Contextual Background
As a librarian I deliver a sequence of repeating sessions, helping students develop search strategies for their literary reviews. Structurally these involve an intro to search techniques, the carrying out of searches, followed by the testing of sources’ authority. Challenges relate to the fact that these sessions service students across both post-graduate and undergraduate levels of study and across a wide range of disciplines. They follow a standardised lesson plan produced and designed by librarians which needs to be adjusted for each discrete class.
Evaluation
As a strategy to combat the generic feel of these sessions I build in a narrative through subject-focused searches that unpack an interesting research landscape related to the given students’ discipline. Telling a story keeps the students’ interest and gets them thinking (Thuna & Szurmak, 2019). It is an established information literacy strategy found in a lot of IL research over the last 20 years that deal directly with the use of digital search environments.
Constructivist pedagogy (Grassian & Kaplowitz, 2009) is used throughout to get students engaged in learning through active doing. Students personalise the experience by creatively developing their own keywords and then testing them. Later looking at results and using an authority checklist, and assessing and sharing results. It is a way to get research project specificity back into the classroom, and counter the greyness of delivering scaffolding around the use of multiple databases and catalogues.
The offer of follow-up 1-2-1 tutorials (see case study C) also indicates that the desired learning is not always achieved in the class space, requiring follow-ons.
Moving forwards
These sessions established and generic formulation have prevented them from being critically assessed or their objectives and learning outcomes tested. Discussion held during the PgCert have got me thinking about a radical alternative. Introducing a notion of a flipped classroom (Johnston & Karafotias, 2016), it might be possible to remove the scaffolding elements, which require so much reworking for each specialist class and which also potentially, even with narrative selection appear boring, and replace them with learning tasks prior to the class. Online tutorials or videos, which are completed and undertaken at students own pace prior to the class will develop the skill necessary to run the session according to a different context. Starting classes with these skills in place allow the sessions to be driven by activities created by and linked to the students’ research. As a tutor, focused and supportive interjections as to how to nuance searches or suggest other databases can be made. It would also provide a better basis and starting point for subsequent 1-2-1 sessions.
The issues related to this are associated to the shared ownership of the sessions. Librarians work to a standard template, and before this is updated, would require a number of test sessions and reflection on success and feedback before considering more widespread change. Equally, each session is delivered in conjunction and for a specific teaching team, and they too would need to assess how these changes impacted on the course’s overall delivery.
References
- Grassian, E. S., & Kaplowitz, J. R. (Eds.). (2009) Information Literacy Instruction: Theory and Practice. UK, Neal-Schuman Publishers.
- Johnston, N. and Karafotias, T. (2016) Flipping the classroom to meet the diverse learning needs of library and information studies (LIS) students. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 57(3), pp.226-238.
- Thuna, M. and Szurmak, J. (2019) Telling their stories: A study of librarians’ use of narrative in instruction. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 45(5), p.102048.