#LILAC22: teaching how to structure literature reviews via 1990s movies

 Kirsty Thomson from Herriot Watt university presented a really interesting workshop based on her teaching practices. She mostly does one-shot sessions where she only meets students once. She realised that while students are fairly confident in finding literature, but the next stage of actually reviewing it and writing a lit review was more tricky. She wanted a practical exercise as it’s widely accepted that students learn more by doing. She didn’t want to set a pre-task, as asking students to commit an hour of their time is unrealistic. Students read at different speeds, so getting them to read in class is problematic. She also wanted to design an activity that was fun and informal, so they looked back favourably on the class. She developed an exercise that was based on sessions she had taken part in at a previous lilac conference, where students would work in groups to summarise films and identify their themes, as a step towards creating a literature review, pointing out that creating summaries while reading is a productive activity. Kirsty has run these workshops face to face and also online using blackboard collaborate and shared some of the tips I recognise from my own use of collaborate! She uses Titanic, Jurassic park and Romeo and Juliet as example 1990s films, because they have been on tv a lot and most people should be familiar with them. We then took part in the same activity that Kirsty’s students would do. We were asked to work in groups to write a summary of each film, and tags we would give it, then Kirsty created a class summary based on our answers. She then tried to identify themes that were common across 2 or more films e.g risk/failure, romance etc. This is away to identify themes for a literature review. Kirsty advises picking films that have overlapping themes, older films tend to work better as students feel more confident to critique these. These 3 films work well as they are so familiar, and the stories are well known even if someone hasn’t actually seen the film. It was a really fun session, perfect for the end of a long day :)