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Abstract: Students who find that traditional library
sources are increasingly digitized and available through different and
often baffling database interfaces turn to the Internet for information
on their research topics. Librarians and writing instructors must join
forces to provide appropriate instruction that will help students learn
the skills they need not only to locate, but also to evaluate and analyze
what they find. Librarians have always assumed responsibility for library
user education, a function that predates even reference service. Writing
instructors have always taught the interpretive and inferential skills
of reading between the lines. Now they must work together to create exercises
and assignments that teach undergraduates--and often their instructors,
too--how to navigate, assess, and apply the wealth of available online
information. A series of campus instructional technology grants has enabled
such collaboration at the University of California, Irvine. As a result,
all UC Irvine undergraduates benefit from such systematic instruction.
The title of a recent newspaper article tells it all: "Term papers
axed to obliterate plagiarism" (Schmidt, 2004). One response is
a renewed emphasis on in-class essays and exams. Another response, especially
in research universities like ours, is to keep the spirit of the assignment
but move beyond the "clichéd and templated 'traditional research
paper'" (Melzer
and Zemliansky) and to try to do a better job of preparing students
to do this redesigned work appropriately. That is what we have attempted,
in the spirit of the Boyer Commission Report, "Reinventing
Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities," which
calls for a university "culture of inquirers . . . in which [all]
share an adventure of discovery" (16).
Moreover, the recent “CCCC
Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in
Digital Environments” acknowledges how “The focus of
writing instruction is expanding: the curriculum of composition is
widening to include not one but two literacies: a literacy of print
and a literacy of the screen.” To meet this instructional obligation,
our collaboration has accordingly gone beyond developing guides to
evaluating Internet sources, such as librarian Susan Beck's well-known
site, "The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." What we three have done—one
librarian and two composition instructors--is work together to develop
a series of online tutorials, worksheets, exercises, and workshops,
all of which are intended to teach students how to find, evaluate,
and use information from library sources.
1. "Congruence of American Library Association’s
Information
Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, and Writing in Digital
Environments” by Cathy Palmer, Head of Education
and Outreach, UCI Langson Library
The librarian, Head of Education and Outreach, will review the American
Library Association's Information Literacy Competency Standards for
Higher Education in relationship to other literacy skills that
are necessary for students to become skilled writers and critical thinkers,
present an overview of the resources necessary to undertake such integrated
curricular collaboration, and present a case for the enriched curriculum
resulting from successful collaborations between librarians and writing
instructors.
In addition to defining
Information Literacy, the American
Library Association’s Information Literacy Competency Standards
for Higher Education set clear standards and communicate high expectations
for students’ ability to locate, use, evaluate and apply information.
While the standards and expectations for student learning outcomes
around information literacy are clear, the challenge for academic librarians
is to find ways to teach these competencies to students in an efficient
and meaningful way. In the past, and traditionally, libraries and librarians
took a “Field of Dreams” (Build it and they will come)
approach to teaching students how to find information. Reference Desks
provided, and continue to provide, one-on-one, point-of-use instruction
to those who needed to use library collections and resources. In the
early 1980’s many libraries
established Bibliographic Instruction programs in an attempt to
reduce the impact of providing individual assistance to multiple students
working on identical assignments. For many years, the focus of BI programs
was to teach students how to use tools to find information. The partnership
between the UCI Libraries and the Writing Program was formalized in
1986 as a way to provide students with instruction on how to complete
a research paper assignment in a more efficient manner than instructing
each student as they came into the library to use its resources.
This model, while staid and not particularly exciting, worked well
enough until the early 1990’s, which saw an explosion in the availability
of information in electronic format. In a very short time, it became
apparent that students no longer had to come to a physical place to locate
and use information; it was available anywhere one could find a computer
with a network connection. This widespread availability of networked
connections, as well as the proliferation of information available due
to the Internet, provided a unique opportunity to change the traditional,
passive approach to library instruction. It was during this time that
library professionals realized that they had to become more aggressive
in promoting the “added value” of information provided by
the Library, as opposed to that which was freely available on the Internet.
Because of our existing relationships with the Writing Program, the
UCI Libraries were well-positioned to leverage new education opportunities
provided by the widespread available of information during this time.
The goal of the Libraries
Information Literacy Initiative is to partner
with faculty in order to teach information literacy as an integrated
part of the course curriculum. The programs we develop, in addition
to being effective, must be scalable and sustainable. The Writing
39C research skills sessions and the Humanities
Core Discovery Tasks are two models for library instruction that
introduce students to basic concepts in information literacy and which
are scalable and sustainable given the resources available.
* In the Writing 39C model, each section participates in a research
skills session taught by a librarian. The Writing instructors prepare
their students for the session in several ways, including the conduct
of a materials inspection exercise. The learning
goals for the research
skills sessions are ambitious, as are the librarians’ goals
to include active
learning, group work, and a hands-on
exercise in these 50 minute sessions.
* The Humanities Core Discovery Tasks introduce students to basic information
literacy competencies through the use of self-teaching worksheets which
the students complete during the course of an academic year.
The Libraries’ Tutorial is
also available for use by students and instructors. The tutorial can
serve as a stand-alone introduction to the use of the library, as a supplement
to material presented in class, or as a remediation tool for students
who are struggling with specific concepts or tasks necessary to use the
libraries collections and services effectively.
As Elmborg observes in his article, “Information
literacy and Writing across the Curriculum: Sharing the vision” both
library instruction and writing instruction have faced similar obstacles
to finding an appropriate place in the university curriculum. Both
programs are often seen as either offering remediation (teaching
skills that students should know but don’t) or inoculation (teach
students something once and they will learn and know it always) or
both, rather than as teaching a stand-alone curriculum that also has
the potential to enrich and enhance student
learning outcomes. Writing programs have met the challenge by leveraging
the resources, and approaches to teaching and research of English Departments,
where they typically reside. Library instruction doesn’t fit
as neatly into the academic model. In order to succeed, libraries cultivate
and build upon partnerships with academic departments in order to reach
students. The UC
Irvine Libraries’ Education Program is an example of a successful
model that supports the Libraries contributions to the learning, teaching,
and research mission of the University.
2. “Enhanced Undergraduate Writing Competence and Use
of Traditional Library Sources Resulting from Collaboratively-Designed
Electronic Research-Based Writing Assignments” by Elizabeth
Losh, Writing Director, UCI
Humanities Core Course
The Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course will discuss how
implementation of a year-long information literacy curriculum composed
of self-teaching "Discovery Tasks" and a sequence of research-based
writing assignments has transformed both student writing portfolios and
teaching methods as instructors and librarians work much more collaboratively
in a series of "Virtual Research" projects. She will also discuss local
research indicating that undergraduate use of electronic resources
from the campus's digital library can actually increase their use of
traditional sources within the library's physical site.
Although many like Stanley
Chodorow once proclaimed that the advent of digital resources would
bring about the end of the era of great libraries, the physical space
of the traditional library as a site of teaching and learning has also
been revitalized by electronic research tools.
To understand how libraries have adapted to change it is useful to consider
three paradigms:
- In the supplementary model, electronic resources
improve upon traditional paper indexes and finding aids to help users
find library materials.
- In the substitutive model, digital libraries solve
problems of access posed by the archive and protect materials from
the rigors of on-site use by replacing traditional texts with electronic
ones.
- In the synergistic model, electronic hypertext encourages
users to exploit the resources of the physical library and conversely
on-site users are invited to explore digital texts.
In the Humanities Core Course, all three models have served the curricular
goals of the course.
1998-2001 "Exploration and Discovery"
2001-2004 "Laws and Orders: Humanities and the Regulation of Society"
Writing Assignments use the Perseus
Project, the Oxford English
Dictionary Online, JSTOR, Project
Muse, Liberty, Equality
Fraternity:Exploring the French Revolution, and the Salem
Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project at the
University of Virginia.
3. “Enhanced Professional Development of Writing Instructors
and Enhanced Writing Instruction Resulting from Library/Writing Collaboration” by Ellen
Strenski, Course Director, Writing 39C "Argument and Research," UCI
Composition Program
The Course Director of the required freshman composition course in Argument
and Research will report survey results of instructors who have requested
special attention and instruction from the librarians in database searching;
describe information about research skills prepared for prospective
transfer student orientation; and provide several illustrative worksheets
and a research log.
This course requires three
major researched papers that require students to incorporate researched
evidence to support their argumentative claims about controversial
issues of public policy. These assignments embody the student
learning outcomes developed for this course. Because the course
uses Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed as a course
textbook, instructors are concerned to avoid the appearance of partisanship.
Besides frankly acknowledging the controversy sparked
by this text at various campuses, various instructional materials have
been jointly prepared with librarians. One example is a collection
of online reviews of Nickel and Dimed, some only available through
library subscriptions to online journals. A second example is a set
of instructions on finding book reviews, prepared by a librarian
and hosted on the library’s web site, that uses the process of
finding reviews of Nickel and Dimed to illustrate the appropriate
guides and indexes.
One very practical result of our collaboration with the library over
the years has resulted in the 50-minute
workshop on research skills, particularly on finding scholarly sources
in library databases, conducted in a technologically-enhanced classroom
by a librarian, as Cathy Palmer explained. This third segment of our
panel presentation will accordingly describe the preliminary and preparatory
library materials inspection exercise that writing instructors conduct
before this orientation in the library, and second, to report the UCI
research that led to this division of labor.
- Library Materials Inspection Exercise
The library provides 4-6 bins of varied documents from the library,
that is, enough to offer composition instructors a choice of topics (related
to the course text, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed)
and to ensure enough material to accommodate multiple sections of the
course taught at the same time. The exercise takes one 50-minute class
during which groups of students analyze and compare the material in one
of the bins according to prominent characteristics. The purpose is in
a very material way to dramatize the kinds and value of potential research
sources other than those freely available on Google and other search
engines, on which this exercise builds in two ways: a collection of UCI
readings about Google and a Google
worksheet, and to point to another course requirement, the Source
Evaluation Worksheet that students will use to assess their major
research sources as they find them.
Thirty-one lecturers and graduate student teaching assistants were asked
to rank 14 instructional goals or activities on a 5-point scale, depending
on whether they thought each of these numbered items fit best as the
classroom instructor's responsibility and expertise (1 point), or whether
they thought it should be covered in person by a librarian in the 50
minute library orientation in a technologically-enhanced classroom (5
points). The results ranged from "Define research topic" on
one end (instructor's responsibility) to the other end of "Understand
structure, types, & coverage of library databases and online journal
archives" (librarian's responsibility). As a result, we have divided
the academic labor as explained above.
References
American Library Association. (2004, April 8). Information
Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. Retrieved
April 30, 2004 from the American Library Association Web site: http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/informationliteracycompetency.htm
Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research
University. (1998).
Reinventing undergraduate education:
A blueprint for America's research universities. Retrieved
April 30, 2004 from the State University of New York
at Stony Brook Web site: http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf
CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and
Assessing Writing in Digital Environments. Retrieved
April 30, 2004 from the NCTE Web site: http://www.ncte.org/groups/cccc/featuredinfo/115775.htm
Ehrenreich, Barbara. (2001). Nickel and Dimed: On (Not)
Getting by in America. New York: Henry Holt.
Elmborg, J.K. (2003). Information literacy and Writing
across the Curriculum: Sharing the vision. Reference
Services Review 31(1), 68-80.
Melzer, D., & Zemliansky, P. Research writing in first-year
composition and across disciplines: Assignments, attitudes,
and student performance. Kairos, 8.1. Retrieved April 30, 2004, from http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/8.1/binder.html?features/melzer/kairosfront.htm
Schmidt, S. (2004, March 31). Term papers axed to obliterate
plagiarism. Calgary Herald.
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