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I received two thoughtful comments on my last post (including my first comment from a Colorado College faculty member; welcome, Laura!), and I thought I might continue the conversation in a new post. So here we are.

Jessy comes at this question of how to help students better use the books and articles they find at the library from a librarian’s point of view:

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 certainly think it is OK if we help them think about their argument. I think we often do that subtly just in the course of a typical reference interview: when they say “I’m looking for information on the French Revolution” and we say “well, what is it you would like to know about the French Revolution?”, we are already giving them a little nudge to be able to explain their argument (or at least their problem or research area).

The longer we work with an individual student, the more opportunities there are to connect a few dots along the way (e.g, “Now from the abstract, it looks like this author is saying that the main cause of the French Revolution was X, while the article we were just looking at said it was Y, so you might have to consider both of those points of view, even thought you said you want to argue that the cause was Z.”).

I wouldn’t consider any of that fairly ad hoc help to be treading on faculty toes. I have no desire to usurp the faculty’s role in advising students on writing the paper, but I would love to work more closely with faculty to help students get a better grasp on the research process.

Which brings us to the faculty perspective, provided by Laura, a new faculty member at CC in the English Department:

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. … 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?

Rereading my post, I see where it might sound like I think that working with students on entering this critical conversation is properly the librarian’s job. I don’t think that. I would hope that librarians and faculty could work together to give students a better picture of the entire process of researching and writing the paper.

Not to put too much emphasis on my own case, but I don’t think I ever heard a faculty member talk about research and writing in the way Laura does when I was in college. I seem to recall “write a fifteen page paper on some aspect of what we have been talking about in class.” End of discussion.

What I am more concerned about is that libraryland’s conception of information literacy research education often seems to lack much consideration for how students actually use all the swell stuff that we help them find. I don’t really care if students are learning how to incorporate these sources into their own writing from librarians or faculty, as long as somewhere along the line they are picking up some skills and strategies.

I suppose a lot of this boils down to me working through something that perhaps should be obvious, but that I tend to lose sight of: when I help students find books or articles that are relevant, scholarly, and available, I feel like my work is done. But the students’ work is just beginning as they read the material, come to some sort of understanding of it, decide what they want to use in their own writing, decide how they want to involve themselves in the critical conversation, and then do the actual work of writing.

Tags: instruction, information_literacy, academic