I am far too sick today to do any real work, so instead I find myself reflecting on the end of three weeks of the ELIP program and in particular on the 60+ search strategy and citation mini-assigments on which I found myself in the position of providing feedback. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve never had such a connection to where students are really at in their research journeys than in commenting on these assignments, not even when I taught this as a semester-long course – perhaps because at that time I was honestly more focused on getting students their grades than actually helping them.
I don’t know why exactly I thought that these mini-assignments would be simple things, that the comments would be straightforward tweaks, rather than mostly scratching the surface of what would ideally require some real, intense course correction. I’ve come into some opinions while marking these; I don’t know if I’m quite ready to proclaim all first-year writing courses ill-conceived, but I feel quite strongly now, that unless and until significant changes are made, first-year students should not be writing research papers.
Fostering intellectual curiousity will always be a chicken vs. egg sort of problem, whereupon final essays in first-year writing courses are often assigned with open topics so that students may follow their bliss. But often these emergent scholars have not yet any bliss to follow, and the course instructor does not have the disciplinary-specific resources to provide inspiration. Direction on a topic is not enough. We can tell students what is too broad or what is too narrow, but we can’t tell them what’s truly interesting, and more importantly, why. No single person can take simultaneous kernels of interest in, say, colony collapse disorder, or the economic ramifications of the housing crisis, or the myriad long arms and looming shadows of A.I. and nurture them all so that they sprout equally. Students by and large don’t come to higher education because they have deep disciplinary interests to pursue; they come to explore and make connections, both with their peers and their instructors. The latter of which are posed to be considered by these students as inspiring people, whether or not they have any claim to deserve it.
Further, the typically librarian advice to narrow a research topic often ends up at cross-purposes to fostering interest in it, because big questions always come before small questions. And big questions need to be answered, at least in a superficial way, before any of the smaller questions can emerge with clarity. Finding scholarly resources that help answer big questions about a topic is nigh-impossible within the space of a single course, but without these strong foundations, any small corner of a topic will end up, at best, vaguely ethereal to a first-year undergrad, or at worst, actively repellant. Impelling students to engage with scholarly sources when they do not have the foundations to actively participate in the conversation only sends the message that they do not belong in their chosen field.
If you invite me (or someone like me) into your course, the reason I am there is generally to coax students into finding, identifying, and using scholarly sources for their research papers; but a librarian visiting a classroom once is like a ship passing in the night if there is no scaffolding in the curriculum for any of this engagement. More importantly, scholarly sources are not written to converse with undergraduates. I have tried to pick apart the equation of scholarship with reliability and authority, but I don’t know that this is a popular tack to take in our profession, even when the first Information Literacy frame purports to speak to this. I can tell students in class that scholarly sources are not written for them, I can give advice on how to read them, but I cannot change the overall landscape of accessibility in scholarship.
If students are compelled against their will to use scholarly sources that are not written for them on topics on which they have a burgeoning interest at best, then what else is to be concluded but that we first make plagiarists and then punish them? We are not setting students up for honest engagement when even those who push through, following instructions to the letter, and even maybe reading whole articles, do not likely comprehend most of what they are reading. So how do they develop a voice, lost in thousands of articles on the most minute of topics that seem so far removed from whatever their original spark of interest? I tell students they can argue with authors, that they can and should read things they don’t agree with, but the problem is that I don’t think that means much when they have had no guidance or experience finding their own voice, and very few paths to feeling confident in any opinions that they manage to surface. So much of the conversation about engaging with texts is focused on anti-plagiarism that it’s impossible to rescue the notions of relationship-building and having a conversation in the space of a single library instruction class. Even the entire course wouldn’t be enough.
So what do we do? My humble recommendations would start with engaging with primary sources rather than scholarly ones. I wrote many essays in the first year of my undergrad, and the ones that were quite good (for a first-year) were written on what I thought one or two primary source texts were saying about a very large topic. I wrote two essays that year that were research papers, and all I remember about them was the 0/1 I got on the metric of my criminolgy paper devoted to using just one scholarly source. I remember thinking at the time that I had used a scholarly source (after all, I’d found it using a library database), but ultimately, how was I supposed to know?
Scholarly sources aren’t the first step to becoming scholars; we need to prioritize developing a voice and a perspective in order to scaffold participation in conversations. Similarly, this would ground citation practice in a few deliberately-chosen sources that the whole class would participate in. Primary sources often engage with the grandness of topics and ideas in a way that is readable and interesting, which would allow students to take up the thread of the source that interests them and to follow it. I’m not the person who can or should fix academic writing courses, but I do question what they actually are. As in, shouldn’t individual disciplines reiterate academic writing concepts throughout the student journey, instead of trying to pack it into one class? And I wouldn’t be a librarian if I didn’t point out the visible need for integrated information literacy instruction along the way.
Ultimately, we need to recognize that students don’t become scholars by reading scholarship and writing research papers; they become scholars by developing their curiousity through discussion and exploration within a welcoming academic community.