose an idea, question, concept, argument, or even a citation that interests them. They then follow that idea backward and forward through scholarship: tracing where it came from, how other scholars have changed or challenged it, and what happens to it as it moves from one source to another. The goal is not simply to find more sources, but to experience research as an act of following knowledge. In this way, their paper becomes an intellectual conversation.<\/p>\n

I developed this activity because students often perceive research writing as a series of requirements: finding scholarly sources, writing an annotated bibliography, citing sources, and producing a literature review. These requirements are useful, but they can also make scholarship seem like a collection of finished objects. Articles appear in databases, then students download them, extract information, and cite them. I wanted students to see something different: scholarship as a conversation that changes over time.<\/p>\n\t\t