Category Archives: in my classroom

Turning Topics Into Searches

By IRIS Posted on by

The last couple of mornings I’ve spent time with a couple of different freshman writing seminars getting them ready to tackle the research component of their classes. Both times I tried a technique that I’d done once last year when I co-taught with a colleague of mine. It’s kind of like concept mapping… but with an eye toward building searches.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Talk about how writing a research paper is like participating in a conversation.
    When you enter a conversation at a party, you need to know a) who’s talking, b) what they’re talking about, and c) how they’re talking about it. Parroting back what people say is not a conversation. Actually contributing to the conversation means having a grasp of the topic and the vocabulary that is in use within that conversation. Relevant vocabulary is also important because search is basically vocabulary matching.
  2. Write a “topic” up on the board.
    This should not be a beautifully narrowed topic, both because that makes the exercise harder and because that’s not actually reaching students where they are. In both cases, for me, the students were at the “I want to do something about globalization and agriculture” stage. Yesterday I got a student volunteer to write his topic on the board. Today’s class was a little more structured and twice as long, so I picked a topic that I knew would serve as a robust enough foundation for all the components of the class.
  3. Invite students to come up and write the answers to two questions: “Who might have studied this topic?” and “What questions might they have asked of the topic?”
    So, for example, if the topic is “organic food” students might write “EPA,” or “Behavioral economists,” or “farmers,” or “doctors,” or “sociologists” (these are examples from this morning’s exercise). Some questions included “is organic food more nutritious than conventionally grown food?” and “what motivates people to buy organic food?”
  4. Talk as a group about what terms might crop up in the articles by the different groups, building searches as you go.
    Basically, that black board full of groups and questions serves as the basis for the rest of the class. Searching Google? Show how to limit to .gov sources to hit those EPA people. Searching Academic Search Premier? Talk about differences in disciplinary language and collect subject headings that match the topic at hand. Having trouble with students still typing “effect of pesticides on the production of corn” into search boxes? The blackboard helps you remind students to step outside of their own phrasing of the topic and choose meaningful terms that would have appeared in, for example, a report from the USDA. STILL having trouble? Do it again. And again. And little by little it sinks in.

An added benefit of this technique is that it gets the whole class up and moving near the beginning. I can’t tell you how much this changes the atmosphere of a morning class full of sceptical freshmen. I don’t know why it helps, but I’ll go with it.

Course and College Integrated Instruction

By IRIS Posted on by

It has been an odd but inspiring week at work. It was odd because my department members and I took one entire day to sit down together and write a couple of documents on a very tight deadline. It was inspiring because one of these documents mapped our experiences with last year’s first-year seminars to the goals of our newly devised first-year seminars (which the college is calling “Argument & Inquiry” seminars), forcing us to articulate what it looks like to be an instruction librarian for first-year students at a liberal arts college.

It was doubly inspiring because immediately after drafting that description of instruction librarianship in the liberal arts, I got to go and actually do that work with a 100-level course that is one of my perennial favorites: Linguistics 110.

I love this class because it absolutely embodies one point we made in our document: “Locating discussions of content relevant to the course within the context of library instruction makes explicit the connection between information gathering and knowledge production.” The professor teaches his class, talking about the different cortical pathways used to process kanji and kana (with a healthy dose of the convoluted history of Japanese writing systems and vocabulary). Meanwhile, I jump in every once in a while and show how to find out if the article he’s used as the basis for this lecture is still being cited in the literature and is still thought to be credible (he supplied me with the article information ahead of time), how to use terms from that paper to find more papers on similar topics, and how to evaluate the web site that popped up when he used Google to find images of these cortical pathways. Meanwhile, he riffs off of the papers that we find to talk about how they either confirm or complicate what he already knows, or how they relate to other concepts they’ve covered in class.

This feels so much closer to the way real research happens. It’s not set aside as “library day” when students will step outside of their roles as Students Of Linguistics and step into their roles as Students Who Must Soon Write a Paper. This is thesis development that’s built on class discussion and lecture, sprinkled with “but is this really credible,” encouraging the habit of taking facts and asking “but how would I find out more about that” and “what do I do with what I’ve found,” and always circling everything back around to how the new information informs thesis development and relates to the course content.

This model wouldn’t work for all courses, certainly, but every Fall I look forward to the call that will schedule this particular session.

Learning about Instruction from Subject Librarians

By IRIS Posted on by

The past week has served as a clear and present reminder of the value of having subject librarians who are committed to helping students in their disciplines engage with and even contribute to the scholarly work of their chosen areas of study. Partially prompted by a desire to train our new librarian, and partially driven by our constant refrain of “wouldn’t it be nice if we could meet and tell each other about what we each do with our students,” my department met three times between last Thursday and today to do a little show and tell. Over the course of those 6 hours, we showed each other key resources in our areas, walked through pieces of lessons that we’ve developed, talked about common challenges and triumphs, and even did mock instruction sessions for each other. I learned so much.

I had never considered the value of surgical videos in the life of a materials scientist. I love the idea that when you read anything from a record in an index to an article or a book, you have to think about reading instrumentally as well as reading for comprehension. There are always clues to new research topics or subtopics, new search terms, and even information about how the search tool or topic or disciplinary discourse is structured. Reading instrumentally involves paying attention to all these things. I had no idea that we’d just acquired an archive of opera videos and another of dance videos, each of which let you search through rich metadata, create playlists of clips, and turn on a variety of subtitles. I learned a metric brainload about ICPSR, WDI (both online and off), and other key data sources, and how these get used in our curriculum. For example, did you know that Earth Trends is useful for way more than environmental research? I didn’t. But it turns out that in order to study the environment you have to study a bunch of other things, too, so Earth Trends ends up being a kind of statistical compendium. And it cites its sources, so you can figure out who’s publishing data on your topic. And I learned a lot by listening to our History librarian talk about the role of book reviews in research, and how teaching book reviews is a great way to introduce students to concepts like scholarly disagreement or how individual works fit into the broader universe of disciplinary conversation.

I showed a few things, too. I showed my “subversive handout” and my work on teaching scholarly attribution, the problem of controlled vocabulary for my students (since they have to work with the MLA International Bibliography, which relies so heavily on it’s thesaurus), and my lower-level work with students who need to learn about combining terms when performing searches.

Beyond learning really interesting and cool things, though, I was struck by the fact that even though we spend so much time working together, talking together, and sharing strategies with each other, that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of our individual stores of subject expertise. We rely on this structure of shared general knowledge backed up by deep subject expertise all the time. For example, I can sit at the reference desk and know that I can help a student get started with research in an unfamiliar area, but that I can (and frequently do) refer that student to the subject librarian for more in-depth help if we have to go beyond my own ability to be of any use. And in instruction sessions, the librarian that deals primarily with upper level social science students relies on the fact that I tend to work with a lot of lower level students, and that I give those students a grounding in some of the basics. We absolutely rely on the fact that we don’t each have to know everything and teach everything, and that our colleagues will be there for us when we get in over our heads with unfamiliar research areas. So our differences really do serve the student population as a whole.

And I feel like I’ve become a better librarian simply by being surrounded by subject specialists. I know more about how to find data and statistics than I did before because I’ve been able to watch our data librarian at work. I’ve learned (and stolen shamelessly from) our History librarian and the way she guides students through the process of finding and using primary sources. And the similar things could be said about any one of the other librarians I work with.

Scholars Index Their Own Literature

By IRIS Posted on by

This year I’ve been shamelessly cribbing off one of my co-workers who’s mantra is “scholars index their own literature.” At first, I didn’t know what she meant, but the more I work with the idea, the more I absolutely love it, especially for the “softer” areas of study where traditional indexing falls short (yes, I’m thinking of the MLA International Bibliography, here).

Here’s the idea, indexers can give a general sense of the primary topics of a given article. Scholars, however, make use of other scholars’ work as it relates to their own work. The web of citations that builds as each area cites relevant works is often a much richer, much more crafted set of interrelations than any result set is. (Incidentally, this is where dissertations are a great help, since part of a dissertator’s project is to map his field and place himself within that field… jackpot for those looking for a starting place in the web of interconnections.)

The problem is that tracing this web of interrelations also takes a whole lot longer than plunking keywords into a bibliographic database and clicking “Search.” Still… if there’s time, and especially if direct searching isn’t working, this is one of those other options that can, sometimes, pay off.

Now I just need to figure out how to explain this succinctly to freshmen. “Scholars index their own literature” doesn’t make much sense when “index” and “literature” are jargon within the scholarly community.

The Whirlwind Class

By IRIS Posted on by

After my first year here, when I realized that I needed to sell the power of a library instruction session from the inside rather than the outside (meaning, by actually teaching rather than begging for time) to those departments that hadn’t made much use of my services, I came up with a plan. The plan was to point out that students would come seek me out for help if they knew my face and could see that I’m a real person and not scary or mean or intimidating or any of those things. I pointed out that if professors were structuring their classes in a way that relied on their students coming to me rather than having me come to their class, they’d have to give me at least a little face time.

For reasons I’ve described before, this mini-class idea was especially important to the language departments, but it wasn’t just them. In a 10-week term, pretty much every professor is jealous not of hours, but of minutes of class time. It’s been one of the most interesting challenges of my time here to figure out a) when library sessions really are important and how to explain that to faculty, and b) when they’re not as important, and how to get students the help they need without the structure of a classroom.

So here I was, offering whirlwind sessions of 10, 15, or 20 minutes here and there. I’d bop in, hand out my trading cards and maybe a subversive handout, explain how to find my Availability Calendar, and then teach the class one thing that so boggled their minds that they’d realize I might be worth coming to see with questions later. My goal was to teach something that the teacher wouldn’t have known. Something flashy. Something so pithy and assignment-relevant that if this was the only thing these students learned all term, I’d be ok with that. And you know what? This is very very hard to do. I put more time into preparing these mini classes than I do into most of my hour-long classes.

And for the most part, I’ve been very pleased with them, and several of them have grown over the years into either longer sessions, or into more sessions over the course of the term. But they’re certainly not good for every situation, or even most situations. They’re really only good if several conditions are met:

  • It’s an upper-level class
    I have zero time to cover the basics.
  • Students will be working on wildly different topics
    I’ve had times when students did come to me after my whirlwind class, but I spent the first half-hour of every appointment going over the very same processes and resources… NOT a good use of anyone’s time.
  • I get the first portion of the class period, not the last
    Even when I finish my bit on time, the sessions usually stretch on as the professor and/or students ask questions. Of course, this leaves me in the odd position of having professors who think I accomplished a lot in 15 minutes, when really I was in their classrooms for twice that long.
  • I don’t have too many of them in a term
    They take a long time to prepare, and I would never have time to see every student in every class in every department I serve as an individual appointment.

Still, they do serve their purpose sometimes, and if nothing else, it’s a foot in the door. Still, I’m becoming a little bit uncomfortable with the thought that I might become known as “the one who can do a 15 minute class.” In reality, this is not enough time, and students do struggle with this stuff, and accessing and deploying the literature of a field is an integral part of becoming a scholar in that field. Simply plunking keywords into databases is only the first baby steps in that process. And really, if professors work with me and tell me what their course goals and readings are, I can craft a longer session that isn’t just an add-on to the class. They can be chalk full of course content and therefore not actually take much away from the incredibly precious minutes in a 10-week term. And I don’t want to undermine the efforts of my colleagues as they also struggle with ways to make their content and expertise an integral part of the classroom experience in their departments.

p.s. Yes… I know… I’ve been tagged. I’ll work on it. Really I will.