ENG 100: Franco-American Snowshoeing Unit 3

Unit 3: Introduction

Writing the Conversation asks you to pursue a question that interests you, engage in effective library research, and communicate what you learned to a specific professional audience.

How to combine all the stuff/ mapping out your research?

You Will Learn:

• Research as inquiry
  • formulate questions for research based on information gaps or on reexamination of existing, possibly conflicting, information;
  • determine an appropriate scope of investigation;
  • organize information in meaningful ways;
  • draw reasonable conclusions based on the analysis and interpretation of information.
• Searching strategy
  • determine the initial scope of the task required to meet their information needs;
  • utilize divergent (e.g., brainstorming) and convergent (e.g., selecting the best source) thinking when searching.

Secondary Research

The fateful day has arrived! Your professor has asked you to do a research paper or project.

Secondary research, which you are currently doing or are about to do, is made up of building blocks of other sources (articles, books, artifacts, photographs, newspapers, lab results) woven together with your own thoughts. This is where your skill of primary and secondary source analysis come into play.

But how do you do that? Indeed. Making an argument out of sources is a learned skill, so don’t feel upset if you’re unsure about how to do this.

Think of it this way:

The research paper or project you turn in is a brick house. The bricks in the house are the sources on your topic.

The mortar that holds the bricks together into a shape are your thoughts. Everyone's brick house will look different based on what bricks they use, or how they put the bricks together, or both.

Be Flexible

First off, don’t start by deciding your opinion on a topic is the correct one (cats are better than dogs) and THEN try to find sources that prove that opinion. As a scholar it's important (and expected) to have an open mind and to be swayed by the evidence rather than stick to your original opinion. If you just use research that back up your own opinions your research won’t be balanced. It also won’t stand up to scrutiny by other scholars.

You can start out with ideas on your topic, but you should be open to shifting those ideas based on the research you find. If, while you’re researching, you only find one point of view about your topic (cats are better than dogs), make an effort to see if there are other points of view on it (dogs are better than cats, guinea pigs are better than either cats or dogs).

A librarian can help you with this.

When you’re researching, assume that you’ll change your specific topic several times.

You’ll start with a Broad Topic: Snowshoeing

After doing some initial research you learn that snowshoeing falls into two categories; sport and recreation. Based on this you can move from your Broad Topic to the Narrowed Topic: Snowshoeing as a winter recreational activity.

Narrowing your Topic

This is then followed by MORE research and probably several different drafts of your Narrowed topic: The history of snowshoeing as winter recreation, History of snowshoeing clubs in Canada and Maine, History of snowshoeing clubs in Franco-American Lewiston, Maine. It all depends on what sources you find and what sparks your interest.

Eventually you’ll come to your Focused Topic: Popularity of snowshoe clubs in Lewiston, ME and other Franco-American centers in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.

Mind Mapping

Your professor and a librarian can help you with this process: Your professor can help you narrow your topic, and a librarian can help you in your search for sources.

When it comes to creating the mortar (thoughts) about your brick house, aka what you’re going to argue or persuade people about in your research paper or project, think about what your sources are telling you and be on the lookout for information gaps, conflicting information, or new ways of looking at information about your topic.

It's helpful to create a mind map to help identify these things. Mind maps are visual drawings that look like spider webs or family trees, with words and ideas branching off of a main subject.

You can draw them on paper, or use sticky notes or scraps of paper, or use a free digital one online. For the ones below we used mindmup.com

For more about mindmaps try the Learning Commons:

https://usm.maine.edu/agile/mind-mapping

This is a way to get YOUR thoughts down on a page, so do what feels right for YOU.

Making Connections

Hopeful you’ll begin to see gaps, conflicts, or connections.

For example, you might have spotted the conflicting information about when snowshoeing was popular. Gillian Poulter in the “Snowshoeing and lacrosse” said that by snowshoe clubs were popular in the 1880s and 1890s, and died down after that, yet the snowshoe club badges from the Franco-American collection are 35-52 years after that, which led us to our Focused Topic.

Get Scholarly

After you’ve done your research and are in the process of deciding what you would like to argue in your paper or project, it helps to create an outline of your topic and the evidence (sources) you have.

You’ll have seen how your specific discipline uses sources in the secondary sources you’ve looked at while researching. Take a minute or two to see how those authors used evidence in their arguments. These can act as models for you when it comes to writing your research. Notice that they use a lot of evidence. Scholars (by which we mean you and your professors) don’t assume that you know everything so they want to know why you’re thinking about something in a certain way.

“Because I just do, that's why” is not how scholars argue something.

“Because Source A and Source B make me think this” is what scholars do. They are interested in your thought process. What sources did you read that made you think the way you do?

Sometimes it's helpful to, again, use a mind map.

For example after researching and pulling in more sources on our Focused Topic, we’ve create a thesis for our paper:

“With time, distance, and affluence Franco Americans created and joined snowshoe clubs as a declaration of their Canadian heritage and local social status.”

You plan on arguing this using the following points based on the Snowshoeing badges from the Franco-American Collection, the “Snowshoeing and lacrosse” article, and a few other sources you found:

1. Snowshoeing Clubs as social status in Canada
2. Using Snowshoeing as a connection to home
3. Snowshoe clubs as status symbols in New England

Snowshoeing Clubs as social status in Canada

• Upper middle class male activity in Canada 1840-1895

(Poulter, Gillian. "Snowshoeing and Lacrosse: Canada's Nineteenth-Century 'National Games'." Culture, Sport, Society, vol. 6, no. 2-3, 2003, pp. 293-320.)

(Dauphinais, Paul R. “A class act: French‐Canadians in organized sport, 1840–1910.” The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol.7, no.3, 1990, pp.432-442. DOI: 10.1080/09523369008713739. Accessed 13 July

2020)

• Canadians immigrated to American centers peak 1870-1890s

(Allen, James P. “Franco-Americans in Maine: A Geographical Perspective.” Acadiensis, vol. 4, no. 1, 1974, pp. 32–66. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30302472. Accessed 13 July 2020.)

Using Snowshoeing as a connection to home

• Snowshoes clubs pop up in American in the 1920s

(Speech given by Louis-Philippe Gagné on the topic of an upcoming International Snowshoers' Convention. Louis-Philippe Gagné Papers, Franco-American Collection, University of Southern Maine Libraries.)

"1949 Snowshoeing Speech" by Louis-Philippe Gagné

• Part of a larger movement to protect cultural heritage between World Wars.

(Brault, G.. The French - Canadian Heritage in New England, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1986. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.wv-o-ursus-proxy01.ursus.maine.edu/lib/usmmaine-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3331756.)

• Occur in the places with the largest Franco American populations.

(Allen, James P. “Franco-Americans in Maine: A Geographical Perspective.” Acadiensis, vol. 4, no. 1, 1974, pp. 32–66. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30302472. Accessed 13 July 2020.)

• Snowshoe Badges : Lowell, MA, Lewiston, ME, Biddeford, ME, Berlin, New Hampshire.

(Louis-Philippe Gagné Papers, Franco-American Collection, University of Southern Maine Libraries.)

• Clubs activities mirror those of Canadian clubs at their height

(Morrow, Don. “The Knights of the Snowshoe: A Study of the Evolution of Sport in Nineteenth Century Montreal.” Journal of Sport History, vol. 15, no. 1, 1988, pp. 5–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43609339. Accessed 13 July 2020.)

Snowshoe clubs as status symbols in New England

• Franco Americans had achieved middle or upper class status by this time.

(Brault, G.. The French - Canadian Heritage in New England, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1986. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.wv-o-ursus-proxy01.ursus.maine.edu/lib/usmmaine-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3331756.)

(Dauphinais, Paul R. “A class act: French‐Canadians in organized sport, 1840–1910.” The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol.7, no.3, 1990, pp.432-442. DOI: 10.1080/09523369008713739. Accessed 13 July 2020)

Practice

Using mind map software or paper and pencil create a mind map on the topic for your upcoming paper assignment. If you can, include where you got the information from for each of the bubbles.

Your mind map should have three layers. The center should be your broad topic (snowshoeing) with at least two key themes (social activity, sport) related to that broad topic as offshoots, and at least one offshoot (dinners, racing) from each of those. Offshoots could be themes or questions you still have about your board topic, or sources you’ve found on those themes.