Our Essential Lessons are a sequence of lessons that form the backbone of the Writing Program curriculum, illustrating what we want all students to learn across our program’s diverse course topics.
This lesson helps students consider four different ways they might use a source: they might rely on it for information, analyze it as evidence, respond to its argument, or follow it as theoretical or methodological model. Such a rhetorical understanding of sources gives students agency to use sources to raise and answer new questions as they embark on independent research projects.
Inclusion
The small group work that is part of this lesson offers an opportunity for participation that is more accessible for many students than participating in whole-class discussion. Consider floating between groups as students work together, looking for the opportunity to supportively “warm call” students who tend to hang back when you come back together as a large group.
Objective
Students will be able to identify how a writer has chosen to use sources in a range of ways and to make informed choices about how to deploy sources in their own writing using the BEAM/BEAT framework.
Key Terms
BEAM/BEAT (background source, exhibit source, argument source, method/theory source)
Timing
The best way for students to become acclimated to the BEAM/BEAT framework is through repetition. Instructors should use BEAM/BEAT to discuss rhetorical strategies used in course readings and help students use it to frame their own uses of sources throughout the semester. To do so, begin this lesson in Module 1 and continue it in Module 2.
Conceptual Framework
While students can feel that writing a research paper can be difficult, stressful, and boring, instructors often despair that students view research as simply gathering quotations that back up the student’s initial impression of a topic.
Joe Bizup’s BEAM/BEAT framework shifts the approach, helping students read and deploy sources in a dynamic way, which in turn helps them craft research questions and arguments that offer fresh insight into existing conversations or even start new ones. It gives writers agency, allowing them to see sources as offering opportunities for new ways of thinking.
By engaging sources through the rhetorical vocabulary of BEAM/BEAT, students learn not just to label their materials to fit what might seem to them a set of arbitrary requirements (assignments that call, say, for a particular number of peer-reviewed sources or of “primary” or “secondary” sources), but rather to think about how sources work and how they as writers can use their sources to raise and answer or further new questions and problems.
The BEAM/BEAT framework offers four terms to help students think through how they might use a source:
- Writers rely on background sources for general context and factual evidence.
- They analyze or interpret exhibit sources to support their claims and shed new light on a topic.
- They respond to argument sources, engaging their claims in conversation.
- And they follow or invoke theory/method sources, which provide conceptual frameworks or key terms that students can use to construct their own arguments.
When writers think about sources through the lens of BEAM/BEAT, they quickly see that a source can have more than one use; likewise, they see that one writer might use a source one way and another might use that source in a different way. For example, while one student in the class might use a peer-reviewed article as a theory/method source, using, say, a key concept to frame the student’s own argument, another writer might interrogate that very concept with a counter claim, using the source as an argument source. Similarly, while one student might use a news article as a background source by citing the factual information there, another might analyze it as an exhibit source, studying the language use, say, about representations of the interviewees, to support the student’s claim.
Lesson
Genre Awareness
As students consider how authors use sources in various ways to create different kinds of texts, instructors can highlight the ways in which different genres demand different approaches to sources. Using BEAM/BEAT, instructors can encourage students to draw parallels across genres, identifying, for example, how authors similarly find occasion to make arguments for different audiences by responding to previous sources, or how different genres similarly use exhibit sources as material for analysis.
Metacognition
This lesson is primarily about developing a new way of thinking about texts (how authors use sources, rather than what sources are), so reflection is integrated throughout the lesson, from group reflection in class discussion to written reflection in the annotated bibliography.
PART I: CHECK PRIOR KNOWLEDGE AND (RE)INTRODUCE BEAM/BEAT
- Ask whether any of your students have come across BEAM/BEAT in their WR 120 classes. Although at first students might not seem familiar with the framework, some will realize they’ve had some exposure once you start discussing the terminology.
- Begin by brainstorming as a group the ways in which students have used sources in past papers for other classes. Keep track on the board.
- Distribute (or project) the BEAM/BEAT in the Disciplines handout and introduce the terminology that the class will share over the course of the semester.
- Have students try to connect some of the material on the board to the concepts outlined in the handout.
PART II: DISCUSS A SHARED READING
- Take a look at a scholarly reading you’ve assigned for that or an earlier class period. Try to pick one in which you can identify at least one use of each BEAM/BEAT category.
- Have students consider the ways in which that author is using sources.
PART III: PRACTICE AND REFLECT IN CLASS
- Divide your class into small groups.
- Give each group one of the shared course sources to discuss.
- Have groups brainstorm to see which ways they might be able to use their assigned source in a research paper.
- Ask students to catalogue those BEAM/BEAT uses on the board and let each group present the various possible uses of its source to the rest of the class.
- Leave 10 or 15 minutes at the end of this activity for individual reflection.
- Ask students to consider which of the shared course sources can act as springboards for their own research projects.
- How might they use those sources in terms of BEAM/BEAT?
- How might their choices of rhetorical approaches affect the kind of research they would then need to perform?
- How might it affect the type of audience they might be able to engage?
PART IV: PRACTICE AND REFLECT INDEPENDENTLY
- Prompt students to reflect, as they perform their own research, on how they might use sources they come across to inspire and construct compelling arguments in their papers.
- Assign the Mid-Research Annotated Bibliography, which asks students to craft BEAM/BEAT-centered annotations of what they’ve found so far and reflect on the rhetorical roles their sources will play.
- Specify a rough number of sources you expect to see in this version of the bibliography, depending on how far along students are supposed to be when this is assigned. For this assignment, more is not necessarily better, as students need to have the chance to write the annotations carefully and reflect on the gaps in their research so far.
- Make sure there is still time to do further research after this version of the bibliography is due, so students can reflect on and refine their research before they begin drafting the paper.
- Use the BEAM/BEAT terminology when you respond to student work, and continue to use it to frame class discussions and peer reviews so that students become comfortable with identifying rhetorical strategies for source use.
Variations and Follow-Ups
Alternative lesson ideas
- Use BEAM/BEAT in WR 120 to help students map and describe the rhetorical moves an author makes to integrate sources in a scholarly piece you’ve assigned. BEAM/BEAT can especially help students see how signal verbs work when writers synthesize and respond to other sources. Using these terms in assignments can also help students understand the ways different kinds of sources might help shape their arguments.
- In WR 151, students can fine-tune their oral communication by framing their statements around sources with BEAM/BEAT signal verbs that clearly indicate to listeners how the speaker is using a source.
- In WR 152, BEAM/BEAT can help students think about how sources other than texts can function in a piece. Bringing BEAM/BEAT into the conversation might spur interesting discussions about whether a photograph can make an argument or how something that seems like it’s only good for supplying background, like an online database, can also be interpreted as an exhibit.
- Since WR 153 courses are likely to use a wide variety of sources, BEAM/BEAT can help students understand what kinds of sources they are examining and the different ways in which those sources can function: for example, a painting can present an argument while an op-ed piece may function as an exhibit source. Students can also consider what kinds of sources they are producing (scholarly papers, creative short fiction, graphic novels, podcasts, TED talks, etc.) and the different ways in which readers can classify and respond to those sources.
Suggested follow-ups
- Theory or method sources are often some of the most challenging for students to learn to use expertly; consider modeling how to use a text as a theory source for the content of your class, specifically.
- This exercise helps students take another look at their exhibit sources within the context of other sources in the BEAM/BEAT framework.
- As they work to include their research into a new genre or discipline later in the semester, ask students to consider how different genres or audiences do or do not demand different approaches to sources; consider the exercise How Research Works in a New Genre for this task.
Suggested flipped learning modules
Further Reading
For students
- Purdue OWL’s section on annotated bibliographies offers an overview of the genre and also some samples
- Project Information Literacy’s Algorithm study is useful when discussing research sources and biases with students.
- Turabian, Kate L. Student’s Guide to Writing College Papers. 5th ed., edited by Gregory G. Colomb, et al., University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Turabian’s Student’s Guide to Writing College Papers covers source discovery and use in Chapters 2, 4 and 5, using common terminology of “primary,” “secondary,” and “tertiary” to classify sources. This terminology is comfortable for most students not only because it is familiar from high school but also because it is relatively simple. These terms say what a source is, based on its textual features, and leave important questions about a writer’s choices and purposes out of the equation. Whenever in the semester you do assign the chapters on sources from the book, you’ll have the opportunity to clarify the difference between BEAM/BEAT and primary/secondary/tertiary. Remind students that BEAM/BEAT is about strategies for using sources.
- “Chapter 13: Thinking About Roles of Sources.” Choosing and Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research, edited by Teaching & Learning, University Libraries, The Ohio State University.
This chapter in an open-source textbook offers succinct definitions, clear examples, and classroom activities that help introduce students to the different roles sources can play using the BEAM framework.
For instructors
- Bizup, Joseph. “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 27, no. 1, 2008, pp. 72-86.
Bizup describes the BEAM/BEAT method in full here: why we need it, what it has to offer, and how it works. This article is a must-read for faculty. While some instructors (see Rubick below) have students read the article, we recommend that faculty teach the ideas from it rather than assign it in the course.
- Rubick, Kate. “Flashlight: Using Bizup’s BEAM to Illuminate the Rhetoric of Research.” Reference Services Review, vol. 43, no. 1, 2015, pp. 98-111.
This article describes how a librarian and a rhetoric instructor collaborated to introduce the BEAM/BEAT approach to undergraduates. In addition to offering a succinct overview of BEAM/BEAT and an example of using it in a course, the author provides a literature review for further reading on how the system has been taken up by different kinds of instructors and how it has been adapted in other disciplines. This article also helpfully discusses how BEAM/BEAT can help faculty foster the threshold concepts put forward in the Association of College & Research Libraries’ “Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education,” a set of core concepts for teachers of information literacy.
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