Category: Teaching and Learning

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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Today’s LTC Lunch (weekly lunch-time presentations sponsored by our Learning and Teaching Center) featured a panel of professors from five different departments talking about how they use our vast arboretum in their teaching. These lunches are often interesting, sometimes inspiring, and always worth the time (and provide free lunch!), and today’s was definitely inspiring. I now want to take all five of those professors’ classes! The English prof talked about having his Nature Writing class do creative reports on local species in the arb. The stats prof talked about sampling ecological spaces rather than just people. The art prof talked about the work his Observational Drawing class does. The biology prof talked about how the arb functions as his class’ laboratory. And the geology prof talked about how it straddles some geologically interesting land that her students can study in a variety of ways, and how one year her class saved the college a million dollars by studying flood sediment and deciding that the college did not have to stabilize the banks of the river that runs through it.

Not only were these narratives fascinating in themselves, but they each reinforced what one professor said, which was that a huge part of a liberal arts education is “learning to look.” Each of these classes dealt with some aspect of taking in the vastness of the arb and then observing some piece of it closely, learning that piece, and applying it to the broader questions that their classes were tackling.

One professor also pointed out that when you take students into the arb, it’s impossible to escape complexity. They’re no longer dealing with lab samples. They’re no longer isolating geological study, for example, from biology or art. So in addition to the skills they build in their fields, they’re also learning to balance the particular and the general, the details and the gestalt. They’re learning to mentally zoom into and out of their environment, learning to look while immersed in complexity.

I love these ideas. I think this is exactly what I’m trying to teach my students about research. The landscape of possible evidence is vast and complex, and students have to learn to look at pieces of that landscape in ways that they’ve never had to look at them before. How is it that this one article fits into the landscape, or this one reference, or this one paragraph, or this one term? How does that mound of raw, uninterpreted primary source material complement the carefully plotted path of the literature review? What terms are sprinkled here and there in the prairie-like non-homogeneous homogeneity of your potential body of evidence? If you really look, even at something as factual as a report about an experiment, you can learn more than the facts that report aimed to convey; you can gain clues that will lead you to unexplored territories of scholarship.

Too often, I think, I shield my students from the complexity of this new landscape. I focus too much on helping them learn to look at the specific, the clean, the sterilized, the lab example. Too often the lessons I draw out from their active learning experiments are too safe. They are fundamental lessons, to be sure, but sterilized nonetheless.

My next instructional challenge, then, will be to build in healthy chances to encounter complexity, and to use those encounters to help my students learn to look carefully at what they find. A rock can be more interesting because of its placement in a landscape, and there’s more to learn about that rock than its shape and size and even its composition. So also, a single article never stands alone in the body of potential evidence, and if you really look, you can learn more than the facts and figures that article contains.

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For the last year, my campus has been having in-depth conversations about situations that make members of our community feel excluded or harassed, with the goal of making ours a more healthy and diverse community. Through it all, I’ve been struck by the amount of inadvertent hurt that well-meaning people can inflict on others through inattention, unfamiliarity, ignorance, misguided efforts to help, and even embarrassment.

I remember with shame, for example, that the default search term that I used to get a feel for new databases used to be “frogs.” Almost no database would come back with zero hits on that term, so I’d get to see what fields were available for searching and how the interface worked without trying to come up with a discipline-specific term. And I liked the mental image of cute little green frogs gallivanting through all of these stogy research tools. Unfortunately, I’m also the liaison to the French department. Ever since one French professor pointed out the connection, I’ve started using the current season as my default search term instead.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor example. But as I hear stories of students who have been crushed by similarly inadvertent insults, I wonder how best to approach those times when typing incredibly offensive terms is unavoidable. One prime example is historical newspaper searching. What do you do when you’re searching for newspaper articles in a full-text archive, and in order to find articles about racial or ethnic groups you have to type the names of those groups as they would have been reported at that point in history? There’s no normative indexing in most of these historical newspaper archives to ease the way. And if I, with my relatively benign heritage and general lack of heritage-induced baggage, cringe just a little bit when I search for World War II coverage of “Japs,” I can’t imagine what the experience must be like for many of my students.

It’s one small piece of a much larger issue, I know, but my current mini-goal is to figure out how to stand in front of a class, as I did just last week, and acknowledge that historical newspaper searching is hard for this reason, and explain why it must be so, and do it all in a way that doesn’t inadvertently wound one of the students whose trust I’m hoping to gain.

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