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Category: First Year Students

Course and College Integrated Instruction

Published by Iris on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

It has been an odd but inspiring week at work. It was odd because my department members and I took one entire day to sit down together and write a couple of documents on a very tight deadline. It was inspiring because one of these documents mapped our experiences with last year’s first-year seminars to the goals of our newly devised first-year seminars (which the college is calling “Argument & Inquiry” seminars), forcing us to articulate what it looks like to be an instruction librarian for first-year students at a liberal arts college.

It was doubly inspiring because immediately after drafting that description of instruction librarianship in the liberal arts, I got to go and actually do that work with a 100-level course that is one of my perennial favorites: Linguistics 110.

I love this class because it absolutely embodies one point we made in our document: “Locating discussions of content relevant to the course within the context of library instruction makes explicit the connection between information gathering and knowledge production.” The professor teaches his class, talking about the different cortical pathways used to process kanji and kana (with a healthy dose of the convoluted history of Japanese writing systems and vocabulary). Meanwhile, I jump in every once in a while and show how to find out if the article he’s used as the basis for this lecture is still being cited in the literature and is still thought to be credible (he supplied me with the article information ahead of time), how to use terms from that paper to find more papers on similar topics, and how to evaluate the web site that popped up when he used Google to find images of these cortical pathways. Meanwhile, he riffs off of the papers that we find to talk about how they either confirm or complicate what he already knows, or how they relate to other concepts they’ve covered in class.

This feels so much closer to the way real research happens. It’s not set aside as “library day” when students will step outside of their roles as Students Of Linguistics and step into their roles as Students Who Must Soon Write a Paper. This is thesis development that’s built on class discussion and lecture, sprinkled with “but is this really credible,” encouraging the habit of taking facts and asking “but how would I find out more about that” and “what do I do with what I’ve found,” and always circling everything back around to how the new information informs thesis development and relates to the course content.

This model wouldn’t work for all courses, certainly, but every Fall I look forward to the call that will schedule this particular session.

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Learning About First Year Students

Published by Iris on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

The dynamics of research in our various liaison areas dictate that most of my co-workers work primarily with upperclassmen, and that I work with more freshmen and sophomores than with juniors and seniors. I used to feel a little left out of the “fun stuff” because of this split — a little jealous that my coworkers had more call to develop highly specialized knowledge and skills while I worked on basic things (like the fact that interlibrary loan exists, and that scholars publish in journals as well as books). But that only lasted as long as my naive assumptions about the complexities of working with first year students. Fall Term two years ago, those naive assumptions vanished, and ever since, I’ve been fascinated by the challenge of getting freshmen up to speed as quickly as possible. And just recently, I’ve learned a whole lot about my the target demographic of my special project.

  • Focus groups on our campus suggest that freshmen here don’t see research skills as generalizable across disciplines. Maybe our liaison model feeds this. Maybe our model just caters to it. Either way, that’s my cue to figure out how to make the skills and strategies I teach more explicitly transferable to other classes and research problems.
  • Our FYILLAA results were pretty interesting, too, showing that incoming freshmen (prior to having any classes at Carleton) *think* that tasks like citation or determining the scholarly-ness of a source are easy, but that they actually have a great deal of difficulty identifying scholarly sources or distinguishing between book, article, and essay citations.
  • And now I learn that first year students have other things on their minds, that they have to adjust to “daily life management” before being able to spend time developing their intellectual muscles.

What a range! Just the new stuff I’ve learned this term spans “transferable skills awareness,” the nitty gritty of getting your hands on stuff and navigating the scholarly literature, and the developmental project of adjusting to life on a college campus.

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Freshmen’s Questions About the Library

Published by Iris on Sunday, September 30th, 2007

For one class that I teach with a colleague every Fall term, the professor helps prepare her freshmen for their first library experience by having them read an article by Barbara Fister* and then write down questions they have of the librarians (me and a colleague, incidentally). Usually, these questions are very topic specific (“where would I find how much money was spent training fighter pilots in WWII,” for example). But this year, they had a discussion in class about the Fister article which generated a much different set of questions, which the professor then forwarded to my colleague and me. Here are a few that were particularly compelling:

  • Aren’t students supposed to be independent? Is asking for help appropriate?
  • When does help slide into collaboration? Do you ever worry about doing a student’s work for her?
  • What is the reference desk? Where is it? Who is there? What is the etiquette for approaching it/them?
  • How does one learn to use the library with an appropriate blend of asking for help and learning to fend for oneself?

Prompted by the clear uneasiness over our roles as librarians and over the broader question of how academic support fits into the academic world, my colleague and I decided to spend some time at the beginning of our library session trying to contextualize library assistance in an academic world. And here’s what we told them:

They are right: we are not here to hand over the perfect research each student will need for each paper. We’re here to help the students learn to figure out when they need to do research and then to find, evaluate, and use the sources they need. Just like we don’t believe that they are born knowing how to write at a college level so also we don’t believe that they were born knowing how to do library research. They don’t think that handing in drafts to their writing professor is cheating, and they don’t think that office hours with their professors will result in the professor doing their work for them. Instead, drafts are commonly seen as good writing practice and a chance to get feedback; office hours can be a great time to practice thinking like a scholar and, also, to get feedback. Well, meeting with librarians works the same way. They give you practice and feedback at this complicated and largely mysterious task of doing library research.

I hope that their other questions (such as “why use the library rather than search engines?” and “how do you pick quality sources out of huge numbers of hits” and the like) were answered in the normal course of our session. But I’m glad we got the chance to directly and explicitly address these more nebulous concerns.

Fister, Barbara. “Fear of Reference.” Chronicle of Higher Education. June 14th, 2002 (Or, for those who don’t have subscriptions to the Chronicle… click here.)

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"But Why Didn’t They Archive Their pre-1990 Web Pages?"

Published by Iris on Monday, October 9th, 2006

Most of my co-workers spend most of their time working with juniors and seniors. They teach classes for these more advanced students, and their appointment slots fill up with students needing complex data, high-level scientific research, or rare primary sources.

I, on the other hand, have spent my time this fall almost exclusively with freshmen. In fact, so far this term I’ve only had two appointments with seniors. And because I’m the liaison to the English department, and because most freshmen take various incarnations of English 109, I end up teaching classes mostly for freshmen. Consequently, I find myself teaching an entirely different genre of class than my co-workers do.

In some ways, I have it easier. I don’t have to worry about those left-field questions about SciFinder Scholar, and I don’t have to worry about my status as a non-expert in whatever field the students are studying. Hey, they haven’t even chosen majors yet!

On the other hand, though, these are hard classes to teach. The research topics range far and wide when the only requirement is to “write a research paper,” so it’s hard to choose a resource for them to learn that will benefit everyone in the class. The students are also inundated with introductory sessions for academic services, so they often come in prepared to be bored. And besides, what do you leave out when they need to learn about database searching and catalog searching and finding encyclopedia articles and evaluate web pages… All this and they don’t know how to read a call number, let alone understand that you can’t look up journal articles in the catalog. I also don’t get to delve into the really fun stuff – the advanced searching techniques, the specialized bibliographies, the thrill of the hunt.

Not only that, but the “everything’s on the web” attitude is now compounded with a new assumption: everything has always been on the web. Last week I had a student looking for government information from 1985-1990. The state government agency in question had digitized documents back to 1993, but not to 1990. “Why didn’t they archive their older web pages?” the girl asked me, bewildered. It took me a minute to realize that she was asking why all the wonderful documents that they’d put up online prior to 1990 had been taken down! As I explained that Google has only been around since 1997, and that the web was pretty much unusable by the general public before 1995, this poor freshman’s eyes got bigger and bigger.

In the face of such confusion, I’ve decided that I have a new mission at work. I’ve stopped being jealous that my co-workers get to prepare their students for complex research projects, and I’ve begun to realize that I have a special place in the library: not only am I perfectly positioned to reach more freshmen than my colleagues, but I actually enjoy the special challenge that these students present. So I will focus on reaching absolutely as many freshmen as I can. I will prepare them so that by the time my co-workers teach them in their advanced classes, these students will not only know the basics, but they will be empowered to experiment freely and ask for help unabashedly. These freshmen won’t know what hit them.

Or maybe I just like to play god. Bwa-ha-ha-ha.

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