Bingo Night at SOAS? Not quite…
📅 Thu 31 October 2024 at 11:24 GMT
This was one of the most impactful teaching experiences I have ever had the good fortune to participate in. After a highly stimulating lecture on how to perform a literature review, we had a very simple, yet highly creative practical exercise.
We were given a set of seemingly random and unconnected movie titles. Then we were put into small groups, and asked to “weave a narrative” linking all the films together. As a cohort, we immediately recognised that it’s possible to identify any number of themes, and so we could “start with the end in mind”, and work backwards tracing the theme’s development.
One group identified the rise of animated movies from 1993 to 2015 as a theme. Another group mentioned the changing depiction of societal relationships. We discussed the fact that many of these films such as “Rush Hour 3 (2007)” were parts of series, and we wondered why was that particular movie chosen for this list rather than the others in the series?
Should we mention that “Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)” was originally made in 1968? And what are the connections between the 1968 film and the current film? And that “The Avengers (2012)” is not only part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe of movies, but that the entire franchise is derived from the original paper-based DC Comics launched in 1937?
How about the elephant in the room… the big blue question mark in the bottom-right corner of the table? If that doesn’t metaphorically represent “the gap in the research” or “your contribution to the field”, then what is it?
And finally the most obvious question – why does the list mysteriously start in 1993 and end in 2015? Are we saying that no noteworthy movies were released before 1993 and after 2015???
But the lightbulb moment for all of us was when we were asked “Where’s The Lion King(1994)”? And where are the “Star Wars” movies? This was symbolic for when your examiner asks you why you didn’t include a paper or study in your literature review! This mental vision, although still quite far away in our MPhil/PhD timeline, did nonetheless trigger a collective cold sweat, which made us immediately re-evaluate all the movie questions we had been asking in the light of our own literature reviews, and also realise the value of this exercise.
I’ve done literature review training before, but from a pedagogical perspective, I thought this group exercise was simply magic! Hats off to Dr Yenn Lee (https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/yenn-lee), Timothy Maugherman and SOAS University of London Doctoral School!
Originally posted on LinkedIn on 31 October 2024.
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