[Note: the collaborative research project outlined below resulted in a digital annotated bibliography of Woolf scholarship. You can access the bibliography here—and at the end of this reflection.]
As a part of our Spring 2025 class on Virginia Woolf at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU), we completed an assignment that helped us enhance transferable skills. Our professor, Dr. Laci Mattison, partnered with the university’s PAGES program, which focuses on career exploration and preparation for Humanities and Social Science majors, in conjunction with FGCU’s new Quality Enhancement Plan, The Skills Advantage: From College to Career. The Skills Advantage enables students to earn microcredential digital badges that can be linked to platforms like LinkedIn or displayed on resumes and, in this way, makes visible to future employers the valuable skills that we develop throughout our college careers.
Transferable skills badges are earned through a process that includes three artifacts and accompanying reflection essays, as well as a final interview. The artifacts are projects students complete either as part of their coursework or through extracurriculars that reflect the development of specific skills. Our professor created a Collaborative Annotated Bibliography Research Project, which allowed us to work toward the transferable skills teamwork badge.
The project was scaffolded over 11 weeks, beginning with a session with our Subject Librarian Rachel Tait-Ripperdan, during which we began with the four-volume Virginia Woolf: Critical and Primary Sources (2020) as a guide for locating high quality research. We include the assignment below:
Assignment Overview
This course’s central focus on Virginia Woolf allows for a deep engagement with one of the major British authors of the twentieth century. With this assignment, a collaborative annotated bibliography, we will delve even deeper to explore research related to five topics of continuing importance for Woolf scholars: gender and sexuality, empire and race, politics, ecology, and aesthetics.
The learning objectives of this assignment are two-fold:
1. To develop and advance collaborative skills and generate an artifact that can be applied towards FGCU’s teamwork badge
2. To enhance research literacy skills.
This assignment will be completed in 5 teams, with each team responsible for selecting 10 high-quality, peer-reviewed secondary sources representative of scholarship on Woolf in relation to the team’s topic of inquiry. The completed assignment will include the following:
1. A critical introduction
2. Annotations for all 10 secondary sources
3. Correct MLA citations for all 10 secondary sources
4. An individual reflection on your collaborative work
5. A screenshot of your individual submission for the teamwork badge
Sustained attention to scholarship in this long-term team project will ground us in the ongoing scholarly conversations about the significance of Woolf’s fiction and nonfiction; as such, it also lays a foundation for the individual work you will do on your final essays. The more we understand about these scholarly conversations, the more we can contribute to them through strong and compelling arguments of our own. While we usually think of writing and research as solitary tasks, this assignment underscores the centrality of collaboration for these tasks: we do not work, write, or think in a void but are always inspired by, responding to, and building upon the ideas of our predecessors and contemporaries.
The full assignment description can be viewed here.
Reflections on the Assignment
While we usually think of research as a solitary task, this project illustrated how it can be a collaborative experience. For this project, four teams located and annotated ten secondary sources each about Virginia Woolf’s life and work. Our team was tasked with collecting sources of information related to the topic of politics in Woolf’s writings.
We had three other people in our group, and we quickly developed a strong team structure based on the team contract we created with our professor’s guidance. Part of the team contract included determining what our team role would be (managing editor, editor, primary researcher, or copy editor). We chose to be the primary researchers for our group because we both enjoy the research process. Everyone was tasked with finding sources related to our subject, and our job as primary researchers was to check that all sources qualified for the assignment’s source guidelines and to work with our teammates to select ten representative sources that demonstrated a range of scholarship on our topic.
Our team thrived off of open communication and constructive feedback. At the beginning of the project, we set due dates for ourselves. These dates included when we should have our resources by, when we should have these resources annotated, and when we should start working on the bibliography and critical introduction together. Because of our time management, we completed our tasks early and turned in the group project a week ahead of the due date. Sticking to team roles, delegating tasks, and establishing goals early on helped to prevent potential disputes as well.
When working on the bibliography, we primarily used google docs. Our managing editor/ team leader created a shared document in which we collected and organized our independent research. During breakout sessions at the end of class meetings, we reviewed each other’s sources and offered advice for revision. When the time came, we created another document to work on the bibliography together. The copy and managing editors formatted the document to meet the assignment’s requirements and double checked people’s citations to ensure they met MLA 9 standards.
Through this project, we learned that even though English majors typically perform research by themselves, it can be more beneficial to do research in a group. By collaborating with others, we were able to split up the work, which decreased the amount of time spent researching per person. Our sources were of higher quality, and we were able to fact check each other, which improved our annotations and our citations. This assignment not only improved the quality of the bibliographies, but also allowed us to improve our team building, interpersonal communication, and conflict-resolution skills.
As honors program students, we took on the extra task of compiling our class’s bibliographies onto a single website for ease of access. In doing so, we turned our class’s separate projects into one, large resource that we could all use when writing our final essays for the course. In addition, we hoped to contribute to the ongoing conversations surrounding Virginia Woolf.
IVWS 