Fall 2016. Time flies.

New semester means a new instruction intern at Gorgas Information Services. Welcome to Kelly Groves! You will be hearing from Kelly throughout the semester as she blogs about her adventures in instruction and research.

This semester we’ve got a lot going on. On an organizational level, we are 1.5 years into a curriculum mapping project that has already proven it’s value in helping us better assess the degree paths of our undergraduates and being to re-imagine our role in that path. We are implementing a new assessment program for our first year writing instruction, and along with this assessment we are starting to test the validity of our implementation of the Framework, which is very exciting! And we are doing a soft pilot of a new collaboration with first semester composition, which we have not traditionally worked with.

 
I am so excited to see what else this semester brings!

I am currently reviewing our learning outcomes, worksheets, and rubrics as the new semester approaches. One of our lesson options for second semester composition classes poses such a difficult quandary: Full Text. Ebook. Web Content. So much of our collection is available in electronic formats, but the formats are not consistent, and students don’t know how to look at a record and anticipate what format they are accessing. In this lesson, we are attempting to address some of the broad media and digital literacy pitfalls students encounter when they are beginner researchers. Things that researchers didn’t really have to face in years past.

Introduction to Library Searching

“In this session, students will learn how to use the library’s search engine Scout, and how to find databases using the database page. This session will not cover controlled vocabulary or keywords (covered in Option 2), or advanced search strategies in Scout or in individual databases (covered in Option 4).”

The challenge for librarians in this lesson is to make this content as active as possible. To engage students in the search, instead of presenting information lecture-style.The expectation many professors have as they approach librarians for instruction is that their students will perhaps get a tour and be introduced to the basic resources that the library has to offer, but we’ve found that students benefit from professors and librarians having more in-depth conversations about what kinds of research the student needs to accomplish in order to complete the coursework for their class, and then narrow exposure from “the basic resources that the library has to offer” to “the resources a student will need to accomplish this course’s/assignment’s work.”

To make this lesson as active as possible, I typically push my students into the deep end, helping them navigate to Scout, asking them to find an item in a given format, and then engaging them in peer instruction. Students demonstrate their searches by retracing their steps for the rest of the class. This can seem intimidating, but I work hard to take the pressure off of everyone. This exercise accomplishes several things: when students share their search steps, they reflect and remember, reinforcing their learning. When several students retrace their steps, we discover there are inevitably multiple ways to find any given thing, and they learn that searching is messy and creative and that some strategies yield different results than others.

For more information about our EN 102 lesson plans and library instruction program, please see our Library Guide for EN 102 Instructors (guides.lib.ua.edu/en102instructors)

Part of my summer internship with GIS involved my own curriculum mapping project. The project was to begin some basic curriculum mapping for the college where I am going to be serving as the Electronic Resources and Reference Librarian. Since the college has their own educational framework my plan was to map a course from their core curriculum to the college’s framework and to ACRL’s Framework. I also began an attempt to map the two frameworks to each other. However, I was unable to get a copy of a syllabus and the college’s catalog did not provide in-depth learning outcomes for the course; and I would have liked to map an individual assignment. So instead of mapping a course I began to map the goals of the entire Core Program. Mapping at a high level like this proved challenging, but was also very helpful. I am glad I was able to do this project because it allowed me to put into practice some more of what I worked on at the beginning of the summer, and the internship readings. It also gave me a much better understanding of the college’s Core Program so I can arrive on campus with some more well formed thoughts on how I can serve the community as a new librarian.

As always, I get used to receive knowledge passively as a student but the transitional point comes when I get this internship. To work with instructional libraries on mapping curricula makes me think about curriculum design actively at the point-view of curriculum developer.

In the project, a comprehensive process of mapping consists of establishing learning goals and assessment. Learning outcomes are increasingly tended to focus on employ-ability skills as a result of broader skilled needed by graduate employees.

According to Oliver’s article, I know the process of mapping curricula goes through five phases from initial request to course changes approved and course learning outcomes consist of several units. (2007) Learning outcomes are aligned with employ-ability so that the curriculum engages students to develop work-readiness.

However, there are a lot of complications and challenges around this pedagogical philosophy. Academic staffs are too busy to do extra work on reviewing curriculum. Also, changes in a wide variety of courses will largely affect the teaching system, which may pay costs. Nevertheless, in my point of view, the quality of learning is worthy to invest time and money. With employ-ability embedded, employment of graduates are improved which will widen the intake of universities, creating a virtuous cycle.

How time flies these days! I do not even recognized most time of the internship has passed. What I also don’t realize is my remaining hours of internship will be changed to spent in reference work at the information desk. I’m so excited and surprised because I have only sit in the library as a student, but never sit as a consultant. Based on the true experience of helping students, I learn some fundamentals of how to provide excellent consultant work as a qualified librarian. I’m very honored to be assigned this glorious task as whether or not the reference service is of high quality affects the image of the whole library.

From this work, I find the role of librarians has a change. Traditional librarians are just information providers who spend all day sitting in the middle of the library and provide services to readers. However, as a modern librarian, he/she should evaluate, collect, and distribute information more actively. Some tasks are just seemingly easy but have to be accomplished very carefully. For example, in the simple action of answering the phone and scanning the file, there are plenty of truths and mysteries waiting for us to explore. To transfer the call accurately and quickly, I have to memorize many phone numbers and their associated departments. It took me a lot of efforts to find that only when the paper is placed on the top left corner of the scanner, it can be scanned in full.

In the coming days, there are a lot I have to learn and improve. I’m expecting to learn something new everyday and enjoy feel connected with students. Happily, an increase in collaboration with colleagues also emerged as a result of seeking guidance from them.

The experience of participating in the project of curriculum mapping is a little tedious but very learning. Through a process of collecting and transforming a large number of data, I familiarized my self with how a subject is structured hierarchically, what factors should be considered when a new curriculum is implemented, and the use of curriculum mapping. I do not expect that, besides functions I already know, the use of curriculum mapping can even increase the collaboration among stakeholders at universities.

For me with no experience in this area , in the beginning I had no idea just “mechanically”removed curriculum records to extract data. Afterwards, a lot of duplicated information in different disciplines aroused my attention. If each subject is organized like a tree where many terms group beneath a term from upper level of the tree, branches of different subject trees are intertwined and overlapped with each other. From this, I find data collected on curriculum mapping allows us to identify the inter-sectional parts of different courses where pedagogical cooperative relationship can be built among different departments. This link is the fundamental element of sharing education resources and unified management.

During the creation and implementation of information literacy curriculum map(ILCM), because librarians and faculty make great effort toward the same direction, they have many opportunities to collaborate. On one side, mentoring librarians are responsible for creation of curriculum. On the other side, instructors hold introduction sessions to library service and figure out what skills students should master in their discipline. In addition, at some colleges, the office of assessment works with faculty and academic departments to investigate learning situation of students for adjusting the curriculum. Thus librarians , faculty, and rating agencies are agreeing and build a perfect teaching system.(Charles, 2015)

In conclusion, curriculum mapping is the catalyst for communication among educators .

Reference

Charles, L. H. (2015). Using an information literacy curriculum mas as a means of communication and accountability for stakeholders in higher education. Journal of Information Literacy, 9(1).

By the end of the semester, I’d learned how to plan effective information literacy sessions. What I had not expected to learn was how much I enjoyed seeing students actually get what I was saying. Freshman aren’t always the easiest bunch of people to teach. They come from so many different backgrounds and they are entirely new to the college game–they have to write different, begin thinking more critically, and think about the direction they want to go in for the rest of their college career. Researching is a big part of that, and for them to finally have it all click and look relieved that it was one less thing off their shoulders, it was a huge win for me. When one of them told me that they loved one of the activities I had them do in class, I fist pumped so hard after class that I nearly pulled a muscle–because to learn, you don’t necessarily have to enjoy something. But having that extra little encouragement made me believe that I was making a difference.

Me? A Teacher? I could be. What kind of teacher? One who wants to connect with students and let them connect with the information by using stories and interesting things that reveal research as something that could be interesting and fun, not just something they had to do. It’s hard to achieve in the information literacy classroom, but the simple engagement of their minds with stories, interesting sources, and pop culture could enable me to interact with the information they grab from the internet instead of just using it and discarding it. Each source has the potential to teach them something and inform them about a topic they find interesting… allowing them to see that research as something engaging and intriguing would be my job as a library instruction teacher.

Asking at the beginning of this semester, I would have answered this as a hard no. Not a soft “well maybe I could get interested” no or a middle-of-the-road “maybe not at this point in my life” no… it would have been a bent over at the waist with laughter, shaking my head and asking you if you were kidding kind of no. I thought to myself that this internship would be to answer the question if I could teach or not. What I didn’t know was that it would teach me that I could be a teacher.

Being a teacher and teaching are often two things that seem like they should go together but often don’t. While a teacher teaches, teaching could be done without a teacher. Effective teaching has to be done by someone who cares, but it could be done by someone who doesn’t. The difference between a teacher and a person who teaches is that earnest intent of someone who wants their students to learn and grow in the classroom and the person who’s just there to collect a paycheck. This is something I learned by listening to people talk about teachers who honestly didn’t care and looking back at my own experiences with teachers and professors. The people who taught me did their job well, I’m a graduate student and about to attain my Masters. Without them, I wouldn’t be here. But, there were some people who taught me that did not make me want to learn and did not make everything they taught interesting and engaging. The teachers I remember the most were my dynamic teachers. They engaged with me and encouraged me to interact with the material. They went the extra mile to be interactive and make sure that, while learning, the class was engaged with the information. In other words, they did more than just teach. They were real teachers.

On April 9th, Lauren, Paige, Claire and I presented a poster at Alabama Library Association’s annual convention in Point Clear, AL. It was the perfect way to end a semester of hard work and dedication for these excellent SLIS graduate students.

For more information about our poster, please check out the documents I have attached below:

• (PDF) Poster- Once Upon A Time: Storytelling in  the Information Literacy Classroom
• (PDF) Handout- Once Upon A Time: Storytelling in the Information Literacy Classroom