This essay investigates the unique place Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility occupies in her development of free indirect discourse. The novel reworks the original epistolary design of Elinor and Marianne into third-person narration, and it contains extended passages of direct discourse. Characters make these extended speeches when they confess their pasts to Elinor, who then repackages their stories for others. This essay argues that the confession scenes in Sense and Sensibility not only reveal the back-stories of the novel, but also dramatize the interplay between voices that characterizes Austen's development of free indirect discourse.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to review selected publications in library-related literature and discuss the thematic approach to course design in colleges and universities and how it has been implemented into information literacy (IL) courses.
Design/methodology/approach
– A literature review of peer-reviewed journals, professional journals, magazines and blogs contextualizes the thematic approach to instruction at the college and university levels. Search terms included “thematic approach”, “thematic approach in education” and “theme-based instruction”; the search was restricted to articles published in the past 20 years.
Findings
– In addition to the IL courses, thematic-based instruction has been used in biology, chemistry, English, French literature, history, mathematics, philosophy and sociology courses in college and university campuses. While instructors report that the thematic approach enhances student learning, few studies have directly tested the impact. No studies have been published within the library science literature.
Originality/value
– Thematic approach is a newer concept in the world of IL instruction. While many professional journal articles and blog posts provide in-depth case studies of how thematic-based instruction has been implemented, this article draws from all disciplines and features a succinct summary of what works, what does not work and how to best implement a thematic approach in an IL course.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.