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Category: Libraries and Librarians

The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

This morning, a Geology professor presented one of her assignments to this workshop that I’m attending, and one concept jumped out at me. She said that one of the things that makes Geology difficult for freshmen is that all evidence can be interpreted in multiple ways (Sound familiar? It sure does to me from both my Literature and my LIS backgrounds). Turns out, this was articulated as a philosophy of studying Geology back in 1897 when T. C. Chamberlin published his ideas about The Theory of Multiple Working Hypotheses.

Holding more than one hypothesis in your head leads to “certain distinctive habits of mind,” particularly thinking critically about each hypothesis and being more thorough in looking at the range of potential evidence (845-846). The idea is that if you don’t get attached to one theory, you won’t fall into the trap of only seeing or “lingering with great pleasure” on the evidence that fits that theory (840). You’ll also always have to confront the issue that one or the other of your hypotheses might not stand the test of research, which forces you to constantly evaluate each one’s validity.

This strikes me as exactly what I’ve struggled to articulate to my students who come to me with research questions for which they’d really just like to find some articles from which to pull supporting quotations. Whether the questions are overly simple (how better to know that you’ll find supporting evidence?) or impractically difficult, my students really aren’t interested in evidence that complicates their projects. (The major exception being those who feel they should find at least one source that definitively and categorically disagrees with them, in order to tear it to pieces while demonstrating that they’ve considered counter arguments. But this is not really holding a counter-hypothesis in mind.)

If I can get students to entertain the possibility of at least temporarily holding another hypothesis in mind, perhaps they’d be more thorough in their research, and perhaps they’d be more able to take a critical look at what they’ve found.

Of course, I should note that Chamberlin identifies a couple of disadvantage to this approach. First, it’s not something that “young scholars” can do very well (848). (Hmmm… that seems to include my entire audience.) And second, you can’t express “more than a single line of thought at the same time” (857). In other words, in the middle of our lightning fast 10-week term, I’d be asking them to entertain the possibility of doing a bunch of research that wouldn’t contribute directly to their final product. That’ll go over like a lead pipe to the head.

Still, I wonder if there’s a way to be more conscious about this as a method of thinking while acknowledging that it is not entirely practical for my students.

Chamberlin, T. C. “Studies for Students: The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses.” The Journal of Geology 5.8 (1897): 837-848. [Available via JSTOR]

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What I Retained from Immersion 2006

Published by Iris on Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Three years ago, I attended ACRL’s Information Literacy Immersion. The name is corny, but apt. It’s intense. Not every hour of it is the Best Experience Ever, in a large part because many of the faculty weren’t very good teachers (which is ironic, isn’t it?). But the chance to have a full week to really sit back and think about pedagogy was a wonderful thing.

Since then, I’ve done a lot of teaching, my co-workers and I spent some time teaching each other our best modules and philosophies last year, a friend attended this year’s Immersion, a few others and I organized “Mini-Immersion” for the instruction librarians of the 5 liberal arts colleges in the Oberlin Group (more about that later), and I’ve participated in some great LSW FriendFeed discussions (like this one) that forced me to really think about what I do, what I’ve learned, and what I still have to work on.

So what did I retain from Immersion ’06? In my head, I think of it as both a lot and not much at all. It feels like a lot because a few things fundamentally changed the way I approach instruction, I hope for the better. At the same time, I know that there are a lot of specifics about learning theories, learning styles, and assessment techniques that I’ve forgotten, and I’m pretty sure there were other things that I don’t even remember having learned in the first place. I remember being bored with several sessions (and my notes from those sessions are uselessly dominated with things like “so tired,” “kill me now,” and “death by handout”), but I don’t remember what I was supposed to be learning during those sessions.

And yet, I would recommend the experience to anyone who does instruction because the three things that changed my instruction have been just that valuable to me. Your three things might be different, but hopefully they’ll be even half as valuable. My three are:

  • Be your authentic self when you teach
    First of all, I love Randy Hensley. He was our instructor for the sessions on instruction, and he is A-Maz-Ing. Baruch is lucky to be getting him. But that’s not really a learning outcome, just my overwhelming impression from Immersion. Back to what I learned. Lots of what I had read about instruction included becoming a perfect teacher-person. This person was able to make students laugh, gain their trust, be wise, be organized, be spontaneous, be an authority figure… in other words, be one in a million. So I’d go into classes trying to impersonate this amazing teacher. And because I’m pretty good at impersonations, this stood me in good stead for a while, but it left me less willing to try things I was less comfortable with because I was already using up all my energy projecting Perfect Teacher onto everything. Learning to play up my strengths was so freeing. It meant that I could give myself permission to include mini-lectures if that’s what the class called for (even though the literature is constantly telling me that it should be Active Learning or nothing), or feel free to start a class on citation with an “I’m such a dork that I actually LOVE citation” attitude, or not feel like a total failure because I’m kind of bad at leading discussions while my co-worker can draw students out like you wouldn’t believe. It also gave me permission not to care about things that felt gimmicky to me, because if it felt gimmicky to me, there’s no way I’d make it feel important and relevant to my students. Basically, it taught me that just like not all clothes look good on all people, so also all teaching “best practices” will fit into my classroom. And that’s ok. What counts is that I interact authentically with my students.
  • As you’re planning a session, get in the habit of switching from “I will teach” to “I want the students to learn.”
    If I want to be thorough, I build real learning goals using the formula “The students will” + [verb phrase] + “in order to” [goal]. So, for example, “Students will recognize key functions of a database interface in order to navigate unfamiliar databases by making educated guesses about functionality and options.” Then I figure out everything students will have to know it order to do this (it could be quite a lot!). I don’t always have time or energy for developing formal learning goals, but at the very least I always consciously switch from “I will teach” to “the students will learn,” and suddenly my decisions become easier.
  • You can get to 2-4 learning goals in a 50-minute session. Seriously. And usually more like 2 or 3.
    There’s always so much to teach and so little time, but packing more in there really won’t help anyone. Figuring out learning goals helps me to prioritize not on the level of “I’ll emphasize x over y and give z the least time,” but also by helping me decide what to leave out altogether. Which is always sad, but necessary. (I get around this by making subversive handouts for most of my classes.)

Since Immersion, I’ve added one more maxim to my list: Shifting the emphasis to active learning and constructivist pedagogy doesn’t negate the need for some straight up, potentially boring, pedagogically outdated training. My students need to know the difference between a journal citation and a book chapter citation, and I want that piece to take 3 minutes rather than 15 so that we can get to some actually interesting active learning. But now, I use learning goals to help me make a choice about where this kind of training is important in a class rather than using that as my default.

So yeah, I’ve learned quite a bit in the last three years, but there’s a long way to go. I’d really like to figure out how to draw students out more effectively in discussion. I’d like to think more about how to emphasize the transferable skills in everything they learn. I feel like my active learning components lack creativity. And I’d like to figure out how to work with professors even more closely to make sure that we each reinforce the others’ work with the students so that my one-shot session doesn’t just wither by itself on the syllabus. I really think library sessions can reinforce or even advance the content piece of the course, and I think the professors can work information literacy pretty innocuously into more than just the one day without sacrificing time or content (I’ve seen it happen over and over, and I’m hungry for more of that).

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What’s In a Term?

Published by Iris on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

One of the things I love about language is how inexact it is. I went through a phase of bemoaning that very quality (“Life would be so much simpler if language were more more exact,” or even “Life would be so much simpler if all the rest of you people would use language more precisely”). When this seemed like it could become one of those fruitless grudges that I could harbor for the rest of my life, I decided to like it instead, and then discovered that I’d always liked it. I love learning what words mean to other people and comparing that to what they mean to me.

I apparently also like digressions.

On Sunday, Lori Reed asked the denizens of the LSW FriendFeed room whether they preferred the term Patron or Customer. People expressed preferences, some gave reasons for these preferences, and some proposed alternatives to both terms (with “user” being the most often mentioned).

Most of the time, I talk about “students” or “faculty,” but every once in a while, I need a good collective term. When that happens, I prefer “patron.” I appreciate the mutual respect that it implies, with my services being worthy of patronage and with patrons making the whole existence of the library possible. It may be a rather elderly term (the OED says it originated in the 12th century, after all), but the term “cottage” is even more hoary and hasn’t lost its vigor yet.

I tend not to like “customer” and “user.” When I worked in a bookstore, I sold things to customers, and I don’t enjoy selling stuff. For me, it muddies the waters, and makes me worry that the people I’m working with wonder if I’d even care if they didn’t have money. And while “user” is part of my library vocabulary (“user needs assessment” being a familiar and meaningful phrase for me), if I had to chose one term to the exclusion of all others, I’d stick with patron over user. Aside from sounding like “user” could mean “drug addict,” I mostly prefer my environment to feel less one-sided. A user is one who uses the library’s collections and services. I am one of the library’s services. A user uses me. Two of my favorite things about the work that we do is that it’s so collaborative with other members of our campus community and how much I get out of our interactions, and so I rarely think of our faculty and staff as using me.

For me, “patron” means mutual respect, and so every time I use it, I remind myself that I respect our faculty and students, and that they (ideally) respect me. If “patron” feels like disrespect to you, please don’t use it, but please don’t assume I mean disrespect when I use it.

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Have Interest – Will Adopt New Conference

Published by Iris on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

For the last couple of years, I’ve been wondering just which conference I should adopt as “my” conference. I want it to be one where the sessions are thought provoking and where I’ll get to hang out with people I know and like and are interested in things I’m interested in, and where I can meet people I’ve never heard of before and that have the potential to become my new best friends. So far, the conferences I know about are either so far above my technological abilities that I’d be lost the whole time and not have much reason to apply those skills in my everyday life, or they are at the “no really, the web can help you” level. And so far, I’ve attended the latter sort of conference primarily because that’s where other people who are stuck in the middle like me attend. These are the people I learn from the most, and this is where they go, so that’s where I want to go.

My experience last week reinforced this for me. I had a great conference! But reading Kathryn’s post, I realized that what we all want is a different conference to attend. We want something that falls in between the two kinds of conferences that are out there already but that has national (and international) draw like the current options do. Personally, I want something that gives nearly equal time to carefully thought-out presentations and less structured discussion. I want to hear from library-types and non-library-types. I want the moon.

Does this exist? Shall we descend on some unsuspecting conference and make it so? Shall we invent it from scratch?

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