So lesson plans are kind of hard for me to write down in a way that feels authentic. Still, with all that as preamble, it occurs to me that even sketches can help people looking for ideas. I’ve benefited greatly from colleagues sharing their sketches with me. So here goes. (I’ve chosen to focus on 100-level classes because the people asked me about those specifically.)

First, there are several modules that I’ve already written about here in more or less detail. While they shift with the given context, I love to work them in whenever relevant, and I think they help 100-level students begin to get some practice with the kind of critical information literacy that my colleagues and I wrote about in our recent article CSI(L) Carleton: Forensic Librarians and Reflective Practices. Other similar modules are linked to in the lessons plans I’ve sketched out later in the post.

• The value of book reviews
  I started toying with this before the Information Literacy in Student Writing really got going, but I’ve continued to use book reviews as valuable sources since and worked it in whenever I can because of  the useful habits of mind it helps develop.
• Citation as a lens for interdisciplinarity
  This one really is a fleshed out lesson plan (which takes about 20 minutes) and the main points of which I’ve used over and over again in many courses with great success.
• Turning topics into searches
  Builds off of the idea of concept mapping in ways that then generate source decisions and search terms in very practical ways. This takes about 15 minutes and it helps if you have some seeds to start with that you can lay out on the board as the students are working.

Most classes need to get at some combination of conceptual and practical learning goals, so here are two very different sessions that I’ve given recently. I chose the first NOT because it’s one of my crowning achievements. It’s anything but that and I’d love to hear ideas for streamlining it. But it does show the combination of practical and conceptual, and it’s a multi-cultural topic (which matches the needs of at least one of the people who asked for a lesson plan example). In terms of the match with the concepts we wrote about in the “CSI(L) Carleton” article, this class teach concrete search skills but emphasize the context-building nature of scholarship, the importance of watching for the breadcrumbs scholars leave for you in their writing to tell you what they’re drawing on, what related concepts are important, and the purpose of using sources in the first place.

CCST 100: Growing Up Cross Culturally (had to be taught in a room with no student computers)

Assignment: Write a paper based on one of the cross-cultural studies topics they’ve talked about in class (which follow the life-stages and study how cultures influencing each other can change the way people experience those life stages, such as birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, adulthood, old age, and death). Find a few sources (3-5-ish) outside of course readings to support your arguments. Students are encouraged to take inspiration from recent international news/culture stories.

Resources: Research Guide, New York Times article on Japanese tooth un-straightening, and a Term Diary

Introduction (10 minutes)

• Why only a few sources?
  The purpose of your sources is not to provide an exhaustive list of everything written on your topic. It’s also not to allow you to write a report. Instead, you’re writing your own paper, and you’re using a few outside voices to help you situated your ideas within the “conversation” that’s already happening on a topic. Conversations don’t work well if you parrot back what everyone says, but they also don’t work well if you just go on in a monologue and make everyone sit back and listen. Conversations work well when you build on what people have said and contribute new ideas or perspectives.
• What constitutes “on my topic”?
  We often look for things that are “on our topics” but sometimes it’s more interesting (or necessary, if the topic is too new) to look for related topics or analogous topics and talk about how they support or contribute to your understanding of your topic. THIS IS OK. Scholars do it all the time and for this assignment it’s almost a given that you’ll have to do the same. Give some examples. (First year students often don’t realize this is allowed.)

Brainstorming Exercise (working in small groups – 20 minutes)

• Term economy (see this blog post)
  Computers can’t read. They match letters in a row. Consequently, we have to figure out what letters in a row to feed into the computer to make it spit out the results we want. This is why we’ll be using a term diary to record keywords and phrases as we go along today, and then using those to help us come up with new searches.

In small groups, read the New York Times article on the new fad where Japanese women make their teeth crooked. Answer the following questions and report back. We’ll use these concepts and terms for our searches in the rest of the session.

1. What concepts is this related to? (symmetry, beauty, youth culture, individualism, etc)
2. Who might have written more about this or related concepts?
3. What questions might they have asked of these topics?
4. Where might these things have been published? (blogs, newspapers, academic articles, books, etc)
5. What are some key terms associated with these topics?

Wikipedia with a glance at Goolge (5 minutes)

• Basic searches using key terms already generated. These will inevitably reveal a wikipedia article. Mention that this is wonderful. Watch students faint in surprise…
• discussion: You’ve heard that wikipedia isn’t good to use — why is that? What might it be good for? (use as a jumping-off place like any other reference work, good for term gathering and to point you toward related concepts and further reading — bibliographies are wonderful things)
• term gathering and source gathering as we jump around and follow links through Wikipedia together with students leading as much as possible– add to our growing list of terms in our term diaries (In this year’s class, we stumbled on the term “wabi-sabi” which is about the many things, including the aesthetic of asymmetry.)

LexisNexis, for the international coverage (10 minutes)

• Point out that we’re searching “every word the journalists wrote” so think like a journalist when coming up with terms to try.
• Try several searches using the terms we already found (letting students choose). Collect new terms, concepts, and potential authors/experts along the way.
• Introduce the idea of concept clusters (i.e. boolean searching)

Academic Search Premier (10 minutes)

• Explain the differences between free-text databases and indexing/abstracting databases — now we have to think like scholars/librarians when choosing terms to use
• how to limit to scholarly articles
• discussion of how scholarly articles differ from newspapers in terms of scope and topic coverage
• student-lead searching as before, this time introducing the power of subject headings.

Books (5 minutes)

• Books often contain much broader topics than articles, so now we have to zoom out and look at broader topics that might give us good foundations for our topic.
• student-lead searching as before, pointing out the importance and power of subject headings.
• Point out call numbers — remind students that they can ask for help, especially the first few times they use call numbers to locate books

ENGL 100: Visions of the Waste Land

Context: This course had no research component. It was important to the professor that students learn to read closely and delve into the primary source text. However, the professor and I both realized that it can be hard to find interesting things in texts if you lack the context to know what’s interesting when you see it. So we devised this context-building session and assignment to help students know how to build up their own knowledge to the point where they can accomplish the kind of careful reading the professor wanted.

Assignment: Select an article that is illuminating, write a 200-word summary to be handed in, be prepared to lead the class in a discussion of a passage in the book based on both your interpretation and the article you found.

Resources: Research Guide

Introduction (5 minutes)

• Matching Evidence to Audience
  There are lots of kind of evidence, and in other courses you’ll be asked to find books and articles and statistics and images and who knows what else to back up your arguments. Lead a little discussion about kinds of evidence that may matter to some audiences but not others, like blogs or something your aunt said or aggregate statistics vs data.  In this course your evidence is the text itself and your audience is not interested in other kinds of evidence.
• Context-Building
  However, all of this doesn’t mean that YOU aren’t allowed to know things other than the text. Far from it. Context-building helps you figure out what questions to ask of the text and also to see how other scholars in the field have accomplished this kind of thing so that you can model yourself a bit on their approaches.

Finding Models to inspire you and aspire to: (5 minutes)

• Show how to search within the publication “The Explicator.”

Finding the backgrounds of words: OED (use “smashing” as an example) (5 minutes)

• How words get into the OED
• What’s in there (etymologies and date charts and quotes)

Scholarly articles often provide a lot of context/insight: JSTOR (20 minutes)

• Limit to literary journals only
• Building concept clusters
• Brainstorm together about some concepts that might be interesting to follow up and what words might be associated with those concepts. Work together to cluster those concept (having students write on the whiteboard together)
• Have students work in small groups to find an article and report back on why they chose the article they did (emphasizing aspects of evaluation by making them articulate a choice and discuss it together).

Following up on a citation (15 minutes)

• Usually one of the best ways to find information because scholars index their own literature. Bibliographies are creative things build from experience and wide readings, which means you can find connections to things you wouldn’t find purely by searching.
• Explain that book citations list a place and publisher while articles don’t, and how to follow up on book citations (catalog) vs article citations (A-Z list) – this whole thing takes about a minute.
• Working in small groups again, use the article they found JSTOR to find a book or article that we have access to. Bonus points if you find a book citation that we have access to.
• Go together to collect one of the found books from the stacks (have an example on hand just in case nobody found a book that’s available). Look at near-by books to talk about what kinds of context that helps them build. Mention that similar call numbers in different areas of the library (reference, periodicals, etc) will be about similar topics. Show the “Google of the book” (i.e. the index) of a book.

Wrap-up (10 minutes)

• Group discussion about how what we’ve found today applies to what they’re reading. Any words or themes that seem more important now?

“Wait, this is information literacy?” a rhetorician at our workshop exclaimed in excited surprise. “But this is so cool!” And we wanted to respond “YES!” not only from joyful pride but also out of recognition. After all, we too had had very similar reactions to our own work with information literacy, and not that long ago. We too had realized that information literacy could be different than we had originally thought (or that the ACRL information literacy standards had led us to believe). Information literacy could be more alive and integrated within the discourse of academic work. It could be more applicable across disciplines and genres and rhetorical goals. And these revelations remapped our practice.

So begins the essay my colleagues Danya Leebaw, Heather Tompkins and I wrote for In the Library with the Lead Pipe that was published last night. It focuses on how our Information Literacy in Student Writing project has helped us learn more about information literacy and how that has influenced our teaching and our work with faculty and departments.

What I hadn’t expected was that the professor had to tear the students away from a spontaneous but very heated debate over the importance of the book as a physical thing vs an intangible narrative. Does it actually matter if you hold a book in your hands? Is there something about that experience that matters? Or is it simply a waste of resources and space to go about printing mass quantities of things that could exist as bytes instead?

The most vehement ebook advocate raged against “self-righteous book smellers” while the greatest advocate for printed books talked about how it was important to be able to capture pieces of history not just in the text of the novel itself but in construction and display as well. At one point I threw a wrench into the “it’s economically unconscionable to ship printed material around” argument by telling them the 2 second version of ebook lending woes in libraries and the digital divide (I couldn’t resist). At another point the professor and I had to step in when things got heated to the point of ad hominem attacks. It’s pretty safe to say that I haven’t been involved in another class where the students were passionate almost to the point of blows.

What was the resolution? We decided that it’s complicated, that neither side is categorically right, but that self-righteousness doesn’t get anyone very far.

Pretty interesting for a totally peripheral 10-minute piece of a library session.

(My next favorite part of the class was the audible gasp when I said “Well, if I were getting started on this assignment [on the Great Gatsby and the Jazz Age] I’d probably start with Wikipedia.” Bwa-ha-ha-ha)

Librarianship is collaborative by nature. Nothing we have or do makes any sense at all unless it’s connected with our community’s needs (however “community” is defined). The more separate and distinct it is, the less vitality it has. In my world, all of this means that my work matters to the degree that I work with faculty, students, staff, and my library colleagues, and the degree to which they work with me.

I specialize a little bit, but I think there’s great strength in specializing in general research support. On a college campus, it can be hard to make a case for that kind of strength, but often when I feel I’m contributing most to the mission of the college it’s when I’m speaking from the position of generalist. I see students from all over the curriculum every day. That’s a different kind of knowledge of the campus.

Librarianship has to balance access and preservation. I want as much of each as possible, but sometimes they don’t get along very well in the real world of budgets and finite space and license agreements.

Librarians teach. Some are hired particularly for this purpose, so they spend a lot of time working at honing those skills and building up teacher expertise, but everyone teaches to some degree or another, directly or indirectly, in whatever capacity they serve in the library.

Librarians are kind of the Keepers of the Light of Information Literacy. And yet, ideally Information Literacy happens outside of librarianship. What’s better than me being good at this stuff? My students and colleagues being good at this stuff while doing work that matters to them, that’s what. So it behooves me to work creatively with people to see how close to that ideal we can come as a community.

So that’s a start. Now if I could just get the vague but important-feeling ideas about my philosophy of information literacy to coalesce a bit more… but that will have to wait for another time.

You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. …  You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (Burke 110-11)

This is Kenneth Burke’s analogy for academic writing, my own version of which I use in most of my classes. Composition instructors like the authors of They Say / I Say focus on the phrase “then you put in your oar” as the turning point (13-14). For me and my profession, the key phrase is “you have caught the tenor of the argument.” Embedded there I see so much about information literacy — what people are talking about, what positions have been covered already, what evidence counts as good evidence in this conversation, what terms will this group use and understand when talking about the topic, whom will you need to acknowledge as you lay out your position… You have caught the tenor of the argument.

Another thing I love about this conversational analogy is that the protagonist is never quite done listening to others and incorporating their ideas into new statements. The research process is not linear.

(Er, I’ve finished the prefaces and introduction to this book now. I promise not to write a blog post for every 5 pages of reading. Really.)

In my job talk for my current job (before I really knew anything about being a reference or instruction librarian, or about what my work would look like) I talked about how research allows you to listen in on the other end of the phone conversation — how any one piece of writing is only part of the story, and a fuller picture emerges when you listen to more voices.

My understanding and teaching about citation and attribution always deals with citations as rhetoric, not only because they build bridges between the various parts of the relevant conversation but also because they signal to your readers “See, I have chosen evidence that you will think is really great evidence for this claim, so please think highly of my claim.”

The rubric my colleagues and I have been developing to help us sift through student papers to learn about the students’ habits of mind when it comes to incorporating evidence into their own work is all couched in their rhetoric, since that’s all we have to go on. So we look for how well they make a case for their evidence being the ideal evidence for their goals, and then at how skillfully they weave it into their justification for their claims.

And now I’m reading They Say / I Say, which has gained great traction on our campus, and the first paragraph of the preface starts out:

The core of this book is the premise that good argumentative writing begins not with an act of assertion but an act of listening, of putting ourselves in the shoes of those who think differently from us. [...] When writing responds to something that has been said or might be said, it thereby performs the meaningful task of supporting, correcting, or complicating that other view. (xiii)

And I’m thinking “that sounds an awful lot like the way I teach information literacy.” Listening in on what’s been said before and using that activity not just as a way to gather facts but more importantly as an ongoing act of building a framework for your thinking and writing and communicating.

And I’m thinking that maybe I should actually learn something about rhetorical theory since I’m currently basing a whole lot of my work on an area that I really know very little about.

So, rhetorician denizens of the internet, what do you recommend that I read as I reverse-engineer some actual knowledge into this theme of mine?

I’d been feeling so proud of myself for “discovering” and beginning to teach information literacy as an arm of rhetoric, so enthused by the reaction it’s been getting from the faculty I work with. And look, there’s this article by Barbara from 1993.

Fister, Barbara. “Teaching the rhetorical dimensions of research.” Research Strategies 11, no. 4 (1993): 211-219.
If students perceive that the research process consists of merely locating, synthesizing, and presenting information from library sources, they will not fulfill the demands of college-level inquiry. This article examines the importance of teaching the rhetorical dimensions of research and suggests several relevant approaches that BI librarians can use when explaining access tools and research strategies.

The other class was very different. The professor couldn’t be there and had left me a long list of potentially useful things her students would need to know, but when I got there and asked them where they were with their paper topics, the conversation turned into a long brainstorming session where they helped each other come up with the required material culture artifacts that they’d need to incorporate into their papers. Only one of them needed the kinds of primary sources we have in the library, as it turns out. We did talk a bit about other primary and secondary sources that might be useful to them, and we did talk about how the strategies for finding out about and laying hands on primary sources is often fundamentally different from the strategies for secondary sources, but for the most part it was just the 13 of us thinking about how to illustrate their arguments with things like ear buds, album covers, magazines, and cigarette packs. And then I got up and showed them 10 minutes worth of “And here’s OAIster and the American Periodicals Series and ProQuest Historical Newspapers… just in case you ever need them.” I think they absolutely needed that time to think through their sources, but I also think that there’s very little that I could contribute to that experience.

In the first class, the overarching message was “there’s lots of stuff available,” which is ok, but maybe not the single most helpful message for first year students. In the second class the overarching message was “the library doesn’t have the sources you need” which felt odder. Both are often true, but neither are my favorite messages to convey.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about part of that conversation where I realized I really only gave half of an answer to a really good question. I was talking about using both Google Scholar and disciplinary databases together (expanding on my post about why undergraduates need those clunky databases anyway) and Rachel asked how I justify teaching some of this stuff when the assignment is really VERY basic: find 3 articles. I think there could be a lot of reasons, some better than others, but I think the main one for me is that I teach for my own amusement.

I don’t mean that I teach things that aren’t useful (well, I probably do, but not on purpose) but that I really think it’s ok to geek out a little in the classroom. That was one of the key things I learned at ACRL Immersion: being authentic is more important than being perfect, and students engage more with people who are engaged. If I’m actually interested in what I’m teaching, the classroom experience has got to be better than if I’m bored. And I am NOT interested in database interfaces. I’m just not. But boy can I ever geek out over citation and the way that it reveals how disciplines construct knowledge, and boy can I get excited about the ways people build up enough knowledge about a topic to do intelligent searches for new information on that topic.

I can’t possibly expect my students to care about something I don’t care about. But I can hope that if I care a lot they’ll at least be interested enough to wonder why I care. And if they’re nodding and smiling and laughing with (ok, maybe at) me, they’re more engaged than if they’re asleep, and maybe at that point I have a hope of pulling them along on the coat-tails of my own enthusiasm into the nitty-gritty of research.

Barring that, at least I won’t have been bored.

—

Adventures in Library Instruction – Episode 23 (MP3)

Posts referenced in the podcast:

• Google Scholar: Why would undergraduates need those clunky databases anyway?
• Reading Instrumentally
• Subversive Handouts
• Exploding an Article

I’ve talked before about how learning goals keep me focused and keep me from burning out on instruction, but it occurred to me in what felt like new says how the framework of learning goals could solve a lot of problems for me in ways that their less actionable cousins (like “best practices” or “standards” or even phrases like “user centered”) couldn’t.

Here’s what I mean in three examples:

• In my own teaching, there are usually 15 or 20 Very Important things that I wish I could teach my students in any given session. Using learning goals helps me prioritize from among the very important things, feel less guilty about letting some very important things fall by the wayside, remember to think about what they’re learning rather than what I’m teaching, and feel connected to the broader, more interesting issues of information literacy.
• In selecting a discovery tool, there are long, long lists of features and functions that user-centered design relies on. No interface has each specific feature, so how do we choose? How do we prioritize the list of very important features? What if we developed learning goals for our discovery system? What if these goals were something like being able to learn the differences between kinds of sources, be able to pick out important terms for the topic and field, and see where to go from here (different searches, different databases, different people). Maybe one system doesn’t have faceting but does have something else that reveals terms and directions. Maybe our usability tests could be more a long the lines of assessment of what the students learned by interacting with the system. Maybe this would all help us prioritize from the long list of important things to choose a system that functions in service of the mission of our library.
• In first year seminars (the context in which the original phrase came up), focusing on programmatic learning goals could help prioritize from the long list of things it’d be nice if all first year students knew. Maybe it would help guard against creating impossibly long check lists of things students should be exposed to, and therefore guard against treating first year seminars as massive inoculations that transform high school students into college students. Maybe it would also grant the teaching faculty the freedom to explore interesting topics in interesting ways while having similar learning outcomes.

Or maybe I’m just creating my own buzz phrase. Or maybe everyone else already knew this.

But for me, at my institution, expanding this framework beyond my direct teaching or my department’s strategic planning is helping me make those hard decisions that crop up all over the place and to make them with more confidence.