This morning I got an email from a librarian wondering what kinds of concepts I teach, particularly in 300-level courses, beyond how to search. As it turns out, that’s something I think about a lot! Here is what I wrote:

Well, I’m not sure I have much to add that isn’t on my blog already, so I’ll include a bunch of links here, but contextualize them a bit. And probably the closest I can come to telling you about 300-level courses is a four-part post on highest level course I teach before their thesis. Another class that I’ve written up is Critical Methods. These are both for the English department, but I’ve done very similar things for American Studies and languages. The concepts are pretty flexible, and I’m coming to think of them as some of the core info lit concepts for most non-laboratory research. They probably aren’t the ONLY concepts, but they may give you some ideas. Essentially, I have come to think of Information Literacy as being highly related to rhetoric, where the point is to participate as an expert insider within a discourse community, using evidence that makes sense within that community in ways that resonate with the community in order to add to the community’s understanding in some way.

Also, a concept that I flesh out and emphasize differently depending on the level (but which I teach more and more often due to the feedback I get and the research we’ve done) is a circular research process that appears in the middle of this post.
With upper level courses I emphasize that there is a ton of actual reading involved because they’re developing a sense of the scholarly conversation, mapping in out (here’s where mindmapping can come in), feeling out its boundaries, and learning its vocabulary. Sometimes we practice what I call Instrumental Reading and what Booth breaks down into three types of reading (in his Craft of Research, pages 91-96 of the 2003 edition).

And finally, I should say that I teach an awful lot about searching, but I frame it as if I’m not teaching searching, but teaching something more conceptual. Boolean and limiters and all those things come up with the examples we do together in class or examples I’m showing when I’m actually teaching them something else, and I’ll digress briefly to make sure everyone understands why I just wrote OR there before moving on. I say this just because when I first started moving away from “how to” teaching I felt guilty whenever I ended up showing those things, but now I think it’s the best way. The “how to” serves the higher order concepts, and they need both.

So that’s where I am right now in my teaching. I didn’t arrive here all at once, and I hope I’ll keep evolving and learning how to teach because there are a whole lot of rough edges yet. But for me it has been liberating and satisfying to think more and more about information literacy’s relationship to rhetoric and about the deep concepts that interest ME about information literacy. If I’m interested in what I’m teaching, I have a much better chance of interesting my students, and a FAR better chance of feeling fulfilled in my work.

~Iris

It’s the beginning of a new academic year, and this year’s thesis students are starting to come see me in panicked waves. The meetings are intense and exciting and full of possibility and fear and anticipation. Right now we’re mostly trying to come up with a Plan rather than specific sources. Given your interests and given the kinds of resources we each know of, what would be both stimulating and researchable here and now.*

Lately, I’ve been mentioning mindmapping more and more often as students wonder how to figure out if they’re original enough, or how to figure out if they’ve created a stable enough grounding in the relevant literature. I teach it sometimes as a way to build good searches with useful terms, but this is different. Sometimes the student has a clear question in mind, and we can draw in supporting bodies of research. Sometimes the student doesn’t have a clear question in mind yet, and we can draw in the supporting topics first — the things where they say “I’m kind of interested in x and y and want to see if they’re connected with z,” and then fill in the spaces between the topics to find the question.

After a session this morning, I’ve realized that I teach four distinct forms of mindmapping to move students from the very preliminary topic questing through to the production of the final product.

Types of mapping

1) Mapping sources to find concepts (early stage of work)

For the early stages in topic selection, students often have vague ideas about topics but haven’t yet come to a point where they’re able to say what piece of the topic they’re going to concentrate on. They know they want to do something with the implications of fictional characters’ names, for example, but haven’t really figured out exactly what about the names to pursue or maybe even what fiction to use as foundational examples. But they’re really interested in race and culture, and they know that fictional characters have names chosen for them by authors, so there’s got to be something they can do that combines the two.

For this, some students find it very helpful to keep their broad topic in mind while reading/skimming several readings. Each reading becomes a node, potentially related to other readings, but not necessarily. The students can then draw connections between readings, using this process to discover the concepts that may be key to their own work.

2) Collecting search terms and source type strategies

Another tricky part of early stage research, particularly in the humanities, is learning the vocabulary of your topic and learning what counts as evidence to the community of inquiry that you’re planning to enter. Unless you do these things, searching can be pretty impossible since it’s just term matching. If you’re using “self-concept” and your community of inquiry is using “identity” you’ll never retrieve the sources you need.

Similarly, if you produce an argument based on evidence that your community scoffs at, or if you need ideas for what kinds of sources would help you make explore your topic, watching what kinds of evidence show up in the literature can be a great strategy.

And of course, following up on people or institutions mentioned in the literature is another great way to build future searches based on readings you’ve found.

So for this kind of map, I have students think about their major concepts, and then fill in those concepts with terms, source type ideas, and people/institutions associated with that concept. These all become fodder for future searches.

3) Mapping concepts to find your own question

Once students have solidified the core concepts of their work a bit more, they still need to figure out how to assimilate the source material into something that original rather than duplicating others’ work or simply patching together quotes from here and there. For this, a pretty traditional mindmap can help.

I have students plot out their key concepts and list the key sources for each concept (for students to did option 1, these can often be the labels they assigned to the connecting lines between sources — in fact, the whole map is like the inverse of option 1). This time we pay close attention to the spaces between concepts. Students can then see what has and what has not been covered by their source material and figure out what they’re adding to the conversation. “People have covered x, y, and z, but I’m going to take these parts of what they have said and add this new idea.”

4) Mapping to test the completeness of your evidence

And finally, for students who are thinking critically about their work and want to be sure they’ve made a rock-solid case for their position, I have them think about building a bridge between themselves and their readers. Their paper is supposed to walk their readers from Belief A (the reader’s start point) to Belief B (what the student hopes the reader will believe after reading the paper). We start thinking “Well, they’d have to be on board with the assumption that x, and know about y event…”

Each of these concepts contributes a bit of itself to the students’ goals, forming one of the planks in the bridge the student is building.

It’s also a way to think about potentially interesting ideas that aren’t actually necessary to the paper.

Tools I use

Generally, if I’m working with students in a class setting or in my office, we do one of these types of mindmaps and we do it using whiteboards. Low-tech and potentially messy, but it gets the point across.

For myself and my own thinking, I do this kind of thing on paper if I’m thinking on the fly or if I’m not intending to use it as the basis for a long-term project. It’s faster and there’s something helpful in the tactile and kinesthetic activity itself — the sketchiness. (Now that I’m getting used to drawing on my iPad, I can imagine the pencil/paper version moving to the iPad from now on. Incidentally, I did the sample maps for this post using the iPad.)

If I’m doing a long project (where I know the map will get pretty big and where I’ll probably be rearranging nodes as my thinking becomes more nuanced and clearer), I use MindNode.

You’ve made it to the final installment of this four-part Information Literacy curriculum that I’ve used now, with some content tweaks, in two senior seminars in two different departments. Both times, it resulted in far more productive one-on-one meetings between me and the students, and both times that faculty members said that they thought it paid off for them as well. For me, the research consultations I had with students from these classes felt far more collaborative, far more like the students were bringing their own subject expertise to the table and their own critical thinking and problem solving. They had almost always done more preparation and solo work before seeking me out, but had made good choices about coming to see me before wasting a whole bunch of time and getting overly frustrated with their work. And in both cases, the students greeted me cheerfully in hallways and the students center, updating me on their progress and generally behaving as if I was a trusted and welcome partner in their disciplinary work.

I will definitely keep working to integrate similar information literacy interventions in as many departments as I can. Granted, scheduling 4 sessions can seem daunting, but I have found multiple sessions alleviate many of the time-consuming and frustrating aspects of research support, making the scheduling a wonderful investment in a happier and more productive term for me.

Here, one last time, is the over view of the whole mini-curriculum:

1. Presearch — identifying and preparing to join scholarly conversations
2. Bibliography as an intellectual product
3. The Literature Review — mapping your scholarly conversation
4. Creativity in Constraint (You Are Here)

Session 4: Creativity in Constraint (10 minutes, generously)

This was my final chance to meet the group as a whole. They were getting ready to write their papers, and we had already showed them ways that the nearly unlimited sources can be relevant to their work. But we didn’t want to leave them with the paralysis of topics that were too massive or that tried to account for too many branchings in the literature. We wanted them to once again see their work as creative and intellectual work over which they have authority.

After taking a few minutes to get a sense for how they were feeling about their progress and if there were any questions they had for me, I talked briefly about the glories and challenges of creativity in constraint. This is a phrase I picked up from Eric Celeste, who comes back to that theme over and over in his writing. And for upper division students especially, it seems to be a concept that helps them move past the temptation to summarize everything rather than make a focused contribution in one area.

I talk about cropping photographs, and how the images gesture toward vast amounts of information that are left out of the frame, but that viewers can easily imagine. Similarly, papers gesture towards whole swaths of the literature that they don’t deal with directly. And that isn’t a sign of weakness — of not managing to fit everything in. Rather it’s a sign of careful decision making, of thinking “what do my readers most need to focus on and what can they fill in for themselves” and “what do I most want them to see that they may not have seen in this way before.”

And with that, I renew my invitation to come visit me in my office as they finish up their papers.