Competency 6d: Citation Pearl

My topic is teaching multiculturalism and multicultural literature in elementary school classrooms.

Database: Library Lit.

I started with a hit from my successive fractions search in Academic Search Complete.

Using Children's Folktale to Explore Multiculturalism by Linda B. Alexander and Maria Sanez

I was able to find this article in Library Lit. and then clicked on full display to see the subject headings. These headings were: school libraries/activity projects for Social Studies, multiculturalism/teaching and school libraries/Florida. Since my topic is multiculturalism and multicultural literature I then chose to explore the multiculturalism/teaching subject term.

This resulted in 17 articles. Here are two examples.

DeVoogd, G. Question Authority. School Library Journal v. 52 no. 4 (April 2006) p. 48-52
Accession Number:
200609100763029

Abilock, D. Educating Students for Cross-Cultural Proficiency. Knowledge Quest v. 35 no. 2 (November/December 2006) p. 10-13
Accession Number:
200630507032002

Reflection:

I enjoyed this search and feel it was very helpful. I think that when you find a good article it is important to look over the citations offered there. It can lead to very good information. The DeVoogd article is very interesting because it discusses getting students to think critically. I often look at a bibliography at the end of an article in order to find other information that might be relevant to my research. I did not realize that this type of searchig was called a citation pearl. I am glad to be able to label this approach that I have used in the past. I also enjoyed using the subject headings. I had never used these before and was so surprised at what I found. I feel that this type of search can be very helpful-especially if you are researching to learn-not researching to come up with a new idea. In my particular case, I am researching to learn about multicultural literature and how to use it in my classroom.