Category Archives: teaching and learning

Investments in the Term Economy

By IRIS Posted on by

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And then comes full text searching of historical documents (something I’m going to be teaching tomorrow).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

By IRIS Posted on by

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.

The benefits of uncertainty

By IRIS Posted on by

School starts on Monday, and with it comes a brand new set of graduation requirements for all first year students. The new requirement that most affects me is the required Argument and Inquiry seminars that all first year students take in their first term at college, and this seminar includes the first cross-curricular mandatory information literacy requirement we’ve ever had.

Obviously I’d think this is a good thing. But what I hadn’t realized was what I’d find most good about this good thing: the major pay-off of this new requirement may be the conversations I’ve had with several faculty in the last couple of months as they develop their A&I seminars for this fall. Just the fact that the seminars are new and that they’re a little intimidating to teach means that we’ve felt at liberty to completely mess with “normal.”

“What if we do away with the ‘library class,’” I ask, and they don’t look at me like I’m growing horns. They say, “What would that look like?”

Another professor came to see if I thought she was completely bonkers for wanting me to come in 4 or 5 times for 15-20 minutes each rather than just once, and I could say “Not at all! Here are the kinds of ways we’re doing that with these other classes.”

And these are professors I’ve never worked with before and professors I’ve worked with consistently over the years — creative and thoughtful professors, all — but it feels totally different because we’re both pretty uncertain about how we’ll make these seminars work. We’re brainstorming and upending the status quo with wild abandon, and nothing feels taboo. And sometimes we settle back on a format similar to the more normal class: assignment-specific instruction for 50 minutes. But when we do, we do so with more confidence that this format suites the course’s learning goals rather than just being What We’ve Done Before.

Search Empathy

By IRIS Posted on by

I was just talking with an English professor about his upcoming Argument & Inquiry seminar on the Gothic story. I’ve really be so heartened by these early-stages planning meetings we’ve had so far. The combination of having really engaged faculty, really new syllabi, and a requirement that the courses should “clarify how scholars ask questions, and teach students how to find and evaluate information in reading and research and to use it effectively and ethically in constructing arguments” means that we’re getting the chance to do some really creative thinking about how to foster intellectual independence in first year students.

Anyway, my Ah Hah moment of the day was when this professor said that searching is a fundamentally empathetic tasks. That crystallized for me a lot of my thinking about searching — how you have to not ask a search interface a question (usually) but instead think of terms that your ideal article would have in it or associated with it. So, not my terms for a concept, but my ideal article’s terms for the concept. When I can get my students to make that leap, their results usually get much better.

I don’t know how useful it will be to use “empathetic” as a term when I teach (it’ll depend on the class), but it sure does help me think about the process.

Teaching Print Journals

By IRIS Posted on by

Taking down shelving

I’m pretty excited that our current periodicals are moving to join their bound brethren.  The current print periodicals (which no longer actually reflect our current periodical holdings, now that by far the majority of our current issues are online) were housed in a huge, beautiful room on long white shelves, and they were shelved alphabetically by title (which I always hated because it assumed that you knew what you were looking for before you got there).

Now they’re shelved with their LC-classified backfiles! (And now we have a huge, beautiful room for studying in!)

This will make my life easier when I teach because when I teach using print journals (which isn’t always), it’s usually for one of four reasons:

New furniture being unpacked and arranged

  1. I’m teaching stack browsing, and point out that a call number means a topic, and that this means that if you find a great subject encyclopedia in the reference collection and note its general call number, you’ll find lots of books on related topics in the book collection, and you’ll find journals on related topics in the periodicals collection. Before I always used to hedge saying that they should go over to the bound periodical collection, write down names of journals, and then check the current periodicals to see current issues. Now I can skip that last bit.
  2. I’m teaching topic-selection. Most early-career students tend to think in book-sized topics, and we browse periodicals in their fields to get a sense of what a paper-sized topic looks like. That will be no harder to do now, and might be easier since all the discipline’s journals will be classified together.

    3. What we're up to

  3. When I’m teaching online browsing. It’s easier to see that scholarly journal issues usually have a stated or implied theme for every issue when you’re looking at the print version. Then I can stress the importance of browsing the online version to see if the great article they just found is part of a themed issue. Again, this won’t change.
  4. When students will need to use some type of periodical. It’s easier to see the difference between a magazine and a disciplinary journal in print. This won’t change.

So for me, this is all gain and no loss. I hope it’s that way for the rest of the campus, too.