Sometimes when I ask profs “what will your students have read recently, and can I have a copy” in preparation for classes, I get best answers. “We’ll have been reading about Wugs!”
I’m thinking my new mascot may be a Wug.
2 CommentsIf I could only be un-nervous and fully supported in my geekery in every class (by profs and students), they could all be as fun as last Tuesday’s class was. I’ve done similar things in other classes, but I often come out feeling like people were just kind of baffled by the crazy librarian who seemed really excited about… something.
So last week was based on what I think of as a fairly standard class: exploding the article. Basically, you take any given reading. You figure out who the author builds upon (citations and allusions) to move backwards in time. You figure out who has cited the work (technically citations and allusions, but really the allusions are pretty hard to search for so you’re left with cited reference searches in Web of Science or Google Scholar) to move forwards in time. And you Read Instrumentally to figure out the language and methodology of this community of inquiry so that you can search for more people using similar language or methodologies.
For this class, the professor and I chose to explode the least explode-able of the day’s readings: and excerpted portion of a book theorizing the silences in history.* There weren’t any citations included, and the piece was difficult to begin with, so we thought this approach might help us all figure out his argument a bit by figuring out who he’s talking to and what his base set of information is.
We started out discussing what outside voices the author included in his argument (and I’d brought the un-excerpted version from the stacks just in case we wanted to track down any actual citations), but very quickly started talking about how hard the piece was to read. We agreed (heartily) that this had not been written for OUR discourse community. In fact, it seemed bent on keeping us at arm’s length.
Talking over what made us feel unwelcome in this author’s world helped us think about conventions that we’re used to in American Studies papers that help us understand what’s going on. Some of that is vocabulary, some of that is topic, some of that is the dreaded citation (which everybody hates but which everybody really missed in this work because they felt like he was just name-dropping or referencing things and then leaving us without context). Basically, we talked about how discourse is situated within a community, and that following the conventions (of vocabulary, method, acceptable evidence, and yes, even citation) makes readers in your community more at ease — more ready to think through your thoughts with you rather than write you off or give up in frustration. Every piece of the work, from vocabulary to argument, has to work together to move your reader from thinking what they already thinking to agreeing that your way of thinking is interesting and useful. Every piece should help your reader trust that what you’re saying is reasonable. If you don’t pay attention to the rhetoric, your message risks being discounted or simply lost.
* Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, “Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History,” American Studies: an Anthology, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 558-566.
2 CommentsOne of my favorite metaphors for humanistic inquiry is “unpacking.” Sometimes it feels like an over-full suite case springing open, scattering previously unseen clothing and toiletries all over the place and revealing that present that grandma brought for you nestled there in the center. Sometimes it feels like carefully and laboriously picking the infinitely delicate locks on a briefcase, not knowing if what you’ll find inside will be precious or just some long-forgotten trash.
Unpacking means finding and reveling in richness and awe-inspring reality. Facility with unpacking is a tantalizing scholarly goal.
Little wonder, then, that my students balk a bit when I force them away from that goal. During one session where the professor and I were trying to get students to plot the interrelationships of some articles by finding their commonalities (either topic or approach or theoretical underpinnings), one student complained that “it seems like we’re reducing these articles down to their least interesting, most simplistic components.”
And we were, in a way. We were doing the opposite of unpacking. We were packing them carefully into suitcases, shirts on one side and pants on another, with no thought to the color, weave, or provenance of the individual pieces.
It hadn’t occurred to me before that moment how important focal flexibility is — the ability to see a given work in all its richness and unpackable complexity, and also see it as one of a constellation of other works — to be able to plot it dispassionately amongst its peers, and also gaze at its internal universes.
3 CommentsThis morning I got an email from a librarian wondering what kinds of concepts I teach, particularly in 300-level courses, beyond how to search. As it turns out, that’s something I think about a lot! Here is what I wrote:
Well, I’m not sure I have much to add that isn’t on my blog already, so I’ll include a bunch of links here, but contextualize them a bit. And probably the closest I can come to telling you about 300-level courses is a four-part post on highest level course I teach before their thesis. Another class that I’ve written up is Critical Methods. These are both for the English department, but I’ve done very similar things for American Studies and languages. The concepts are pretty flexible, and I’m coming to think of them as some of the core info lit concepts for most non-laboratory research. They probably aren’t the ONLY concepts, but they may give you some ideas. Essentially, I have come to think of Information Literacy as being highly related to rhetoric, where the point is to participate as an expert insider within a discourse community, using evidence that makes sense within that community in ways that resonate with the community in order to add to the community’s understanding in some way.
Also, a concept that I flesh out and emphasize differently depending on the level (but which I teach more and more often due to the feedback I get and the research we’ve done) is a circular research process that appears in the middle of this post.
With upper level courses I emphasize that there is a ton of actual reading involved because they’re developing a sense of the scholarly conversation, mapping in out (here’s where mindmapping can come in), feeling out its boundaries, and learning its vocabulary. Sometimes we practice what I call Instrumental Reading and what Booth breaks down into three types of reading (in his Craft of Research, pages 91-96 of the 2003 edition).And finally, I should say that I teach an awful lot about searching, but I frame it as if I’m not teaching searching, but teaching something more conceptual. Boolean and limiters and all those things come up with the examples we do together in class or examples I’m showing when I’m actually teaching them something else, and I’ll digress briefly to make sure everyone understands why I just wrote OR there before moving on. I say this just because when I first started moving away from “how to” teaching I felt guilty whenever I ended up showing those things, but now I think it’s the best way. The “how to” serves the higher order concepts, and they need both.
So that’s where I am right now in my teaching. I didn’t arrive here all at once, and I hope I’ll keep evolving and learning how to teach because there are a whole lot of rough edges yet. But for me it has been liberating and satisfying to think more and more about information literacy’s relationship to rhetoric and about the deep concepts that interest ME about information literacy. If I’m interested in what I’m teaching, I have a much better chance of interesting my students, and a FAR better chance of feeling fulfilled in my work.
~Iris
