Undergraduate English majors should have opportunities to conduct meaningful, authentic research. This essay outlines a research methods course that introduces students to empirical research with qualitative and quantitative tools. Over the course of the term, students complete a whole-class project that models the process and then also complete…

This essay concerns the methods I use in my 300-level Shakespeare course at Winthrop University to foster research worthy of frequent conference presentation and occasional publication. In short, my approach is to provide suitable topics and to require multiple stages in the composition and research process. The results, I have discovered, are…

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…