How'd You Do That? From one-shots to a minor in Information Studies
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LOEX 2020 with Irene McGarrity and Eric Shannon. In this presentation, we describe our process of rethinking and reinventing our approach to information literacy instruction and developing a minor in Information Studies. Over two years we decreased librarian-taught one-shots, eliminated our ineffective liaison (non)program, collaborated with the Writing Center to provide peer-to-peer research and writing support, and developed train-the-trainer workshops for faculty. We describe the Information Studies curriculum, its connection to The Framework, and how teaching in the minor has impacted our self-perception and identity as librarians. We engage attendees in asking themselves the hard questions that we asked ourselves as we began to reinvent how we work.
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How'd You Do That? From one-shots to a minor in Information Studies
- 1. How’d You Do That? From One-Shots to a Minor in Information Studies Elizabeth Dolinger edolinger@keene.edu Irene McGarrity imcgarrity@keene.edu Eric Shannon eric.shannon@keene.edu
- 2. Keene State College ❖ Public liberal arts college ❖ ~3000 undergrad students; mostly on-campus ❖ ~50% 1st generation ❖ 5 FT librarians (4 of them teach) ❖ All librarians have faculty status
- 3. From this…. To that…. Subject liaison model Librarian-staffed desk Librarian-led one shots One-shots on demand 2013 2015-Present Functional liaison model Research & Writing Tutors Tutor taught one-shots Academic program minor in Information Studies
- 5. Our Approach… ● Integrative Learning ● Focus on quality of interactions and building meaningful relationships ● Believe that information literacy is not about the library ● Information literacy requires studying information as content (vs. information skills) = a spectrum
- 6. Statue of General John Stark at the Bennington Battle Monument in Bennington, Vermont. Wikimedia Commons/Joe Mabel Live Free or Die granite monument in Nashua, New Hampshire erected in celebration of the nation's bicentennial; photo by James Walsh (jcbwalsh) on Flickr
- 8. What is information literacy? Bibliography by papertrix CC BY-NC 2.0 Questions we asked ourselves:
- 9. What’s a “program”? Is this support? A service? An initiative? When do I lead? When do I have control? (is control necessary?) Program by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images Questions we asked ourselves:
- 10. What is good pedagogy? And when do I get to practice it? Questions we asked ourselves:
- 11. What is our ability to assess students’ readiness (or needs) for information literacy instruction? When can we provide feedback on their learning? Angelo & Cross Wiggins & McTighe Questions we asked ourselves:
- 12. The Minor in Information Studies Five Courses @ 4 credits each = 20 credits total Three Core Courses / 12 credits ● 110 Information Environment (can take for gen ed credit) ● 310 Information Policy (can take for gen ed credit) ● 490 Collective Memory: Archival Methods Two elective courses / 8 credits selected from a list of courses taught by other departments, or accomplished via independent study or internships. Flyer linked here.
- 14. 110 Information Environment (survey course) ● Information seeking behavior online (online information search methods; usability; information structures and design) ● Influence of algorithms (filter bubble) ● Information as a commodity/ value of information and data/ property ● “Fake” news/ “evidence” / “authority” / confirmation bias ● Information Privacy ● Access issues and digital divide ● Censorship and 1st Amendment (IL Frames: Authority is Constructed and Contextual; Information Has Value; Information Creation as Process; Scholarship as Conversation; Searching as Strategic Exploration; Research as Inquiry)
- 15. 310 Information Policy ● Intersection of law, social/cultural forces, internet architecture, and markets. ● Information and data privacy from a policy perspective. ● Copyright law, fair use, and the complications of policy that can’t keep up with technology. ● Structural, political, and technological barriers to information-sharing (bureaucratic, corporate, non-profit, etc.) ● Free speech and censorship: policy and cultural enforcement. (IL Frames: Authority is Constructed and Contextual; Information Has Value;)
- 16. 490: Collective Memory: Archival Methods ● Collective and cultural memory ● Oral history ● Primary source literacy ● Transcription ● Digitizing ● Preservation, storage, access ● Social justice aspect of archives and information storage (IL Frames: Information Creation as Process; Scholarship as Conversation; Searching as Strategic Exploration; Research as Inquiry)
- 17. How the Minor Has Changed Us and Our Work Self-perception and professional satisfaction Scholarship Teaching Connections with students Connections with faculty Librarianship?
- 20. Contact Elizabeth Dolinger edolinger@keene.edu Information Literacy Librarian Irene McGarrity imcgarrity@keene.edu Digital Learning Librarian Eric Shannon eric.shannon@keene.edu Collections Strategies & Services Librarian
Editor's Notes
- WE ALL INTRODUCE OURSELVES - IRENE WILL START, ELIZABETH, THEN ERIC, Also I think we should take questions at the end - rather than in middle How long we’ve been there, our other professional title.
- ERIC - you could start with what’s current Integrated Research & Writing peer to peer tutoring program provides reference desk help and research workshops for classes
- IRENE Presentation is primarily about the development of our information studies minor, but we had a lot of dramatic changes in our library before, and concurrently with the minor . We shifted from a very traditional subject liaison model to a functional model. So rather than being plugged into random departments and wearing many hats, we get to cultivate and lead out own particular areas of specialization. Ex: My area is digital learning--collaborate with digital learning and faculty enrichment departments to support faculty teaching in a lot of different ways; I lead initiatives around OER; I provide copyright and creative commons education. We switched from a very traditional reference desk to a student run research and writing desk. Librarians can now use their time and expertise training small groups of students to help other students, and we teach courses rather than doing shifts at a reference desk. Our tutors also teach most of the one shot sessions. Librarians do more complex upper level workshops occasionally. We also provide workshops to faculty to teach them to teach information literacy themselves in the context of their own courses and their own disciplines. All of these changes really provide a good context for how and why we came to develop the minor. Since we were freed from doing basic database demos in other people's classrooms, supporting other people’s assignments and curriculula, we had the opportunity to create meaningful learning experiences for students in the form of courses that had some components of one shot instruction, but really allowed us to go a lot further and deeper into the study of information.
- IRENE As we have started sharing our story with other librarians, this is the question most often posed to us - which is why we thought we’d title the presentation this way. But we can’t say that what works well for us, will work just as well for you or for your institution. But what we can do is share our experience,AND the hard questions we asked ourselves in the process of making these significant changes, and why we made them. We can encourage you to ask the same or similar questions - and to push forward toward working in the way that is best for you, for your library, and your students.
- ELIZABETH To begin we want to contextualize our approach and describe how we think about information literacy, and curriculum at Keene State - Keene State approaches general education from the idea of “Integrative learning” = making connections between experiences - its a holistic view of education, that learning doesn’t occur in silos - The librarians Focus on QUALITY not QUANTITY - We would rather spend more time with fewer students - (bodies in seats does not equal success). We don’t aim to introduce every student or even as many possible. INstead we aim to develop meaningful long lasting relationships with students. We don’t believe that information literacy is about the library - the library may play a role in information literacy, we also research and share how to develop information literacy - however we don’t believe the content of information literacy is library-centric We view Information Literacy as a SPECTRUM -- flowing from information skills, to skills applied in disciplinary contexts, to the idea that information literacy really requires one to study information as content -
- ELIZABETH NH happens to have one of the most famous state slogans of “Live Free or Die” and this approach is held very close at heart in NH - intellectual and academic freedom is taken very seriously by faculty at Keene - standardization is resisted, faculty aren’t “required” to participate in anything that isn’t explicit in the contract, and content and pedagogy are determined by each individual instructor (and can vary widely even if there are multiple sections of the same course). However - as Irene described, that curricular freedom was not always the case for librarians. We were beholden to course curricula that was designed by others, and reliant upon other instructors to “allow” us to teach. Despite the many successful collaborations we had - ultimately the goals for the assignments and activities were not about information literacy, but rather were developing information skills in service to their assignments and their goals which were about some other topic. By viewing information literacy as a spectrum, we recognized that we needed the same level of academic freedom over our curriculum and pedagogy, in order to teach students about information - to study information as its own content - and ultimately develop the full spectrum of information literacy. (Stark was a New Hampshire–born war hero, having served as an officer in the British army during the French and Indian War and a major general of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Stark led troops at the Battle of Bunker Hill and later at the Battle of Bennington) John Stark said in a letter honoring veterans “live free or die”
- ELIZABETH To come to this point - and to gain freedom and control over our own curriculum - we’d been asking ourselves some questions that prompted us to reflect on our practices. And as we answered these questions, we identified new ways to work, and it was like a domino effect - one change led to another. And over a few years we’d completely changed our entire way of working. So we’ll share with you all of the questions we asked ourselves, because they’re related and helped us change, but by the end we will be focusing the presentation on the development of the Information Studies minor.
- ELIZABETH The first question was - WHAT IS INFORMATION LITERACY? - we’d been grappling with this. With what we believes information literacy to be, verses what we were doing in the classroom by teaching all of these skills workshops. And this helped us to view information literacy as a spectrum ranging from skills to understanding of information structures and policies. When the ACRL Framework came out - it helped us to articulate what we’d been grappling with and to define as information literacy.
- ELIZABETH - As IL Librarian - The next Question, I was trying to answer as “What’s a Program?” This really lead to a series of questions - and eventually led to developing the minor - We had a “program” of integrated one shots - and we spent years discussing it in the library - but if I mentioned an information literacy program to anyone on campus outside of the library, they had no idea what I was talking about. So there was no institutional recognition of an IL program - What others saw -- was a support service. So ultimately we stopped referring to our series of embedded sessions as a program - and started thinking of it as support. And sometimes we had an initiative to get a project accomplished. Answering these questions honestly, helped us to reframe how we view our work - and to re-identify the variety of efforts around information literacy we that we engage in and then to categorize them - allowing us to recognize various degrees of control and to temper expectations (of our own and others) and to determine where responsibility really lies.
- IRENE Another question many of us struggled with was around pedagogy, and what we knew to be good teaching practices in the classroom. Because we were constrained by other people's demands and needs, we often had to resort to short lectures and demonstrations, or short canned activities that lacked depth, follow up, and the opportunity for assessment. We knew what good teaching was but felt we never had the opportunity to practice it.
- ELIZABETH One of the key best practices regarding the development of critical thinking and IL is the ability to provide feedback, to see when students hit a bottleneck, and to then coach them through that challenge and provide them feedback. Because we didn’t have control over the curriculum, we were very rarely in the position to witness those challenges or to provide that kind of feedback to students on their process or their learning. The Framework is based on concepts in Wiggins & McTighe (threshold concepts) and Angelo & Cross is a great book on assessment of many forms. We felt IF WE’RE NOT ABLE TO DO THESE THINGS, TO TEACH IN THE FORMAT AND USE BEST PRACTICES then we should consider a new way…
- ELIZABETH SO ULTIMATELY WE SOUGHT ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND CONTROL over curriculum and to practice what we know as librarians are the BEST PRACTICES for developing information literacy. (beyond the information skills - toward the other end of the spectrum, where their understanding would require us to deliver content, and to study information as content), We wanted the opportunity to have a bad day, a lesson that didn't work out so well, and to have another day with the same students to do it better. So we developed a minor in information studies - the first recognized academic program from the library. We wrote the rationale, designed the courses, and proposed the minor through the same processes used by every other department on campus. As department chair I spent a year meeting with curriculum committees, with many many academic departments, made tons of revisions to the proposal, and eventually saw the minor pass our college senate. The fall 2015 semester was the first academic year students could claim the Information Studies minor.
- IRENE - we want to share a NEW MARKETING VIDEO DEVELOPED FOR THE COLLEGE PROGRAMS WEBSITE. Our Students are ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MINOR BUT ARE completely UNSCRIPTED (THEY WROTE THEIR OWN SCRIPT OF WHAT TO SAY--this doesn’t exactly mean unscripted, not to be nitpicky :-))
- ELIZABETH STARTS - THEN ERIC ELIZABETH Information environment is the survey course- it touches literally every Frame from the Framework - it’s typically a mix of first- and second year students. It’s a kind of - feeder course - where we gain a lot of the students who end up joining the minor from. It can also be taken for gen ed credits. This course is designed to get students to question their own assumptions about information - by studying these topics, they’re not just applying information skills on some other topic or field. They’re studying information - for example we question the assumption that “everyone has access if it’s online” - or that Google is a neutral source of information. Eric’s going to give you some more specific examples. ERIC - (rewrite this for yourself) ERIC Role playing, charts, For example we discuss the filter bubble, the influence of social media, and the implication of “fake news” (pizza gate, for example).
- IRENE - Like Information Environment, Policy is a course in our minor, but it can also be taken for General Education credits. In policy we try to expand upon the ground work set in Information Environment. We begin by looking at the intersection of law, social/cultural and cultural forces, the architecture of the Internet, and markets as forces that interact to shape our lives. For example, in the case of Net Neutrality, we have markets influencing legislation, and the social/cultural implications of something that could cause a more profound digital divide and income inequality, and the architecture of the actual internet--how companies can slow down services, and block certain sites. All of these factors play a role in that issue, and we look at that intersection. Authority is constructed and contextual is probably the most prominent frame in the policy course; Information has value also certainly comes into play with many of these topics. (maybe mention that students can take this for gen ed credits)
- ERIC -
- IRENE AND ERIC MOSTLY Irene, As someone who started my career teaching, and came to librarianship later, I was very happy to return to more familiar territory with the minor. It certainly helped with my sense of professional satisfaction, as I was finding myself in a bit of a professional crisis as a navigated one-shot instruction. The teaching and scholarship I’m able to engage in is more interesting and satisfying. I don’t feel like I’m banging my head against the wall, trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. I have more time to engage with other faculty on my specialized areas of copyright, OER, and pedagogy. And my connections with students are much deeper and longer lasting. I have seen students at commencement who were in my course when they were in their first year. It’s a great feeling to be able to watch students grow over time. I don’t know about librarianship--I feel less like librarianship has changed, and more like we have changed and the field has stayed the same, or at least somewhat the same. Most places are doing things in the same way, although the framework is certainly an improvement over the standards. It’s time for a change. Something that might help is drawing a parallel with writing instruction.
- ELIZABETH Lastly - this is a favorite shel silverstein of mine - because it’s really about questioning what’s always been done, and following what in your heart you believe is an effective and fulfilling way to go. Even if it’s new territory, follow your inner voice rather than letting others decide for you. .
- IRENE AND ERIC FACILITATE QUESTIONS