Looking for a fresh idea for class? Start with a question.

Should humans control the weather? Can bacteria talk to each other? What can the Salem witch trials tell us about the way history becomes literature?

A good class discussion can start with a good question. So can a research assignment, a debate or an unexpected connection between subjects.

Over the past year, the ProQuest blog has explored questions like these through research, primary sources, documentaries and other materials available through ProQuest.

We started wondering how some of these stories might translate to the classroom. Here are a few possibilities.

Ask A Question With No Easy Answer

Should humans be able to change the weather?

That question opens the door to much bigger ones about science, ethics, public policy and the environment.

Students could stake out an initial position on the question before beginning their research, then explore the evidence and different perspectives. Returning to the original question gives them something to reflect on: Has anything changed?

The approach could work in plenty of disciplines: begin not with a predetermined conclusion, but with a question complicated enough to reward investigation.

Put The Primary Source Next To The Story We Tell About It

The Salem witch trials have been studied by historians for centuries. They've also been transformed by writers, playwrights and popular culture.

The ProQuest blog The real story behind Salem’s shadows: from historical record to The Crucible puts those worlds side by side.

That suggests an interesting possibility for courses in literature, history, theater or cultural studies. Students might take a scene, character or claim from The Crucible and trace it back to the historical record.

What did Arthur Miller preserve? What did he change? And what might those choices reveal about the argument he was making for his own time?

It's one way to move from reading about history to examining how historical narratives are constructed.

Begin With Something Wonderfully Strange

Sometimes the subject supplies its own invitation.

The ProQuest blog The secret conversations happening all around us explores quorum sensing, the chemical signaling bacteria use to coordinate their behavior.

Which raises a pretty irresistible question: Can bacteria communicate?

How do organisms without brains or language coordinate their behavior? Students could form their own hypotheses before turning to the scholarly literature for an explanation.

It's a small shift in approach: begin with the surprising observation or mystery, then let research lead toward an explanation.

Make The Documentary The Beginning, Not The End

Documentary film offers another useful starting point.

ProQuest and ROCO Films bring documentaries into the classroom through Academic Video Online. Among the wide range of titles is Particle Fever, which follows scientists during the launch of CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

A film like this could become more than something students watch. They might identify a claim, controversy or unanswered question raised by the documentary and investigate it using scholarly literature, news coverage or primary sources.

How does the story on screen compare with what they discover? What has been simplified? What context is missing?

The exercise could create a natural bridge between subject-area research and media literacy.

Make AI Part Of The Research Question

Generative AI doesn't only have to be a tool students use, or something faculty have to manage. It can also be an object of inquiry.

The ProQuest blog When text becomes data: how AI is changing research, teaching and libraries explores AI, text analysis and the ways researchers can derive insights from large bodies of unstructured information.

That raises some useful questions about evidence.

For example, students might begin with an AI-generated response to a research question and investigate its claims using authoritative sources. What stands up? What needs qualification? What context has disappeared? What evidence would they need before making the same argument themselves?

The interesting question becomes less “Did you use AI?” and more “How do you know?”

Start Small: One Quotation, One Voice

Sometimes one piece of evidence is enough.

The ProQuest blog “If any of us make it, we all will.” uses quotations from Gloria Steinem as windows into her ideas and activism.

A quotation could serve just as easily as a starting point for student research. When was it said? What was happening politically and culturally? What argument was the speaker making? How did others respond?

From one voice, students can begin moving outward into a much larger historical conversation.

See Where Curiosity Leads

Faculty know their subjects, their students and their classrooms best. These ideas are offered as starting points, not prescriptions for building a course or assignment.

But inspiration can come from unexpected places: a strange scientific phenomenon, a documentary, an old newspaper, a provocative quotation or a question nobody in the room can immediately answer.

That's what makes the ProQuest blog interesting to us as a potential teaching resource. It's a collection of stories, certainly. But it's also a collection of starting points.

So the next time you're looking for a different way into a familiar subject, consider taking a browse. Dip into the archives to find posts on the French Revolution, the early sixties in America, what it was like to be a woman in Victorian England and what it was like to be Queen Victoria or Aretha Franklin, Indigenous arts and peoples, climate change and so much more.

You might find a question worth bringing to class.