Storyboarding research (T2T assignment description)
(By storyboarding, here, I mean in the design firm, cover everything in 3M post-it notes way. By T2T, here, I mean Teacher-to-Teacher.)
1. Storyboarding an academic chapter or article
In class, I group students (based on zodiac sign or whether they are from a city, suburb, town, or the country, or in some other, ideally unexpected, manner that gives students within each group something in common and thereby helps to foster group rapport). I then hand each group of students (usu. 2–4 students, and group sizes vary) a stack of post-it notes, markers, and one of three assigned readings. About assigned readings: do what you want, though I almost always include article options by Sid Mintz, Ted Bestor, and Mary Weismantel — because each of these authors does commodity chain analysis and commodity chain analysis looks especially sexy (and takes diverse forms) once storyboarded. The assignment is:
Storyboard this text. Using words and/or sketches, show us the structure of one reading. How did the author organize their/her/his thinking?
As a final step, students present their storyboards to the class in 2 minutes or fewer. Presenters describe the categories they discovered and explain the decisions they made when choosing how to organize article content within their storyboards. Audience members then have 4 minutes to ask follow-up questions.
So what?
Because students are working with post-it notes, this feels a lot like *making.* It also feels like design work. And the presentations at end mimic art school critiques.
The assignment encourages students to recognize authors as agents who make intentional decisions about order/organization. The students also get to consider the variations in how they and their peers identify key themes and then categorize information extracted from the same texts. Lastly, I am pretty confident that learning to see structure in written works, the primary outcome of this assignment, helps students to become better (more effective) readers, and especially, skimmers.
2. Storyboarding your own (pending) research/writing.
Later in the same semester, before I ask students to draft lengthy, research-based papers, I have students storyboard their own data. Again, I give them post-it notes and markers in class, though this time they work individually. The assignment looks like this:
Remember back to W3 when you storyboarded Mintz (on sugar and power) or Bestor (on tuna and sushi)? Today you will have 60 minutes to storyboard your final research paper for this course. [Remind students how to storyboard; ask students to open their research notes, including their annotated bibliographies; model storyboarding my own research from my own notes + bib in ten minutes or less.]
As a final step, I ask students to submit digital photos of their finished storyboards at the end of class time — and these images (housed in a course module on Canvas) then become the outlines from which students work as they draft, review, and revise their papers in the following 3 weeks.
So what?
This assignment demands that students focus on the act of organizing content in its own right. This assignment also allows me to see into students’ thinking about their research at a glance — and thus, I am able to help students untangle what might still be tangled in their findings + thinking before they begin composing. Like the above “storyboarding an academic chapter” activity, this activity feels more like making / design studio than traditional outlining does. As a result, I believe that I get higher levels of enthusiasm and much more detailed work from students.
