Assessment as Outreach: A Low-Stakes Approach

When I first arrived in September to begin my new position as Research & Instruction Librarian I was (understandably) overwhelmed with all of my new duties and liaison areas.  Being new to the areas of Geography and GIS, I decided to start with some outreach to my faculty—hoping to learn a bit about the subject, and lobby for some faculty participation in collection development, while slowly making myself indispensable them.  My first meeting was with a faculty member who regularly teaches an Environmental Geography class with a research presentation as its culminating project.  As we chatted, he expressed concern about the quality of the research that his students were producing…and I saw my opening: “Oh, would you like me to come in to class and talk about some research strategies for their assignment?”

Since the campus library’s instruction program is robust, and scaffolded, students should be arriving in Environmental Geography (a 200 level class) with a predictable set of research skills based on the library instruction and guidance that they have received in classes previous to this one.  In addition, there were certain skills that I was confident that students would not have according to the outcomes that the library has developed for the 300 level class (BIS 300, for students in the school of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences) that we provide instruction for.

Based on the assignment that the instructor sent me, my understanding of our instruction program, and my previous instruction experience, I bounced into class on Halloween, with streaks of vampire makeup on my face, to teach a very brief introduction to the class guide that I’d made them and a few tips I thought they’d find useful.  The instructor gave me a very generous introduction, and I launched in to my spiel to be rewarded with glassy eyes, and bored stares.  Unfortunately, the students seemed to find my Halloween costume far more interesting than the material I had to present.

After finishing up, I went to talk to Jackie Belanger and Leslie Bussert, about what had happened.  True to their positions (as Assessment Coordinator and Head of Instruction, respectively), they suggested that I conduct a little low-stakes assessment to see if I could figure out why my session had flopped.  As part of this assessment, they suggested that I sit in on the students’ presentations at the end of the quarter to gather information about what sources they ended up using and how the projects shaped up.

In collaboration with Jackie and the instructor, I knocked together a 1 page survey that asked, among other things:

• What did you learn in the library session that helped you with your research for this class?
• What did you find most challenging about your research for this class?
• If you have received instruction in library research methods for other classes at UWB or Cascadia, was the information that you received in this class the same or different from the information that you have received in other classes?

The results were a revelation.

What I found was that over half the class had taken the 300 level class in which they get about 6 hours of in-depth library instruction.  Therefore, the things that they found most useful from my session were not the research tips (that they’d gotten plenty of practice with in BIS 300), but the brief exposure that I’d given them to subject-specific resources for their assignment.  After talking to several librarians who teach in the BIS 300 classes, the consensus seemed to be that students had a lot of practice with humanities and social science resources, but needed exposure to the natural sciences resources that would be most useful for their Environmental Geography assignment.

After a student worker transcribed all of the responses into a excel spreadsheet, I sent them, and my observations, to the instructor with a request that we chat before I did the same session the following quarter.  When we got together, we talked over the results, the analytics for the class guide that I’d made, strategies for what to change, and a plan to continue the assessment process the following quarter.

The session went far better the second time around.  Students were more engaged, took extensive notes, and were visibly and audibly appreciative of the material that I’d presented.  When I sat in on their presentations at the end of the quarter and conducted the second round of assessment, the results confirmed my experience: the revisions that I’d made based on student feedback had increased the relevance of my session.

There were some other unintended but very welcome consequences of this process.  The investment in student learning that I’d demonstrated through the assessment process proved to the instructor my commitment to his classes, subject, and students.  As a result, we have a very open and communicative working relationship that’s been a boon to my other duties as liaison to him and his colleagues.  I got really useful insight into the subject matter of my liaison area, and it has helped me to learn the ropes of what was a previously unexplored discipline for me.  The process also brought me closer to the students that I worked with, and I got lots of reference questions on the assignment during the quarter, and afterward, from students who I’d met in the class.

While it was intimidating for me to conduct assessment on an session that I knew hadn’t gone well, I am convinced that hearing the truth and being able to act upon it was far better for me than living with a vague sense of failure, and several more unsuccessful sessions.  The insight and relationship building that I gained through this assessment experience was an invaluable part of my first year as Geography/GIS liaison at the Campus Library and was instrumental in my process of learning the job, meeting my colleagues, and getting to know the students. 

You'll find a copy of the survey that I used after the jump.

Copyright Roundup: ACRL 2013 and in the Library Classroom

Recently I’ve been thinking about copyright and fair use, and specifically what we are telling students about these increasingly important matters. I think a lot of times we shy away from talking to students about copyright, because we are worried about giving them legal advice or because we assume that they don’t care and won’t listen. However, I think it is really important to talk to students about copyright, because we want them to be responsible users of copyrighted materials and responsible owners of copyrighted materials. If we don’t talk to them about the important social and economic issues around knowledge creation and production, where will they get their ideas about copyright from? The people who are talking the most vocally about it: big media conglomerates who have an interest in protecting their intellectual property at all costs. And if we don’t teach our students about fair use? Probably no one else will.

Flickr user: opensourceway

At ACRL 2013 this past month, I attended a session of three conference paper presentations that all had something to do with copyright. Jean Dryden discussed how online archives struggle with how to educate their users about copyright, and ultimately often fail to do so. I think we (librarians and other information professionals) should be taking every opportunity to talk to our users about these issues, especially in the case of archives, where we are the copyright holders or at least stewards of those copyrights. 

In the same session, James Neal, described the challenges and dangers we face on the intellectual property landscape. Corporate media interests and lobbyists are exerting pressure in Washington, D.C. for copyright reform in their favor, and the new director of the U.S. copyright office is indicating that she is looking for a new set of major copyright reforms. The Supreme Court and other courts have recently taken on a number of cases around copyright and intellectual property. Digital rights management is ever encroaching on our ability to own and use copyrighted materials. What have we been doing to be a part of or even a lead in these conversations? Neal pointed out that when professional bodies create ‘best practices’ they often undermine risk taking. In my favorite line of his talk, Neal reminded us, “Fair use is not civil disobedience; it is our most important tool and must be preserved.” 

Katie Fortney actually provided a great example of how we can use and protect fair use in her talk describing the creation of the Grateful Dead digital archive. She described how they triaged the items going into the collection, deciding if and how they would try to get permission from the copyright holders. For the 23,000 items that they posted under the presumption of fair use, they have received only 15 takedown notices and no claims of copyright infringement. Fortney said that it is misguided to allow fears about copyright guide our decisions about what to put into digital collections—we should be trying to make the best and most useful collections and we can use fair use to do so.

So what does this mean for reference and instruction librarians? I find that opportunities to talk about copyright and fair use come up all the time, and it is pretty easy to slip in some quick information about copyright. When students want to search for images, I send them to Flickr and show the advanced search options for Creative Commons licensed materials. When I cover citations in instruction sessions, I bring in the concept of fair use. (Kevin Smith this week laid out the three questions he tells students (and faculty) to ask themselves when considering fair use: “First, will the “quotation” of the original help me make my point?  Second, will it help my reader/viewer get the point?  Finally, did I use no more than necessary to make my point?”) In fact, I’ve had very engaged discussions with first year students on these topics, because these students have all run up against DRM when downloading or streaming music and videos online. This is a great way to talk about ownership and knowledge production, and to highlight the different norms in different communities. This is precisely the kind of information literacy I want my students to have because it so clearly translates from their academic selfs to their social and professional selfs. 

As I asked above, if we don’t talk to them about these things, who will?

Update on the Outrageous Costs of College Textbooks and a Useful Alternative

From the dp.la Women's Activism Exhibit

While none of this is shockingly new information, I was outraged afresh when a colleague emailed me this Huffington Post  article about the college textbook racket.  The article was written in response to an American Enterprise Institute post that showed college textbook prices rising faster than he Consumer Price Index, new home prices, and the average cost of medical care.  Cripes.

In happier news, last week saw the launch of an excellent open educational resource, the Digital Public Library of Amerca.  While the collection is still growing, some of the thoughtful features of the collection are already apparent: you can search material by era, geographical location, and theme.  I particularly like the Activism in the U.S. exhibit, which has already grown since I checked it out last week. 

Teaching Tools Roundup

Ahoy Bookaneers!

As I'm finishing up my second quarter as a real librarian, and preparing for my upcoming quarter, I find my desk(top) covered with the new accoutrements of our profession. While many of these items bear the word "library" on them, they also bear words like "literacy," "pedagogy," "teaching," and "classroom." What has surprised me most these last two quarters is the sheer amount of teaching I have done--and the amount that I have to look forward to. This instruction takes many forms, and happens both in-person and virtually: class sessions with students I see only once or twice, one-on-one instruction while assisting a student at the reference desk, carefully detailed tips and advice in response to an email reference question, or virtual learning objects like research guides and video tutorials. This spring I'll teach a two-credit, full-quarter information literacy class as part of an I-BEST cohort, and the prospect of 20 hour-long class sessions has me both excited and just a little nervous.

I know that several of us have been experiencing the same steep learning curve as we recognize the gaps in our knowledge about teaching at the same time that we see the potential for its impact on our students. So, I thought I'd pull together some of the resources that I've found most useful in helping me grow as an educator, and I would love to hear what you all have been using, too.

• Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice by Geneva Gay has been invaluable in my process of thinking about classroom dynamics and communication styles at the very culturally diverse community colleges where I work. Gay, an instructor at our very own University of Washington, brings into focus the ethnocentricity of traditional American teaching styles, and how disenfranchising that classroom environment can be for our students. Most excitingly, Gay explores the multiplicity of communication styles represented in a multicultural classroom, and how much richer our educational experiences will be if we harness that diversity of styles in our teaching.
  

• The recent blog post "Reflective Teaching for Librarians" by Char Booth nicely summarizes the experiences I've had working with all you bright Bookaneers and the incredibly gifted educators at Seattle Central Community College, Shoreline Community College, and Highline Community College where I work and teach. Char suggests some practical approaches to collaboration, mentoring, and observation that operationalize all of the knowledge that we, almost unconsciously, absorb from our colleagues. With the brisk pace of the reference desk, its easy to forget some of the brilliant techniques that we witness daily, and it pays to be as disciplined in our record keeping as Booth suggests.

• Teaching Information Literacy: 50 Standards-Based Exercises for College Students by Joanna M. Burkhardt and Mary C. MacDonald with Andree J. Rathemacher comes as close as a book can be to the practical ideas that you get observing a colleague in the classroom. While the exercises are so concrete as to be a little limiting at times, I really appreciate the step-by-step instructions of how to plan different lessons around the various and interlocking elements of information literacy.

• While I don't necessarily agree with them all of the time, the ACRLInformation Literacy Competency Standards have been an important touchstone as I've planned classes; discussed the value of information literacy with administrators; and struggled to define, in my own mind, how the skills that I teach differ from the content of the class that I'm teaching to.

• A thousand thanks to Bookaneer Freeda Brook for sending along the brilliant In the Library with a Lead Pipe blog post on "Carleton: Forensic Librarians and Reflective Practices." Jastram, Leebaw, and Tompkins make a subtle but important distinction between teaching information literacy skills and fostering an information literate mindset, that has set my head spinning (along with Claire Murata's at Shoreline, with whom I can't stop talking about this) with ideas about how to shift my whole pedagogical paradigm.

• It's been over 10 years since I first encountered the classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and the inspiring Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks, and they have been foundational to my thinking of the classroom as a possible place of liberation. Freire's simple injunction to remember that the teacher is also a student and that students are also teachers has had an amazing impact on the level of trust and relationship building in the classes that I have worked with. I've found that nothing makes students take me seriously faster than taking them seriously first.

I had no idea that teaching would form such a fundamental part of my practice as a librarian, but I am grateful that it does. Nothing takes more of my time than preparing for a class, but nothing feels as good as seeing a student's life get easier and more interesting because of something they learned in a class with me. We have the opportunity to make a huge impact on the lives of students in our classrooms, and I look forward to a lifetime of working with you all at getting better at that task.