Category: Libraries and Librarians

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.

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As I mentioned earlier, last spring an English professor and I repeated an experiment that I’d conducted with American Studies juniors the year before, wherein we integrated information literacy concepts into several key points in their seminar. In each case, I met with the students 4 times, sometimes for as little as 10 or 15 minutes, and sometimes as long as the full class period. In every case, I worked with the students on concepts that were simultaneously part of an advanced information literacy “curriculum” of sorts as well as timed to help them accomplish an upcoming assignment.

Here’s the overview:

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

Session 3: The Literature Review

In talking about this session with the professor beforehand, she stressed that she wanted the students to “see their own authority” within the scholarly conversation. We were building on the theme of bibliographies being more than just lists and hoping to move the students toward thinking about the function of sources in scholarly work. Sources that function as background, evidence, arguments from other scholars writing on the same topic, and methodological/theoretical foundations.*

The previous week, the professor had asked students to bring in outside reading that complemented or augmented their understandings of the poetry they were reading that week, and she’d been pretty disappointed with the results. We had hoped to push students beyond finding things “on my topic” toward finding things that had intellectual and thematic resonance with their poetry, especially since there’s just not a whole lot of criticism out there that’s specifically about the poetry they were reading.

Based on that experience, she and I decided to ask them to try again and bring an article with them to class that was not about the assigned poetry, but that helped illuminate some key aspect of the poetry. She and I would guide them through mapping their supplemental readings to each other and to the poetry on the big blackboards in the classroom to help the students imagine how readings could be related when they weren’t about the same thing, and then we’d move from there to talking about the various levels on which the sources functioned and how they might function in a literature review.

Thematic Mapping (1 hour)

We started well enough, reading an article together that the professor had assigned for that day, talking through the article in fairly standard ways, and also talking through the kinds of sources the author invoked, and the functions that those sources played in her argument. Some sources were just barely related in topic, but contributed theoretical approaches that the author could apply, or arguments that applied by analogy. Other sources were clearly directly related to the poetry the author was writing about.

Then we transitioned to the exercise using the articles the students had found and brought to class.

Things were a little shaky at first. The students first seemed confused by and then resistant to the exercise of mapping their articles to one another. We asked them to write their article’s citation on the board and then list underneath it several key themes that it helped illuminate (things like “body,” “Other,” “self,” “national identity” etc, were some of the broad themes that the poetry dealt with, for example). Then we could start drawing connecting (literally) between the articles using these themes as connection points, even when the articles were about drastically different specific topics. All along, we tried to draw the students out a bit, getting them to talk through how other students’ articles augmented their readings of their own articles, and how the growing collection of sources they were creating all helped illuminate aspects of the poetry.

The push-back was fascinating. One student, after making skeptical noises for some time, finally articulated what she didn’t like about the process. She said, “It seems like we’re reducing these articles down to their least interesting, most simplistic components.” This, it seemed to her, was the opposite of what they should rightly be doing in a college class. It’s in many ways the opposite of everything English Lit majors are all about — unpacking, reading between the lines, finding the subtext. This was packing, skimming the lines, and hanging as many articles from the same category marker as we could.

Another student countered that no, this was something she really needed — some discussion of how to read on multiple levels at once, simultaneously unpacking and packing, as it were. And this started a conversation between all of us (including the professor and myself) about the multiple levels of reading that go into literary criticism, and particularly criticism that draws on other criticism or theory.

The Literature Review (half an hour)

The second part of the class was far more straight forward. We talked about how literature reviews look in other fields (often as a somewhat stand-alone thing) and how in the humanities, the epistemology is all based on a conversation paradigm, so literature reviews mirror this by integrating sources throughout the paper rather dealing with them primarily in one discrete section.

We talked about how the literature can function in a variety of ways (again riffing loosely off of Bizup’s BEAM model). It also performs a variety of services to the readers of the finished writing, allowing readers to use one text as a jumping-off point into related areas, lending credibility, and mapping out common ground between the writer and the reader (as if the writer is saying, “You know Foucault, and I know Foucault, so let me skip through all the summarizing and just point out why I think his work is important to what I’m saying, which will help you understand what I’m saying, and also signal that I’m not just pulling this idea from nowhere”).

* This is the BEAM model articulated in Bizup, Joseph. “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing.” Rhetoric Review 27.1 (2008): 72-86.

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As I mentioned earlier, this past term an English professor and I repeated an experiment that I’d conducted with American Studies juniors last year, wherein we integrated information literacy concepts into several key points in their seminar. By the end of the term, I met with this seminar 4 times, sometimes for as little as 10 or 15 minutes, and sometimes as long as the full class period. In every case, I worked with the students on concepts that were simultaneously part of an advanced information literacy “curriculum” of sorts as well as timed to help them accomplish an upcoming assignment.

Here’s the overview:

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

Session 2: Bibliography as an Intellectual Product

This session lasted about 15 or 20 minutes. I arrived at the beginning of the class, and participated in a discussion about readings they (and I) had done, and then transitioned into a brief discussion about bibliographies. After this session, students would be preparing an annotated bibliography as one of the initial stages working up to their final paper.

We started by looking at the bibliography in one of their readings, pulling out examples of entries there that illustrated the building blocks on which the author had built the article. Some entries gave us background information, some gave us a theoretical grounding, some pointed us to other scholars who were part of the same critical conversation about the topic.*

From there, we expanded on our notion of what bibliographies do. They are not lists, and they’re not incidental. They’re also not busy-work. Rather, they’re just as much an intellectual and rhetorical product of the author as is the prose of the argument. They map out the boundaries and the interlocutors that are part of a given scholarly conversation. They provide citations for key theoretical works that undergrads have trouble finding on their own (or knowing which will be useful for their projects). For undergrads especially, they also point toward important works that are part of the conversation but that would never come up in the search process because their titles and descriptions don’t share vocabulary (and since search is just about term matching, branching out into new vocabulary is incredibly important, particularly in the humanities where the jargon isn’t as stable or codified as it is in the sciences). “These scholars know each other,” I point out to the students. “They’ve heard each other at conferences, gone to graduate school together, talked with each other over email and Facebook… As they’re conceiving of their articles, they have all these other people’s work in their heads, so they know to cite so-and-so’s work even though there’s no shared vocabulary. Or else they know that so-and-so talks about the topic using this other vocabulary, so they can search on that vocabulary. Or else they know that so-and-so’s work on a completely different topic is relevant to their own work on this topic and can show you those connections and open up a whole new scholarly conversation to you.” This has usually never occurred undergrads. I encourage students to look at bibliographies as they would look at conversational clumps at a party — seeing who is talking to whom, then seeing what they’re saying and how they interact with each other, then joining a conversation and adding to it while referring back to the people whose points you’re expanding on or countering.

To tap into my own geekiness and the readiness of many Carleton students to revel in an honest-to-goodness intellectual geek out moment, I then pointed out that citation styles themselves, far from being arbitrary and complex hoop courses invented to make student’s hoop-jumping lives difficult, in fact reveal the epistemologies of the disciplines they serve. The styles are jargon, meant to communicate complex ideas in predictable, short, human-readable (everyone laughs) bursts of information. APA, for example, privileges dates and really only needs a primary investigator’s last name. This, speaking in generalities, reveals much about the way that science research is conducted (often a lab run by one or two stable scientists and several more temporary post-docs and research assistants, often working on sequential stages of a complex research question, publishing as they go). Providing last name and date lets readers know very quickly which major research question, and at what point along the timeline of an epistemology in which new research either test or build upon older research. MLA, on the other hand, works well for disciplines that are primarily discursive and subjective rather than sequential and objective.  It privileges peoples names and their words, and leaves dates for later primarily for people who need to know precisely what edition you were using or orient themselves in the much less granular timeline of developments in critical theory.

So, with all this in mind, the professor and I encouraged the students to see their annotated bibliographies as their chance to map out the boundaries of the conversation they’d be entering, selecting key works for theoretical foundations, background information, and the main voices in the conversation their papers will be adding to. The annotations should point out why and how each source functions in the context of their papers. And all of this will help them and their professor see the major landmarks on the emerging landscape of their topic.

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