We’ve nearly finished the first term of the new first year seminars, and I’ve worked with a whole bunch of them now, and they’ve all been totally different. Sure, they’re all required to give students practice finding, evaluating, and using information, but just as we suspected, there are lots and lots of ways to work those things into a course. Some courses have taught The Research Paper, others have concentrated on teaching students to build context for what they’re reading and hearing in class.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, though, it’s been that I am not there to teach the students how to find, evaluate, and use information. I tried that with a couple of courses, and it failed. Miserably.

No, I’m there to do two things: to give the students a couple of skills they need right now, and to spark their imaginations about what could be possible if they decided to make a habit of this research stuff.

This clicked for me the other day when I thought about what it would look like if the college decided that all first year students have a foreign language component in their first year seminar, or a biology component, or a stats component. The guest lecturer from French or Bio or Econ would never be expected to teach French or Bio or stats in half an hour or an hour. Instead, they’d get the students interested in their fields of study by providing just enough basic knowledge to make some interesting, higher order process make sense, and then they’d concentrate on making that higher order process interesting and engaging for the rest of the half hour or hour.

You can’t inoculate students in one easy session and expect that now they know French.

Note to self: There’s no way to teach it all, anyway, so think harder about things that are both practical and imagination-sparking, and then teach those things more consistently. These students like to be intellectually engaged — that’s why they’re here — so go with that. Be a guest lecturer.

Yesterday I taught two classes pretty much back to back. The first was to senior English majors embarking on their thesis projects, and the second was for first year students taking an English 100 course. At the beginning of the first class we talked about what the seniors were most worried about as they started their theses, and nearly all of them worried about defining the scope of their project so that it would be long enough, short enough, or completable in the given time. The second class was all about picking a topic, but the atmosphere in the room was quite a bit more apprehensive than it had been when I went to teach them about finding sources.

And it struck me that maybe finding a researchable topic that’s of appropriate scope for your aims is one thing that’s only learnable to a point. Maybe it’s just always hard. Maybe there’s something about it that, if it were easy, would actually make things worse. Maybe that struggle is actually one of the central pieces of scholarship — the thing that makes it work in the first place.

School starts on Monday, and with it comes a brand new set of graduation requirements for all first year students. The new requirement that most affects me is the required Argument and Inquiry seminars that all first year students take in their first term at college, and this seminar includes the first cross-curricular mandatory information literacy requirement we’ve ever had.

Obviously I’d think this is a good thing. But what I hadn’t realized was what I’d find most good about this good thing: the major pay-off of this new requirement may be the conversations I’ve had with several faculty in the last couple of months as they develop their A&I seminars for this fall. Just the fact that the seminars are new and that they’re a little intimidating to teach means that we’ve felt at liberty to completely mess with “normal.”

“What if we do away with the ‘library class,’” I ask, and they don’t look at me like I’m growing horns. They say, “What would that look like?”

Another professor came to see if I thought she was completely bonkers for wanting me to come in 4 or 5 times for 15-20 minutes each rather than just once, and I could say “Not at all! Here are the kinds of ways we’re doing that with these other classes.”

And these are professors I’ve never worked with before and professors I’ve worked with consistently over the years — creative and thoughtful professors, all — but it feels totally different because we’re both pretty uncertain about how we’ll make these seminars work. We’re brainstorming and upending the status quo with wild abandon, and nothing feels taboo. And sometimes we settle back on a format similar to the more normal class: assignment-specific instruction for 50 minutes. But when we do, we do so with more confidence that this format suites the course’s learning goals rather than just being What We’ve Done Before.

I just had a really fun meeting with a professor who is developing a new freshman seminar for Fall, and we were trying to work out what exactly first year students could reasonably and usefully get out of her course in terms of information literacy, particularly since she’s interested in ditching the Big Final Research Paper kind of assignment. As we talked, we realized that what we really wanted students to get out of this course is an understanding that intellectual output is the product of intellectual choice.

So, if they write responses to readings and are asked what kinds of evidence the author used to support the argument, and what other kinds of evidence could have been used, that’s information literacy. If we talk to them about the ways that citation styles reveal epistemology, that’s information literacy. If we ask them to think about why articles appeared in one kind of publication rather than another, that’s information literacy. If we talk about disciplinary vocabulary, that’s information literacy.

And all of this will, of course, mean introductions to standard sources and search strategies and things. And some of this will involve 10-15 minute visits from me. But all of it should help these first year students move from thinking of published literature as The Voice Of Truth (to be paraphrased and revered) and start seeing it as a living body of work that each scholar navigates, and that each scholar shapes while navigating.

So I guess that’s another piece of the answer to my ongoing question: An information literate student can recognize intellectual choice and make appropriate intellectual choices when gathering, evaluating, and communicating evidence.

I spent the last two afternoons in a workshop for professors who are thinking of teaching Carleton’s new first year seminars next year, so I’m now well steeped in thoughts about first year students. And the more I think about it, the more I think that my main goal for first year students is for them to understand the far-reaching impact and usefulness of understanding the concept of communities of inquiry.

This is a stuffed cow. (Photo by Catherine Woolley)

Think about it. If you know who you’re talking with in this vast thing we call “scholarly communication,” it helps you make appropriate choices about everything from topic to citation style to rhetorical style. It reinforces the idea that you’re contributing something to a conversation rather than just parroting back a set of facts. It allows you to evaluate sources and arguments (none of which are inherently “good” or “bad” regardless of context). It helps you know which words are meaningful and therefore ripe for use as search terms. And perhaps most important, it helps you decide what you’ll need to back up with evidence in the first place. After all, only the things that count as odd or new or controversial within your community need explicit backing up, and these things can change radically from community to community. The omnipresent pieces of your community’s world rarely need explanation.