Category Archives: in my classroom

Some 100-level information literacy concepts in lesson plan form

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Several people have asked for examples of my lesson plans lately, which is both flattering and terrifying. Flattering for all the obvious reasons, and terrifying because I can always see the flaws in my lessons when I write them out to share, and terrifying because my “lesson plans” are the barest sketches of outlines regardless of how many hours I’ve put into preparation, tailoring the class to the specific assignment at hand and trying to match the course professors’ ultimate learning goals as much as possible. When I get into the classroom with 2 or 3 learning goals firmly in mind, an interactive exercise or two up my sleeve, and notes about readings the students have been or will be doing and how to mesh those with my own session, the actually class is more like jazz — playing off of the outline and goals but also off of the students and the course professor.

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.

The second is one of the sessions I did for a course that has no formal research component, building off of what I learned from the “Evaluation” section of the “CSi(L) Carleton” article. You’ll notice it looks a lot like a class for a research paper. The main difference is in the framing — emphasizing that this kind of looking and the habits involved are useful for all kinds of work.

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
Wrap-up
  • There is no one perfect search — try combinations of terms and write down new terms/concepts as you come across them
  • Librarians can help you, so come talk to us about your specific topics.
Some things I’ll change next time:
  • TOO MUCH STUFF — The constraints of space and the breadth of the assignment were working against us, but really it was too many things. Next time I will almost certainly cut out the books section. I just don’t know yet what to do about the rest, but this is probably double what it should have been.
  • Emphasize the brainstorming/problem-solving part of when searches fail — The students didn’t seem to understand well enough why we weren’t concerned with failed searches so next time we need to build failed searches more explicitly into the expectations.

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?

You have caught the tenor of the argument

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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.)

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. Second Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.

Specialization: License to jump off the deep end?

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In some ways, it’s probably overkill to have subject librarians teaching loyally for the first year seminars in their subjects. I know there were several courses I taught for last term, first year seminars in my departments, that any of my colleagues could have taught for as well or better than I did. And yet, if that happened regularly, when would I ever get to teach classes after saying flat out, “You don’t need to have them do research in order to fulfill the information literacy requirement for the class” to faculty who couldn’t work a research component into their courses?

And so a few times last term I found myself coming up with ways to integrate information literacy into courses that had no real research component. And it was fun.

I wonder if I’d have the guts to suggest such a session in a physics course, where I know much less about how knowledge is created and how scholars ask questions and what counts as evidence. I wonder if I’d be able to build up the kind of knowledge that would allow me to suggest this to a physics course if I were more of a generalist in my teaching. Maybe I could if I were a lot better at that kind of thinking than I am, but for me being a subject librarian paid off big time with these non-research-based first year seminars. Talk about unforeseen outcomes.

Of course, I’m still wondering if that was the responsible course of action. But it was fun, and it didn’t seem to do actual harm, and it got people thinking about information literacy in more nuanced ways. So maybe I don’t have to hand in my librarian credentials just yet?

One Class on Research Methods in Literary Criticism

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tl;dr version: I had fun teaching yesterday, and I didn’t want to forget what happened and what I think helped make it work well, so I wrote it down.

Prep:

The course is Critical Methods (in the English department) and the students’ first assignment is to find criticism about a poem from William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All (which they had read for today) and analyze it for critical stance. They’ll have to write a larger work of criticism themselves later.

The professor had told me that they’d read “Hills Like White Elephants” by Hemingway last week, so I decided to use that as my example and then let them use Spring and All for their hands on practice. I read “Hills like white elephants” and then familiarized myself with the major themes people had written about and indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

Talking with the professor, we decided on a few goals: how to read with an eye toward using what you read, how to search the MLA International Bibliography, and how to evaluate what you find for its appropriateness and relevance to an argument.

The Class:

Started off by discussing what critical theories they’d encountered so far and what they knew about the theories they’d encounter later in the course (this is only the second week of classes, so this is mostly speculative). We talked about how these theories differ in a large part by what each group of scholars believes counts as evidence, and we brainstormed a bit about what kinds of things would count as evidence to the people who espouse each theory.

The professor talked about how the project of this course is to move from reading things for the purpose of comprehension toward reading things for the purpose of parsing out discursive communities and beginning to be able to participate in those communities effectively. I emphasized that in order to participate in any conversation effectively, you have to know a bit about what matters to your conversation partners so that you don’t rely on evidence that the other person thinks doesn’t counts as evidence.

So, how do you read an article if not to comprehend it? Instrumental Reading. The professor and I tried to get them to think about what might be in an article besides the article’s argument (using an assigned reading for the course), but this seemed like a completely foreign concept to them, so she and I ended up feeding them suggestions to look for citations and bibliographies in order to get a sense of who else was in this particular conversation, to look for markers for which theoretical framework the author was using, and to look for what kinds of evidence the author thought counted as evidence for that kind of argument.

From there we moved to the MLA International Bibliography and I prefaced my explanation of its adorably/insufferably nonsensical quirks by describing why those quirks exist: the history of the bibliography. It still operates very much under the constraints of its printed forebearer, which means that in a hierarchy of terms, the indexers have to choose the narrowest term that will describe the main point of the article. If the article is about “Hills Like White Elephants” and one or maybe two other stories from Men Without Women, they’ll list “Hills Like White Elephants” and the one or maybe two other story names as descriptors. If it’s about more than a couple stories, they’ll say it’s about Men Without Women as a whole and will no longer list individual story names. Men Without Women is now the narrowest term on the hierarchy that describes the main point of the article. If it included stories from other Hemingway collections, it’d probably just use Hemingway’s name. The same thing goes for concepts (like gender). So you may have to OR together terms from all levels of the hierarchy in order to get a good sense of what’s written on your topic.

Using a story they’d just discussed in class made it easy to have them help me decide whether a given result list made sense. So when we said “Hills Like White Elephants” AND gender and got 6 results, they agreed that we should try something else. I wasn’t going to go into the thesaurus today, but it ended up happening anyway. They wanted to see the hierarchies and related terms for themselves.

The professor had them look at one record and talk among themselves to see if they could predict the theoretical framework the author used. Then we opened the article itself and used the abstract to further think about that framework. I emphasized paying attention to key, jargony-sounding phrases that might make good search terms if they were going to pursue this particular line of thought. The point, of course, being to collect those elusive and powerful terms that make the world go round (if your world is made up of entering search terms into search boxes).

Back in the MLA International Bibliography, we brainstormed ways to choose which articles to open up, or how to prioritize reading lists. Titles, descriptors, authors (and other things the authors have written), as well as publication sources all came up as possible clues. I kept emphasizing keeping notes about key terms and names and publications so that future searches could capitalize on what they’ve already read.

Then they worked on their own to find criticism about a poem of their choice from Spring and All while the professor and I wandering around talking to each of them and occasionally repeating things for the rest of the class. When they’d all found something (and either downloaded it or retrieved it from the stacks) we talked for a bit about what they’d found, how they decided on that article as opposed to the others they’d found, and what they could predict about the author’s critical stance.

Finally, I treated them to a 5-minute version of the Web of Knowledge hack to try to find articles that take particular critical stances, using the authors from their Literary Theory anthology as seed authors for the cited reference search.

Throughout, the professor tied what we were finding and doing to the project of the course as a whole and to their readings and assignment in particular, which really helped make the session seem less like a complete digression from the course and more like an integral part of the intellectual work of a critic and scholar.

Using Learning Outcomes for Inspiration

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Back when I attended Immersion many moons ago, they presented me with a formula for a learning outcome: “Students will” + [verb phrase] + “in order to” + [goal]. Then we used action words from Bloom’s Taxonomy [PDF] (the higher order the better, usually) to come up with the verb phrase describing what students would be able to do, and connected that action to a compelling reason for them to know how to do that.  So, for example (and not a great example), “Students will recognize key functions of a database interface in order to navigate unfamiliar databases by making educated guesses about functionality and options.”

In my own practice, two pieces of this are by far the most important. First, the formula puts the emphasis on what students learn, not on what I teach. Second, the “in order to” phrase is what I use to make sure my goals are information literacy goals rather than bibliographic instruction goals. “In order to use Boolean operators correctly” isn’t a good goal. Using Boolean is an action that may result in a goal of getting more relevant results from a variety of search interfaces, or that may help students deal with searches for concepts that don’t have standard vocabulary (very important in the humanities), but it’s not a goal in itself.

When I talk to faculty about the sessions I’m going to teach for them, I start with their goals. What are their learning goals for the course? What are their learning goals for this assignment? And then I match those to my goals for the session. That way we can prioritize what to include in the class, and we can both feel better about why we’re including those things rather than all the rest of everything we could include. And prioritizing is important because 2 goals is quite enough for a session — 3 if we’re feeling really ambitious. (Believe me, I’ve balked against that constraint HARD, but it’s absolutely true.) Whatever I can’t cover in the session, I include on a Subversive Handout.

I rarely write out formal learning outcomes, but I do keep the structure in mind all the time: students learn (not me teach), some learning action (I keep Bloom’s Taxonomy by my computer at all times), some interesting learning goal that’s directly tied to the course and the assignment. And for me, connecting the practical actions of research with the larger goals of being sophisticated scholars is what keeps me engaged and interested in instruction — what keeps me from burning out, or falling back on cookie-cutter classes. Others may have other ways of keeping themselves out of instructional ruts, but this is what does it for me.