Educational Biography Project

I. Bibliography Assignment

List of suggested subjects

The bibliography is due in class October 28.

Assignment

Prepare a 7-10 item list of research materials concerning the life and accomplishments of a significant person.

Note that the Bibliography and Critical Evaluation Paper are assigned as individual work. Only the In-class Presentation may be done as a group project.

Grading

The Bibliography will count as 10% of your semester grade.

See Step-by-Step instructions, below, for details on what I'll be looking for when I grade this assignment.

Background

This is the first part of our major "educational biography" project. The second part is to prepare a critical evaluation of a book-length biography about a significant person. The third is an in-class presentation on the life and education of your subject.  There are separate assignment sheets for each of the three parts.

The objective of the overall project is for us to discover the many forms that education may take. We will accomplish this by surveying the lives of a number of significant people, as researched and presented by all the members of our class.

The objective of the bibliography assignment is to identify sources of information about a person of your choice. [Click here to see Some Suggested Significant People.] In other words, your task is to become the class authority on your chosen person. You will need to develop more than a passing familiarity with the person's major achievements, and more than a narrowly focused outline of their "educational history." The best projects will be informed by an awareness of the social, historical, and cultural context in which the subjects lived, the admirable and not-so-admirable aspects of their character, their failures and frustrations as well as their successes and triumphs, and a critical sense of the reasons why they are (or should be) considered "significant" citizens of the world.

This information can be gathered from many sources, of course, and you will need more than one source to form a reliable picture of your person's life and accomplishments. The Bibliography that you turn in is the starting point of your research.

Preparing the bibliography will involve employing and/or developing information literacy skills that are commonly identified as essential to a general education.

Step-by-Step

Your work on this assignment consists of four steps:

1. Identify potentially useful sources of information about your person. Don't exclude primary sources (the person's own writings or other created works), but secondary sourceswill perhaps be most useful for this assignment (videos, web pages, encyclopedias, museum displays, magazine and newspaper articles, and other sources of information about the person). Materials other than books may prove useful to you in the overall project. Be sure that you include potentially good book-length biographies among the materials you identify, however, since you'll be turning in a critical evaluation of one of these. Voyager, the GVSU library's online catalogs and databases site, is a good place to start.
   
   
2. Locate and examine the sources you have identified. You need to determine which information sources are likely to be most useful for your research. Evaluating sources is an important but imprecise art. See the Guide to Evaluating Information Sources, provided separately on this website, for help.
   
   
3. Develop a seven to ten item bibliography. This is simply a list of the information sources that you have identified and examined for the project, to be turned in with your critical evaluation paper. Your bibliography should be annotated: after listing the author, title, publisher, date, and other bibliographic information, give a one-sentence evaluation of the work. Follow the guidelines in the MLA Handbook for proper bibliographic format. The point of the bibliography is to record all relevant information about your sources in an easily readable form.
   
   
4. Turn it in. Keep a copy for your own reference as you work on the remainder of this project.

Some Suggested Significant People