An Introduction to Instructional Services in Academic Libraries

Elizabeth Connor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780789037084
• eBook ISBN: 9781135695040
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

More than ever before, librarians are being called upon to contribute considerable energy, knowledge, and leadership to fostering the academic success of students through information literacy. Unique in its expansive breadth and in-depth approach, An Introduction to Instructional Services in Academic Libraries explores the latest methods and ideas for planning, delivering, and evaluating effective instructional sessions.

Providing librarians with informative, real-world case studies culled from over three dozen prominent librarian-instructors from across the US and Canada, An Introduction to Instructional Services in Academic Libraries comprehensively covers the topics of experiential learning, hybrid models of library instruction, interdisciplinary inquiry through collaboration, introducing primary documents to undergrads, using case studies in credit-bearing library courses, teaching information literacy to ESL students, information literature for the non-traditional student, preparing an advanced curriculum for graduate students, librarians in the online classroom, and teaching distance education students. An Introduction to Instructional Services in Academic Libraries features numerous planning documents, survey instruments, handouts, active learning exercises, and extensive references which make it an ideal resource for educators and librarians everywhere.

PART B:
LIBRARY INSTRUCTION IN UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

Chapter 5
Interdisciplinary Inquiry Through Collaboration

Leslie Bussert

Suzan Parker

Mark Szarko

INTRODUCTION

At the University of Washington Bothell (UWB), a required foundation course, Interdisciplinary Inquiry, serves as an orientation to upper-division work while developing research skills for subsequent courses. This case study will focus on a successful model of collaboration between faculty and librarians and will describe information literacy assignments integrated into an interdisciplinary curriculum emphasizing problem-based learning.

SETTING

The Campus Library and Media Center, part of the University of Washington Libraries system, serves the UWB and Cascadia Community College (CCC) on a colocated campus. While CCC serves lower-division freshman and sophomore students, UWB serves primarily upper-division transfer and graduate students, many who transfer from Cascadia and other local community colleges. The majority of the UWB student population is over twenty-five years old and female. Most of these students attend classes part-time while holding jobs off-campus.¹

This case study focuses on the required foundation course for UWB’s Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (IAS) program, Interdisciplinary Inquiry. The IAS program is geared toward helping working professionals, community college, and four-year institution transfer and adult returning students who have completed the first two years of study at the lower division. The program is “designed for students who … enjoy making unexpected connections across disciplines.”² Information literacy is highly integrated into the curriculum, allowing for a developmental approach emphasizing collaboration, problem-based learning, and interdisciplinary research methods.

OBJECTIVES

A primary goal of Interdisciplinary Inquiry is to prepare UWB’s transfer student population to begin work at the upper-division level, while developing research skills for subsequent courses. The course is typically taken during the first quarter of study, thus providing a common entry point for the approximately 500 students who transfer annually into the IAS program. The course serves as an orientation to upper-division work, as well as to several important academic services on campus, including the Campus Library and Media Center, Quantitative Skills Center, and the Writing Center. Interdisciplinary Inquiry creates cohesiveness among these students by providing a common language and set of experiences that build a foundation for students’ further work in the program.

Course objectives for Interdisciplinary Inquiry are ambitious. Fundamentally, this course aims to explore what it means to do interdisciplinary work at the upper-division level, examining the assumptions and methods in doing interdisciplinary research. The course is designed to help students become better critical thinkers, researchers, writers, and speakers.

METHODS

The goals of Interdisciplinary Inquiry are met through the collaborative teaching efforts of faculty and librarians, along with academic services professionals representing the Writing and Quantitative Skills Centers. These individuals collectively provide learner-centered, collaborative activities that build the foundation for upper-division work. This collective effort takes place over a ten-week period, with librarians typically cofacilitating four two-hour sessions. In addition, the directors of the Writing and Quantitative Skills Centers often teach one or two classes. This case study gives an overview of the information literacy sessions cofacilitated by librarians, as well as their role in the course as a whole. While librarians work with all sections of this course, there is variation across sections as to how and when librarians work with the students. This case study describes the most frequently utilized model.

The first library session typically involves the formation of research groups, or “clusters,” comprising four to six students. Each research cluster then identifies a topic represented within the central course text, and develops this topic into a working research question that they will investigate, refine, and/or reformulate for the rest of the quarter. The second library session addresses the notions of scholarship and knowledge production across disciplines. Students learn how to search for and identify scholarly works, and locate at least one relevant scholarly article pertaining to their research cluster’s question. The third and fourth visits with the librarian may vary depending on the instructor and section of the course. Typically the third session addresses qualitative research by locating information sources such as interviews or personal narratives. The final information literacy session demonstrates cultural artifacts, or primary sources, as evidence of knowledge and sources of information.

By the end of their tenth week in this course, students have been heavily exposed to library resources and librarians, as well as to the staff and services of the Writing and Quantitative Skills Centers. They will have engaged in the fundamental processes in research in an incremental fashion: identifying their information need by formulating a researchable question; locating and evaluating relevant online, print, and archival sources; and integrating those sources into the final course project, the “research proposal.” This final research proposal is used to ask students to reflect on the paths taken in their scholarly investigations, and to lay a framework for how a fully developed research project might take shape. This progression of “scaffolded” research activities introduces students to understanding the process of research through collaborative, learner-centered activities emphasizing problem posing, and the varied ways that knowledge is produced.

RESULTS

Raspa and Ward define collaboration as a “special form of listening that comes from attending to the relationship behind the project.”³ One of the hallmarks of Interdisciplinary Inquiry is the high degree of collaboration among librarians, faculty, and other academic services staff, as well as among students in their research cluster activities. Participants enter into an ongoing and evolving pedagogical conversation to create a curriculum which best supports student learning.

Faculty and Librarian Collaboration

For each section of the course, it is not uncommon for librarians to teach or cofacilitate the class with faculty for eight or more hours per quarter. During these in-class teaching collaborations, librarians and faculty enter into dialogue with each other, breaking out of the model of individual experts teaching their own content, thus looking for intersections between their respective disciplines. This sometimes “messy” conversation between scholars mirrors what students experience in their research groups.

For collaboration between faculty and librarians to be successful at this level, broad departmental and institutional support is required. UWB’s mission and goals statement explicitly mentions the need to “emphasize and develop critical thinking, writing, and information literacy, in order to graduate students with lifelong learning skills.”⁴ To achieve these institutional goals, faculty, librarians, and academic services professionals working with a particular course interact frequently before and throughout the quarter to assess if the learning goals are being met.

Student Collaboration

Students in the Interdisciplinary Inquiry classes learn to shape their thinking around research questions as they explore their own assumptions, perceptions, biases, or gaps in knowledge regarding these questions. This learning takes place through hands-on information literacy activities in their research clusters, as well as through small and large-group discussion (both in class and online), and group “facilitations” on a topic. Talking with their peers offers students opportunities to think critically about their questions and information in new ways, clarify their thoughts, and perhaps reconceptualize the context or lens through which research questions are considered.

During the first library session, students form research clusters around a topic of interest discovered within the assigned text for their section of the course. For example, several sections of the course have focused on the theme of tourism by reading Jamaica Kincaid’s ASmall Place. Together, students and their instructor identify several major themes within the work that could serve as a lens through which to understand the issues Kincaid raises about tourism in Antigua. A few previous examples have been post colonialism in the Caribbean, tourism industry, and environmental impacts of tourism. The interdisciplinary focus of these research topics allow students with different interests to bring their previous academic, professional, and life experiences to their group’s research project. Lattuca, Voigt, and Fath suggest that an interdisciplinary pedagogy may accomplish more in such cases because students can establish connections between new knowledge they gain from the class with what they already know.⁵

After the students have chosen their research clusters, the librarian and instructor model for students how to move from a broad topic, such as “tourism in Antigua,” to a narrower research question, such as “How have economic changes brought on by the tourism industry had an impact on poor and working-class Antiguans?” One successful strategy for helping students to develop a complex and rich research question has been the use of “concept maps” to show relationships between issues and ideas related to the theme. The librarian and course instructor model is for students how to develop a concept map for a sample topic on the white board (see Figure 5.1).

Students then work within their groups to generate concept maps for their research cluster’s topic. After they have developed their maps, making connections between issues and raising questions, the librarian guides the groups in exploring their topics th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the Editor
• Contributors
• Preface
• PART A. LIBRARY INSTRUCTION IN COLLEGE LIBRARIES
• PART B. LIBRARY INSTRUCTION IN UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
• PART C. LIBRARY INSTRUCTION IN HEALTH SCIENCES UNIVERSITY SETTINGS
• Chapter Exercises