Tag: elip

1500 words most people will happily skip: Thoughts on a lit review

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the lit review is the most tedious section of research essays in the social sciences. When students ask me pointed questions about how to read research papers, I have bluntly opined that if a section needs skipping, this is the section. I mostly glaze over them myself. The literature review is mostly good (and by good, I mean interesting) for one thing: making low-key bitchy comments about other peoples’ substandard research, and for that it is woefully underused.

Frankly, I would much rather read only articles that are good and interesting -like what I tell students to find – but generally peer reviewers demand a level of comprehensiveness that requires me to read the bad and boring ones too. It is of course impossible to be comprehensive on a topic so vast as IL instruction, so my goal is to accurately represent the state of the field until a saturation point, or when my eyes glaze over, whichever comes first.

What I found in this particular review was a preponderance of uncritical thinking towards one of the most prominent/important of librarian duties. One study declared the one-shot session “just enough of a good thing” because students were able to regurgitate the most conservative of perspectives about authority (the US government is a better website than Wikipedia!) weeks after participating in one. This same study asked a bizarre array of demographic questions as a precursor, including of all things, students’ marital status. I was greatly amused by one meta-analysis that included as part of the discussion, all the ways the author had had to correct some of the other studies included.

And yet, there was also interesting thoughts – on the increasing irrelevance of Boolean modifiers, on the importance of reflection and presence to teaching – especially decolonized approaches to teaching, on the “organizational fiction” of librarians as teachers, and on critique as care, a mindest incredibly dear to my heart.

While I suspect my synopsis will be largely passed over by eventual readers, I did learn, and I have new questions and ponderings now, which is usually the greater part of learning anyway.

The Sisyphean Task of Evaluating Information Literacy: A Beginning

Today is the first official day of my 6-month sabbatical. While I have some ambitious ideas for the time and I hope to be able to expand into many areas of professional interest, my first priority and ostensible purpose is to evaluate the ELIP program, based on both the feedback and the assignment data that were collected this past year.

In the last, lazy days of June, I was able to make a start with my analysis, reading the librarian journals, the student survey answers, and the faculty survey answers. What remains is the bulk of the student assignment data, especially the search strategy worksheets, which formed the major assignment in both semesters.

Even taking into account the increased communication and collaboration with course instructors, truly understanding the long-term impact of our instruction (if any) remains outside of our capabilities. The bulk of literature on one-shot instruction sessions notes the difficulties incumbent upon evaluating any lasting impact of the instruction; we at least have the perspective of the whole semester, as reported by course instructors.

The initial goal of the research was (somewhat vaguely) to evaluate the impact of the program on students. After teaching, collecting data, and keeping this project on my mind almost constantly throughout the past months, the questions I think we can answer are the following:

  1. Did the ELIP program help students succeed in their English 1100 courses?
  2. Does further integration of instruction aid in relationship-building between the library and the TRU community?
  3. How can we improve our instruction practices to better meet student and program needs?

I feel like potential answers have been swirling in my brain since the beginning of all this, but at this point, my most important goal will be to forget all that and start at the beginning.

A place of failure, a place of play: Academic libraries as third place

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking to the Faculty of Arts on the declared topic of integrating library instruction and support to increase student belonging and academic engagement. As enthusiastic as I was to deliver this talk, I admit that I first needed to check in with myself to make sure that I did in fact agree with my premise-that libraries support student belonging and academic engagement. Much of the research supporting this point is correlative rather than causative, and student socioeconomic status is often the elephant in this particular room. I do, however, believe that academic libraries play a central role in student belonging, and upon reaffirming this, the question became why this should be so.

Ray Oldenburg’s work on third places is surprisingly underused in the library field, because it seems to me to cut right to the heart of libraries’ role in building academic community. In brief, third places “host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work” (Oldenburg, 1989). So, if home is your first place, and work is your second place, third places are the other places to go and chat and build community. Not just any place can be a third place; there can’t be a price of admission, there can’t be pressures, there can’t be obvious socioeconomic distinctions. Conversation and play should be the main activities, which isn’t what a lot of people think of when they think of libraries, but it’s what we want to be. Not just a place of quiet study and research, but a place of failure, of play, of experimentation, of trying.

Public libraries are some of the last lingering third places in any community. Academic third places are always slightly complicated by the fact that there is quite a hefty price of admission to being part of the academic community at all. But if we permit (as I think we must) universities to exist as learning communities in their own right, these must have third places, where members can gather and where grades and success are not of primary concern. Waters (2023) posits that not only are libraries the academic third places, but that librarians are unique in being “third people,” not centrally located within home and school groups. Which means that we are people who can provide guidance but also who can accommodate failure.

Going over the interviews from the Makerspace research, I came across this student quote:

I like the idea of this place, that it is a place where you can make mistakes. And I think really getting the understanding of that creates so much [thinking pause] comfort in coming here and trying things. So, I would try, and then when I get only so far, I know that there’s someone will help me get a little bit further

Makerspace user

I think this wonderful attitude is so prominent in the Makerspace right now, but it actually describes ideally what the library is or should be to the students. This is what we want to encourage from the students who currently feel like experts when they use Google. To let go of the need for expertise and embrace the curious unknown.

I didn’t entirely realize when I put the talk together that what I was asking is for me to help them help students fail, but I think that failure is key to building our academic communities, and the role that libraries can play in student success is bound up in their capacity to be a safe place for failure.

“I feel like an expert when using Google”: Reflections on 2 weeks of ELIP

I am almost through the second week of the three-week English 1100 library tutorial. It has been a whirlwind, particularly today having just returned from CLAW last night. But in the classroom itself, that’s when it doesn’t feel draining. It feels smooth, and natural, and both the content and timing are working very well. I have 5 sections, with numbers ranging from 1 student in my Thursday morning to 42 in my Friday afternoon.

I gave comments on the first batch of mini-assignments in a flurry this morning. Students were supposed to answer questions relating to what kind of sources they would be using for their topic (which most of them don’t have) and what factors they would be looking for to choose their sources. While not having topics made it a little trickier, many of the students still default to words like reliable and authoritative, without really thinking about what they mean. That being said, a lot of them put visible effort into the assignment, asking curious questions and revealing their thought processes. My favourite observation: “I feel like an expert when using Google.” Because it’s true. And that’s what Google wants, and that’s how it hooks people. I had to think hard on what to say, but the answer I gave had to encourage the student and all the students NOT to feel like experts when you approach your research, to instead embrace a standpoint of open curiousity as a learner and novice. It’s a hard sell, I admit.

The work we’re doing, it’s making a difference, I think. This is the first time we’ve been able to really work iteratively with students on their strategies. I think when we worked on filling out the Effective Search Strategies sheet today, every single person had at least one question or comment about their particular strategy. When I gave them the last 20 minutes of class to do their work, most of them stayed until the end and really put in the effort. I felt proud of them. One of the students who initially said they would use the first page of Google results for their paper came to talk to me about his search strategy twice and each time went back to fix it and improve it. And even in the second week when students still came without topics, every one of them left the class with a preliminary topic that they could work with.

Perhaps the oddest thing is that a group of students brought two of their friends to my evening class tonight, and the guests stayed, filled out the worksheet and even participated, asking questions and offering input. As they entered the class, I overheard one student explaining: “It’s a library thing we have to do for English…but it’ll make you smarter.” I know the jury’s still out, but it just keeps making me think that what we’re doing here is helping, is making the students understand a little better what research is and how to do it. And at the end of class, my favourite comment so far: “If this was a course, I’d take it every year.”

Welcome to ELIP

Today is the first day we start registering students for ELIP – the English 1100 Library Instruction Pilot that I have been preparing for in some way since the beginning of the year. After consultation and contemplation and actually considering what would work, we are attempting to replace one-shot library instruction with a series of three tutorials.

We’ve aligned outcomes with the newly-developed Librarians’ Department Program Learning Outcomes, with the Framework for Information Literacy, with the English Department Program Learning outcomes and with TRU Institutional Learning outcomes. That can sound like a lot of bureaucracy but it’s my favourite part in a way, to take a bunch of disparate goals and find the places they fit all together. The three classes themselves are essentially tied to three of the ACRL frames:

  1. Authority is constructed and contextual (evaluating sources and identifying academic sources)
  2. Searching as strategic exploration (search strategies and tips)
  3. Scholarship as conversation (citation and academic integrity)

Honestly, the content we’re attempting to cover in these tutorials isn’t much more than what would happen in a one-shot; what I think will make the difference is spreading it out over the three weeks, building relationships and getting feedback on what they hand in. Even more than that, it’s so difficult to ever try anything new when you have something that maybe isn’t working that well, but is by all accounts…fine. I’m excited to try something new.

For all the various evaluations we do and the anecdotal data we collect, we’re not actually sure if library instruction works, or perhaps more importantly, how it works and in what ways. This is the first time we’ll have a significant amount of data to play with, and I think whatever else happens, the partnerships with the instructors in developing this material and this program will be worthwhile.

What I’m less certain will work is the logistics. The tutorials are connected to classes, but they’re outside of classes, so certainly some of the instructors are worried that they won’t go or they won’t have time to go. That’s valid. Student lives are hectic and over-scheduled. We’ve asked instructors to designate marks for the completion of the tutorial as an extra inducement to attend.

At 4pm I walk into my first class to tell them about it, and we will see how it goes!