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Category: Teaching and Learning

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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Mini-Immersion: A Shameless “How We Done Good” Post

Published by Iris on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

Well, last night ended up being un-fun and not very restful, and today started out with a low-grade fever (now gone, so things are looking up). So while I’m confining myself to laziness for the rest of the day, I thought I’d lay out this Mini-Immersion idea in its more logistical details.

The Two-Fold Inspiration

Many of us in the MnObe libraries have been to Immersion, but not all of us, so we thought it might be nice to spread the benefits a little bit. Think of it as a really intensive conference report where the audience has to recreate the conference for themselves.

Then last year, the instruction librarians at my library got together and shared teaching modules and strategies with each other, and ended up surprising ourselves at the wealth of experiences, approaches, and practicalities that we had to share with each other. Those days still stand out as my favorite days of the entire summer last year even though we’d all gone into it wondering just what the point was, exactly, since we thought we had a pretty good idea of what each of us did. Boy were we wrong! And the only thing better than the librarians of one liberal arts college library teaching each other how to teach? The librarians of five liberal arts colleges teaching each other how to teach, of course!

So the idea this year was to recreate a Good Parts Version of Immersion just for ourselves, emphasizing particularly the parts that are relevant for smallish private schools with similar missions and goals, squeezing it into one day, and acknowledging the wealth of expertise that’s housed among our colleagues, and spending some quality time teaching each other how to teach.

The Logistics

We picked a day (August 6th) and a place (Gustavus Adolphus) and met from 9 to 4. (In retrospect, building in some breaks would have been a good idea, but we were all so gung-ho!) All the presentations ended up being about half and half, lecture and discussion, which worked out really well.

  • 9am: Gather for coffee, conversation, and introductions
  • 9:30-10:15: Presentation — Information Literacy in the Liberal Arts (Barbara Fister)
  • 10:20-11:05: Presentation — Changing Paradigms: Shifting the emphasis from Teaching to Learning (Iris Jastram and Aaron Albertson)
  • 11:10-11:55: Presentation — Best Practices in Effective Instruction (LeAnn Suchy and Ken Johnson)
  • Noon-1pm: Lunch
  • 1-3: Instruction Workshops (small groups of 4–6 people)
  • 3-4: wrap-up discussion

Participants had two assignments:

  1. Plan out a SHORT presentation for the afternoon workshop (5-7 minutes) .
    This should be a snippet from instruction that you do or are planning to do and could either be something that works particularly well or that hasn’t worked as well as you’d like it to work. This could also be a narrative about a portion of a class that you are planning. Remember, you’ll be surrounded by experts who can help you, so take advantage of the opportunity! I strongly encourage you to plan to do these presentations without props of any kind. There will be projection equipment there that you can use if needed, but this exercise works best if the emphasis is on you and your teaching rather than a screen.
  2. Read the two articles below.
    Think of these readings not as prescriptive but as food for thought as you enter a full day of thinking about the kinds of instruction we do at our institutions. How do they work for you? How don’t they work? What aspects of your own instruction style and content do they make you think about (something that they show to be either a strength of yours or a potential weakness)?

    1. “Teaching the Library: Best Practices” by Laura Saunders, published in the Spring 2002 issue of Library Philosophy and Practice, available here: http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/saunders.html
      This is a short overview of best practices in library instruction. Many of these ideas we may have heard before or think about when we plan library instruction, but we want you to read this and think about your own instruction. How do you try to accommodate different learning styles? What supplemental materials do you provide for your class? Do you try to incorporate humor into your instruction? Bring examples of your own instruction, or ideas you come up with as you read this, to share with all of us on Immersion Day.
    2. “So, What’s a Learning Outcome Anyway?” by Mark Battersby, published in 1999 as an ERIC document, available here: http://tinyurl.com/nbkjby
      This article attempts a definition of Learning Outcomes that foregrounds this concept as an approach or set of attitudes rather than as a formula for classroom instruction. How well do concepts such as “generic abilities” fit with liberal arts education in general and library instruction in particular? How do we break down the big picture end result of multiple “generic abilities” to things to be taught in a library instruction session? And, how do we relate them to the library tools we feel students must learn about, like the library catalog?

The articles were chosen by the presenters of the morning sessions and gave us some concrete things to agree or disagree with early in the morning. And there was a lot of disagreeing, but in the most constructive way possible, of course.

The whole day cost $10 per participant to cover lunch, coffee, and snacks.

I should note that the entire day required a grand total of an hour and fifteen minutes of meetings on the part of the organizing committee, and all but about half an hour of that were 15–minute telephone conference calls. So really, this isn’t that hard to set up. The hardest part was finding people to step forward and present, so the steering committee ended up doing two of the three presentations ourselves.

I guess the point is this: it’s really not hard, and though it may look either too serious or too hokey or too whatever, you might enjoy it more than you think.

And now, I think I’ll take a nap.

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Dragging a Stick and Other Obsurdities in Research

Published by Iris on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

With Fall Term looming, my colleagues and I have been thinking more and more intentionally about where our students are, where we want them to be, and how to move them closer to that second point. To kick of “Aaah, the students will be here soon” season, my colleagues and I from the 5 liberal arts institutions that make up the Minnesota Oberlin group got together for what we affectionately termed “Mini-Immersion.” It was a fabulous, exhilarating, exhausting day of intensive learning about teaching, and it served as yet another reminder that we have a lot of teaching expertise to draw upon in this group.

I’ve included the major themes from our sessions and discussions below in case you’re interested, as well as my own class-specific take-away, but there was one new pedagogical idea that I hadn’t thought about before and that has me intrigued.

Barbara Fister started off the day with a presentation on Information Literacy and the Liberal Arts in which she said that playfulness is important to learning and a key aspect of the liberal arts. “Research is really kind of a formalized playing around,” she said, and then wondered aloud how she could instill this idea of playfulness in her students.

The idea of Play allows you to explore avenues in your research that may not pan out, sometimes without the idea that you’re even doing something as serious as “exploring.” The idea of Play includes the prerequisite of being easily interested, amused, and inspired. The idea of Play assumes interaction with people or things or both. And probably most important, Play doesn’t assume an outcome.

I think of a child I saw this morning who was dragging a stick along the sidewalk and watching it intently as it dipped into each groove in the pavement. I need to be able to drag a stick through the world of information and watch it bump along whatever is in its path, to watch how it interacts with that world without predicting what I’ll see, and to begin to predict interactions without ruling out the possibility of surprise too quickly. I want to be able to help my students play this way, too, even in their world of impossibly short deadlines.

I don’t remember the last time I saw a stick and felt compelled to pick it up and drag it along behind me, or poke things with it. When did I lose that capacity to be so easily interested in my world, or even to notice these things that used to interest me? How can I relearn this critical skill, and how can I help my students find and pick up sticks of their own?

——
End of Post-Proper; Beginning of extra information…

Continue readingDragging a Stick and Other Obsurdities in Research
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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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