Jennifer Phegley

Rethinking Student Research and Writing in the Digital Age: The Punch Historical Archive, 1841-1992 and the NINES Classroom Exhibit Space

This essay explores the use of the Punch Historical Archive and other digital collections to create online student projects in the NINES classroom exhibit space and other public wiki sites. Phegley uses Punch cartoons to model the kinds of research she asks students to undertake in the classroom.

Collaboration and the Periodical Press: Assigning a Group Project to Uncover Victorian Publishing Practices

Collaborative writing was something I loathed as an undergraduate. Inevitably, I thought, one student (most likely me) would end up doing all the work. My most significant collaborative writing assignment seemed to prove this assumption: when faced with a group of uncommitted classmates, I wrote most of our paper on The Scarlet Letter by myself and we all received the same grade, my grade. As a result of this experience, I was initially disappointed when I arrived at my graduate program at Ohio State to discover that collaboration was a well-respected and pervasive approach used in the composition program in which I would be teaching. Following the model provided by the Composition director, Andrea Lunsford, and two succeeding directors of the First-Year Writing Program, Suellynn Duffey and Sarah Games, new graduate teachers were required not only to manage collaborative activities in the classes we taught, but also to work collaboratively amongst ourselves. However, my attitude toward collaborative practices changed quickly as I began to have more successful group experiences. In fact, my new efforts at collaborative writing directly resulted in the development of an early publication record: I was able to co-write an essay with Andrea Lunsford and the other members of her graduate seminar, to participate in assembling a composition reader based on the work of all the new graduate teachers, to co-write an article about the process of publishing this programmatically produced textbook, to co write an essay on the experiences of being trained as a new graduate teacher, and to begin work on a collection of essays on women readers with a fellow graduate student.1 All of these enriching professional development activities were made possible because I was working with other students who were also