Information literacy has become one of the most essential skills we teach undergraduates. One highly effective way of teaching this skill is to put students in the active role of the mediator by asking them to produce a critical edition of an existing, open-access text. The process of inserting explanatory footnotes, writing introductory material,…

This is not another tired lament for a Golden Age when all students were brilliantly prepared for college, but rather an elaboration of a central pedagogical reality the authors had each separately faced--it is not easy to teach the complex set of skills subsumed under the heading "research," that organic, contingent, messy, recursive…