Tag: library instruction

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.

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.”

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!