Category Archives: in my classroom

Specialization: License to jump off the deep end?

By IRIS Posted on by

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

By IRIS Posted on by

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

By IRIS Posted on by

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.

Reading Instrumentally

By IRIS Posted on by

A few years ago at a kind of instruction in-service we held in my department, my coworker Kristin talked about a way of reading that she was beginning to teach in her classes. She called it “reading instrumentally” and talked about how she was trying to get her students to read articles for more than subject comprehension — to read them in order to use them as springboards for finding new material. Since then, I’ve started teaching this, or bits and pieces of it, in more and more of my classes. For me, it’s the best answer I can come up with so far to the problem of the Term Economy.

The idea is that reading for comprehension is good and important and all that, but that the point of the article is only one of many things you can learn by engaging with it. Just reading the first few paragraphs of a work slowly and carefully, you can glean a whole host of names and terms that you can then use when crafting further searches or deciding where to search next. For example, you can note down concept names, other vocabulary, researcher’s names,  relevant institutions that might produce or publish information for the topic, or types of evidence used in this kind of argument. After reading the first few paragraphs of a few likely articles, you can go back and start using these new concepts and terms and research/institution names to craft more focused searches. At this point, you’re more likely to be using vocabulary that a more expert person would have used in the first place.

Here’s one concrete example.

Cooks, Bridget. “Fixing Race: Visual Representations of African Americans at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893.” Patterns of Prejudice, 41.5 (2007): 435-565.
ABSTRACT Cooks examines the Johnson family cartoon series published in Harper’s Weekly during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Her analysis addresses the series’ caricatures of African-American fairgoers in the context of the landmark exposition, a national celebration of America’s cultural leadership and accomplishment since its ‘discovery’ by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The Johnson family cartoons are remarkable because they are the only racist images in the issues of Harper’s Weekly in which they appear, highlighting the importance of their message that African Americans were an unwanted presence at an event that served to solidify America’s national identity. The series provides insight into some of the social anxieties of white Americans regarding the presence of African Americans at the exposition. It also explores white American discomfort with racial and economic diversity through the antics of the imaginary yet symbolically representative Johnson family. Cooks’s discussion includes a visual analysis of the cartoons and comparisons of the Johnson family images with photographs and illustrations of African-American labourers at the fair and with depictions of proper behaviour by white American fairgoers. This examination of the cartoon series questions the roles of race, class and social hierarchy in turn-of-the-century America, and illustrates that acceptable mainstream attitudes clung to ideas of racial prejudice.

Just from this I get a whole bunch of clues about how and where to look for evidence that might reveal attitudes about race in the late 19th century. I might not have thought to page through Harper’s and other magazines at the time. How would I find out which other magazines to look at? I could look at caricatures in general, cartoons (oh, and I bet there were caricatures and cartoons in newspapers at the time, too, so I could look there), advertisements, and anything else that exaggerates normality or abnormality. I could do more research into the World’s Exposition, since it’s positioned as being a representation of America. Terms like “national identity” and “social anxiety” might be useful. The abstract also makes it clear that one great way to build an argument about difference is to make an argument about what the ideal sameness might be. It also compares caricatures to photographs, which is kind of a similar rhetorical move — making arguments about exaggeration by comparing it to its opposite: realism.

If I read a few paragraphs of the article itself, I’m sure there will be useful citations to follow, possibly some argument about why Harper’s is a good source (which might hopefully mention some similar periodicals as part of this argument), certainly other historians who are interested in race in America, possibly some theorists (which would be a jackpot, particularly if this were a literary article, since searching for theorists is one of the hardest things to do), possibly some other types of scholars who might have an interest in this kind of topic, and hopefully some clues about where to go looking for photographs, either from citations for the photographs used or from other context.

Once I realized that this is how I approach most of the searching I do (since I’m almost never searching for topics in fields in which I’m an expert), I decided to back up and start teaching this as a way to read result lists and abstracts, too (part of my exploding the article idea). So now I often have students help me pick relevant terms out of both controlled vocabulary and abstracts, or point out clues hidden in article records that might point us to related genres or topics or avenues into the literature. Then we search again, and then again, usually (hopefully) finding whole pockets of literature that we’d never have stumbled on otherwise.

Beyond Course-Integrated Instruction: An Example from Linguistics

By IRIS Posted on by

I just finished teaching this term’s installment of one of my least usual classes. This is a class that takes the idea of course-integrated instruction to an even more integrated level. There are trade-offs, for sure, but it remains one of my favorite sessions to teach.

The General Idea

I show up for one class period of an intro to linguistics course. During the first half of the session, the professor covers an introduction to made-up languages, tells the students about their upcoming assignment (a short presentation on one of several made-up languages), and demonstrates the way a linguist might describe a language in hopes that the students will do something similar in their presentations.

Pretty straight forward stuff. Except that while he’s doing that, I’m also teaching. Here’s how it works. He chose Láadan as his made-up language to describe, so I then show how you might find things like consonant inventories and vocabulary and grammar rules. We start with Wikipedia, and I show them how to use it as a reference work (sifting through for important terms and using it to point them toward authoritative web sites). Meanwhile, the professor swoops in whenever I hit on a particularly linguistically relevant bit of information and uses them as the foundations for mini-lectures on linguistic characteristics.  All in all, I only talk for about 5 or 10 minutes, but, we cover basic search strategies and web evaluation, and we do it in the context of building actual linguistics skills.

For the last half of class, the professor and I launch into a little ad libbed song-and-dance that is ostensibly there to introduce students to one of the kinds of research they’ll have to do for their final paper and a basic gloss on what makes a good research question. But it also serves as a fascinating introduction to the neurological work involved in reading. The professor explains the history of the three writing systems in Japan, and then talks about a paper he found that used an fMRI to determine that Kanji and Kana are processed via different cortical pathways. This, he says, would make a really interesting basis for a research project, but the problem is that the study was published in 2000.

So I show how to use the Web of Science to do a cited reference search, and then how to do a search for (kanji OR kana OR hiragana OR katakana) and then combine that new search with the cited reference search to find the nearly 30 articles which both cite the original paper and have something to do with Japanese writing. All this gives me a chance to talk about how scholars index their own literature (via citations) and about exploding articles. Meanwhile, the professor jumps in whenever I hit on an interesting article. He usually mentions something (some theory, or a part of the brain), that I can Google in the background to find an example or an image, and then I can show how to evaluate the web site or image we find. Again, all in all I talk a for about 10 minutes, but together the professor and I demonstrate how research and evaluation are part of learning to be a linguist rather than a completely separate set of “library skills.”

Drawbacks

Clearly, there are strategies and tools that I can’t cover in this format. Many of the students’ topics end up requiring books, for example, and I never show them the catalog. My main goal is to teach two things: I can help you, and there are some pretty powerful tools out there that can help you, too. The upshot of this is that I spend much of the next few weeks in one-on-one consultation with these 20+ students, which takes a lot of time.

Benefits

The students see me (the single greatest influence on whether they’ll come to work with me in my office later), and the professor claims that the quality of the papers is measurably better now, even though I only teach for a couple of minutes, and even though only half to two-thirds of the students come see me later.

For me the most interesting part of the whole thing, though, is that it’s the only class I teach where I feel fully integrated into the disciplinary work that the students are doing. The skills I teach are part of the lecture, part of the work of learning about linguistic structures and brain activity rather than being separated out into an auxiliary library day.

So while there’s no way this would work if it’s the only kind of class I taught, I still get a kick out of every term when the professor calls me and says, “Ready to go again? Shall we use Láadan as an example this time? Can we still use the Sakurai article?”