Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Unless he has no idea how to clean and cook the stupid fish.
Fri 6 Oct 2006, 10:08 am
Here is a little story I have told a few times lately since I recently remembered the event:
When I was a college student, I spent a fair amount of time in the library. I wasn’t really burning the midnight oil studying (I was a theatre major, after all!), but when I had some time to kill in the middle of the day, I would often head over to the library and browse the literature or art or theatre stacks, or read in the periodicals room.
This particular quarter, I was in a class where we were reading Sense and Sensibility and I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to write my paper on.
In browsing the Austen criticism, I came across an essay on Sense and Sensibility that seemed to cover some of the same ground that I had intended to cover in my essay. As I read more, I saw that the author was arguing essentially the same points that I wanted to argue, coming to the same conclusions, and even citing some of the same passages I had in mind in support of her argument.
I was thrilled! Here was an actual scholar, giving voice to my half-formed theory! I felt validated, reassured.
Until I realized that I had to stop reading. How could I now pass these ideas off as my own, when someone else had already published them? I felt worried, tainted, as if–simply by reading a few pages–I had committed some bizarre act of retroactive plagiarism. I thought if I put the book back and never thought about it again, I might get through OK. I had no conception of how to take a secondary source and engage with it through my writing.
Now, when I think about this, I think of how I approach my job in working with students in the humanities. I usually feel that if I help them find a few good articles or books on their topic, I have done my job. How they read, think, or write about those sources isn’t my concern.
And perhaps that is true. Perhaps it is up to my colleagues on the faculty and in the writing center to teach the students how to engage with those writers and critics in a meaningful way. But I think it is an impoverished idea of “information literacy” that usually ignores what people actually do with the information, or talks about the issue in bloodless, meaningless phrases such as “Integrates the new and prior information, including quotations and paraphrasings, in a manner that supports the purposes of the product or performance.” (that’s Standard 4, Outcome 1C for the benefit of those without a scorecard).
Tags: instruction, information_literacy, academic
I know what you mean, and I tend to freeze up when students want me to stray into faculty turf and advise them on writing the paper. I’ve always considered that to be a good thing, but maybe it isn’t. It’s not like we don’t want faculty to ever, ever help students use databases — we just want them to involve us. So maybe it’s okay if we help them think about their argument. I suppose it’s the usual problem, we want to help them but not TOO much, we don’t want to do the project for them — for their own good and for ours. Still, when a totally lost first-year (or later!) student doesn’t even know where to begin, I should stop thinking of my hands as being tied. Asking a few leading questions, maybe with the assignment in front of us, could work.
Comment by Jessy — October 8, 2006 @ 12:50 pm
Hi Steve– I found this blog when I was looking for your email address.
When I read this, I thought that this was actually such a missed opportunity. One of the more difficult parts of teaching literature is giving students a sense that there is this broader conversation going on outside the classroom. The criticism should do exactly what this article did for you– engage scholars both new and established. It is tricky, from a teacher’s perspective, to cover the required text and to encourage further exploration; it seems so sad to me that you had made the effort to make that engagement, and that you then stepped back from it out of fear of appearing to plagiarize.
In that situation, I hope that a student would bring the article to office hours, at which point we could discuss how to make use of the critical discourse without parrotting it. I would ask the student to explore the limitations of this line of thought: how old is this article? Is it manner of thinking outdated? Does it ignore critical elements of the novel? Who are the scholars that this author is engaging?
Sorry to be so long winded, but it does make an English professor a little sad to see my kind of fun nipped in the bud.
Comment by Laura Padilla — October 10, 2006 @ 11:32 am
This quote needs information on it. o yes yes yes it does
Comment by Danielle — December 11, 2006 @ 6:39 am