Category Archives: teaching and learning

The Fister Maxim

By IRIS Posted on by

Any good idea I come up with, Barbara Fister has already thought of, and published on, years ago.

I’d been feeling so proud of myself for “discovering” and beginning to teach information literacy as an arm of rhetoric, so enthused by the reaction it’s been getting from the faculty I work with. And look, there’s this article by Barbara from 1993.

Fister, Barbara. “Teaching the rhetorical dimensions of research.” Research Strategies 11, no. 4 (1993): 211-219.
If students perceive that the research process consists of merely locating, synthesizing, and presenting information from library sources, they will not fulfill the demands of college-level inquiry. This article examines the importance of teaching the rhetorical dimensions of research and suggests several relevant approaches that BI librarians can use when explaining access tools and research strategies.
Excuse me please while I read all about my theory that Barbara predicted.

Teaching poorly

By IRIS Posted on by

My last two classes of this term were… challenging, and I did a pretty poor job of rising to the challenges. One of them was just a case of me not having my head on very straight, talking more than I intended, and forgetting to mention things I’d meant to emphasize. What’s more, it’s the first time I’ve had a group of students just flatly refused to participate, no matter how much prodding they got from me and their professor, in a group activity that I’ve had several classes do before with good success. But in the end the students all left class with at least one scholarly article and at least one newspaper article for their papers, and most of them hadn’t done the kinds of things we were doing in class before, so it wasn’t useless, but it certainly wasn’t great.

The other class was very different. The professor couldn’t be there and had left me a long list of potentially useful things her students would need to know, but when I got there and asked them where they were with their paper topics, the conversation turned into a long brainstorming session where they helped each other come up with the required material culture artifacts that they’d need to incorporate into their papers. Only one of them needed the kinds of primary sources we have in the library, as it turns out. We did talk a bit about other primary and secondary sources that might be useful to them, and we did talk about how the strategies for finding out about and laying hands on primary sources is often fundamentally different from the strategies for secondary sources, but for the most part it was just the 13 of us thinking about how to illustrate their arguments with things like ear buds, album covers, magazines, and cigarette packs. And then I got up and showed them 10 minutes worth of “And here’s OAIster and the American Periodicals Series and ProQuest Historical Newspapers… just in case you ever need them.” I think they absolutely needed that time to think through their sources, but I also think that there’s very little that I could contribute to that experience.

In the first class, the overarching message was “there’s lots of stuff available,” which is ok, but maybe not the single most helpful message for first year students. In the second class the overarching message was “the library doesn’t have the sources you need” which felt odder. Both are often true, but neither are my favorite messages to convey.

Teaching for my own amusement

By IRIS Posted on by

Last week I had a lot of fun joining Jason, Anna, and Rachel on Adventures in Library Instruction. I’d had a bit of a rough day, but talking with three people as enthusiastic and interesting as these three really turned things around. They’re awesome!

Since then, I’ve been thinking about part of that conversation where I realized I really only gave half of an answer to a really good question. I was talking about using both Google Scholar and disciplinary databases together (expanding on my post about why undergraduates need those clunky databases anyway) and Rachel asked how I justify teaching some of this stuff when the assignment is really VERY basic: find 3 articles. I think there could be a lot of reasons, some better than others, but I think the main one for me is that I teach for my own amusement.

I don’t mean that I teach things that aren’t useful (well, I probably do, but not on purpose) but that I really think it’s ok to geek out a little in the classroom. That was one of the key things I learned at ACRL Immersion: being authentic is more important than being perfect, and students engage more with people who are engaged. If I’m actually interested in what I’m teaching, the classroom experience has got to be better than if I’m bored. And I am NOT interested in database interfaces. I’m just not. But boy can I ever geek out over citation and the way that it reveals how disciplines construct knowledge, and boy can I get excited about the ways people build up enough knowledge about a topic to do intelligent searches for new information on that topic.

I can’t possibly expect my students to care about something I don’t care about. But I can hope that if I care a lot they’ll at least be interested enough to wonder why I care. And if they’re nodding and smiling and laughing with (ok, maybe at) me, they’re more engaged than if they’re asleep, and maybe at that point I have a hope of pulling them along on the coat-tails of my own enthusiasm into the nitty-gritty of research.

Barring that, at least I won’t have been bored.

—

Adventures in Library Instruction – Episode 23 (MP3)

Posts referenced in the podcast:

Breaking up with best practices; Hooking up with learning goals

By IRIS Posted on by

Last weekend* I heard two sentences that sparked one of those great “ah hah!” moments. A writing center director said, “We’ve moved away from best practices and toward learning goals. This helps us prioritize and it helps us evaluate whether we’re accomplishing what we wanted to accomplish.”

I’ve talked before about how learning goals keep me focused and keep me from burning out on instruction, but it occurred to me in what felt like new says how the framework of learning goals could solve a lot of problems for me in ways that their less actionable cousins (like “best practices” or “standards” or even phrases like “user centered”) couldn’t.

Here’s what I mean in three examples:

  • In my own teaching, there are usually 15 or 20 Very Important things that I wish I could teach my students in any given session. Using learning goals helps me prioritize from among the very important things, feel less guilty about letting some very important things fall by the wayside, remember to think about what they’re learning rather than what I’m teaching, and feel connected to the broader, more interesting issues of information literacy.
  • In selecting a discovery tool, there are long, long lists of features and functions that user-centered design relies on. No interface has each specific feature, so how do we choose? How do we prioritize the list of very important features? What if we developed learning goals for our discovery system? What if these goals were something like being able to learn the differences between kinds of sources, be able to pick out important terms for the topic and field, and see where to go from here (different searches, different databases, different people). Maybe one system doesn’t have faceting but does have something else that reveals terms and directions. Maybe our usability tests could be more a long the lines of assessment of what the students learned by interacting with the system. Maybe this would all help us prioritize from the long list of important things to choose a system that functions in service of the mission of our library.
  • In first year seminars (the context in which the original phrase came up), focusing on programmatic learning goals could help prioritize from the long list of things it’d be nice if all first year students knew. Maybe it would help guard against creating impossibly long check lists of things students should be exposed to, and therefore guard against treating first year seminars as massive inoculations that transform high school students into college students. Maybe it would also grant the teaching faculty the freedom to explore interesting topics in interesting ways while having similar learning outcomes.

Or maybe I’m just creating my own buzz phrase. Or maybe everyone else already knew this.

But for me, at my institution, expanding this framework beyond my direct teaching or my department’s strategic planning is helping me make those hard decisions that crop up all over the place and to make them with more confidence.

* Last weekend I attended a workshop called Teaching and Maintaining Mulitdisciplinary First-Year Seminar Programs hosted at the gorgeous Pomona College campus. This is the second blog post drawing on my experiences there.

Uncovering Research Practices in Student Writing

By IRIS Posted on by

When I was a baby librarian, I thought Information Literacy was about searching and evaluating. The ACRL standards had some other stuff in there, but it seemed like abstract stuff that I couldn’t do much about. Keywords, operators, relevance, currency, authority — just learn the formula and my work here is done. No wonder librarians were the only people who cared about information literacy, I thought.

In my defense, I was young. In my defense, this is how it had been presented to me all the way up through library school.

In the past three years, I’ve been part of a project that really expanded my thinking and made me fall in love with what information literacy could be and with the ways in which it really is relevant to people and projects on my campus.

But let me back up.

All of our sophomores are required to submit a portfolio of their writing, and passing this assessment is a graduation requirement. When they submit their portfolios, they’re given the choice of designating that their writing can be used for research, which many of them do, and lately the college has been doing three large projects (that I know of) based on these writing portfolios.

  1. Our quantitative initiative (QUiRK) reads a subset of the papers to determine how sophomores use quantitative evidence in their writing.*
  2. The writing program and SERC are pairing up for the Tracer Project, which studies how faculty development (which includes writing portfolio assessment) impacts student learning.
  3. And starting in 2008, we in the library have been reading portfolios to see how information literacy is revealed in academic writing at the sophomore level.

As part of that last one, my department had fascinating hours of discussion about what we could and couldn’t evaluate about information literacy when presented with a finished paper. One of the most interesting and useful of these discussions (for me) was the one which revealed that we could, in fact, assess evaluation of sources even when the paper didn’t use “outside” sources beyond primary sources or sources prescribed by the professor. We could watch students picking primary sources, even from assigned readings, that worked well together and could be used to make a compelling point, or we could see them cramming two such sources together and either treating them entirely separately or in other ways not using them instrumentally toward making a point. We also confirmed what we had always suspected: that implementation of attribution was about more than just mechanics, and that failures in attribution could often signal a fundamental misunderstandings of the sources the student was using or of the purpose of reporting evidence in the first place. And we articulated for ourselves some of the ways in which integrating evidence into a paper can help or hinder the student’s rhetorical goals.

We couldn’t assess much (if anything) about the actual steps in the process that resulted in the writing we had in front of us, but we could look for habits of mind associated with using evidence, and we could look for the ways in which conventions of communicating evidence manifest in sophomore level student writing.

In the end, after much testing and revision, we came up with a rubric for assessing information literacy in writing and sat down to score papers. And yesterday, we finally presented our work and some preliminary findings, handed around a sample of student writing and watched as the faculty and staff attendees pulled interesting and useful insights out of the writing and then all came up with exactly the same score on the rubric (inter-reader reliability!), and had a fun discussion about how this could be used on campus to build shared expectations for information literacy and to help inform our teaching.

For my part, participating in this project has fundamentally changed one of the major ways I think about my work. It was so liberating for me to realize in concrete fashion that “information literacy” does not equal “the research paper.” All of a sudden I discovered that I do have something to contribute to those parts of the curriculum that interest me but that don’t produce traditional research projects. All of a sudden I realized that I don’t have to help faculty squeeze research projects into courses where those projects don’t fit naturally, and that instead we could talk about context-building skills or source interpretation skills for thought-pieces, class discussions, and other non-research assignments.

For me, this project helped me realize that I actually do like the concept of information literacy and that it actually does have meaningfully deep and cross-cutting applications on a liberal arts college campus — that it’s not simply about making mini-librarians out of our students or about searching for searching’s sake. I’m hoping that as we open it up to include faculty readers this year, that same sense seeps through the campus. I hope this is something we can get behind and dig into and find interesting, and that what we learn from analyzing these portfolios will meaningfully inform our practice as teachers.

I’m just so excited about this project, and so glad to be involved in it. It’s probably been the most eye-opening and practice-changing project I’ve participated in.

* Rutz, Carol and Nathan D. Grawe. “Pairing WAC and Quantitative Reasoning through Portfolio Assessment and Faculty Development,” Across the Disciplines, December 2009; Grawe, Nathan D., Neil S. Lutsky, and Christopher J. Tassava. “ A Rubric for Assessing Quantitative Reasoning in Written Arguments,” Numeracy, January 2010.
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