Category Archives: teaching and learning

I need to stop being such a librarian

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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.

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.

Reading Instrumentally

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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.

Investments in the Term Economy

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Search is all about term matching, and several times in the last couple of weeks I’ve had students think there was nothing on their topics simply because we hadn’t found the right terms yet. Once we’d dug enough to find some useful search terms, we uncovered previously hidden worlds of scholarship which could in turn point us toward related works as we ruthlessly mined them for even more terms, their bibliographies, and their “cited by” works.

Finding the right terms is hard. It takes empathy with the author, it takes some knowledge of the field, it takes some knowledge of related fields (particularly if you’re in an interdisciplinary database and can’t figure out why you’re getting chemistry results in your humanities search), and it usually just plain takes reading. Reading carefully and with an eye toward learning vocabulary. Reading lots. And there are very few shortcuts.

And then comes full text searching of historical documents (something I’m going to be teaching tomorrow). That’s another whole layer of complexity, and I really love what Timothy Burke had to say about that recently. He makes it clear that you really have to read, and read a lot, before you can start searching through historical texts, and he makes it clear that developing a familiarity with other rhetorics is vital to scholarship.

Searching sometimes feels like the modern way and browsing like the legacy way of doing research. But in some sense, search is impossible without a hefty dose of browsing.

Maybe Not Something You Outgrow in Four Years

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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.