So I just can’t drone on and on without other people talking. I won’t do it. This stuff is really boring, I know, and I don’t want to stand up there listening to my voice for an hour. The class this morning was not interested in speaking at all. When I asked a easy-answer yes or no question, Do you guys have library barcodes? I was met with blank, open-mouthed stares. They wouldn’t even raise their hands.

Now, so much of how students interact with me depends on how they interact with each other in the disciplinary classroom. They’re going to chill with me for 75 out-of-context minutes; I can’t do much to affect the dynamics they’ve already established. Shrug. But here’s how I got them to talk: I made them write something down. The second slide on my powerpoint was just the sentence, Why are you here today? I took out my watch and said, You have one minute to write down an answer to that question. And then I asked for volunteers, and managed to cajole five of them into reading out loud.

I can’t say they were ever truly engaged, but at least I heard a little something. And since I said no repeats, I ended up with five articulated learning goals from a class that worked really hard to be totally silent. Not bad.

If you’re in NYC, come join me and a bunch of other great people at this day-long workshop about critical pedagogy and library instruction. Thanks, Alycia, for pulling this together and inviting me along!

One of the things I do in my off hours is work on a journal called Radical Teacher. Founded in 1975, RT is a journal of socialist, feminist, and anti-racist teaching. The magazine has just started a blog in the last couple of weeks, and my first contribution went up yesterday. I blogged about football, of course, this being playoff season, and how Wikipedia after a sports chokefest might prove to be a useful text for destabilizing ideas about authority and objectivity in the classroom.

One of the hallmarks of RT is its emphasis on classroom practice. It’s very, Okay, then, how are you gonna make that happen in an actual class? (Leonard Vogt has a recent post on teaching about the earthquake and Haiti that will show you what I mean.) This is a particularly vexed question for library instructors. I am rarely given free reign to teach whatever I want however I want, and our insistence on linking instruction to particular classroom assignments (a strategy I advocate for all the time) works against innovative, creative, and critical library instruction in one or two shot sessions. I usually teach what the teacher tells me to teach, and experience myself as most successful when I do.

So, what is to be done, beyond daydreaming about co-teaching a composition class and eventually leaving the library profession? Are there potential advantages to de-embedding our instruction? Has anyone tried this? How do we negotiate our essentially dependent positions in the hierarchy of the academy?*

*These are questions that will be explored in lots of depth in Critical Library Instruction, our book out in March from Library Juice Press. Heidi LM Jacobs has a wonderfully well-argued chapter about teaching Wikipedia as an information source, and Dolsy Smith and Cathy Eisenhower knock my socks clear off with an analysis of our structural position that made me rethink the basis of my claim to the classroom in the first place. I just can’t wait.

And we’re on to the next one. Classes are now in session at my university, and library instruction sessions are not far behind. I’ll be working for a third semester with the same faculty member in the English department. (Can I get a shout-out for continuity!) As we continue to work on embedding the library component coherently into his first-year composition classes (hard flippin’ work!), he’s given me a stack of student research papers to read through–something I’ve always wanted to do, since I don’t see how I’m supposed to assess my courses without access to completed research projects. (I give out a little quiz, but that tells me less than I want it to; I’m more a qualitative-measurement kind of gal anyway.) Included are reflective meta-texts on the research process, a core requirement of our English 16 classes. This means I’m looking at self-assessments alongside completed papers. Reveletory!

The first thing I’m noticing is a distance between what people think happened with regard to the library sessions, and what shows up in their bibliographies. One student proclaims I personally found these sessions helpful because I learned how to find books I needed and use the library databases. Most of the sources I used I received from the school library. My ego is all fluffed up and enormous! And yet, when I look at the accompanying bibliography, the student has used one book from our collections and the rest of his sources are from the Internet. What does that mean? Does that matter? Are Internet sources good enough in a comp course that’s focused on integrating sources at a pretty mechanical level? How does this change the way I read answers to open-ended questions in my own assessment tools? Etc.

And that’s just the first paper I’ve read. I’m not sure what I’ll do with what I glean from these, but I’m looking forward to starting to build a rich archive, and hope what I find informs my teaching in a cascade of comp sections this Spring.

Does anyone out there have a process in place for looking at student work? Anything you notice time and time again? Has anyone changed their instruction based on a review of these texts? How?

I taught my last session yesterday, and was flooded by giddy relief when I was finished. I like teaching, and I love libraries, but it’s tiring to get up there day after day, teaching the same material in contexts that I suspect usually don’t work, don’t make sense, and are extraordinarily limited in potential impact. I had a better fall than I did last fall. I can tell because I have seen many more students after these sessions than I did this time last year. Students coming to my office, coming up the desk, remembering my name, asking for citation help, asking for reminders about how to get started. But even though it’s an exponential increase, it’s still only about ten students out of the several hundred I stood in front of and yammered at.

Is library instruction in this 50-minute add-on session worth the labor? Is there any way to know whether we’re reaching anyone? Is this why I need a more comprehensive way to approach assessment? Is anybody else feeling a post-term letdown?

I was just googleychatting Maria from my desk shift in Brooklyn to her desk shift in Indiana. And guess what? With drafts of your research paper due right around the corner, we find ourselves repeating ourselves and saying a lot of the same things. Are you a similarly broken record? What do you tell students over and over again?

1. You will have to actually read it to see if it applies to your thesis. There’s no way around that, and I can’t do that for you.

2. You don’t have to read the *whole* book. You can read relevant *chapters* in the book.

3. Sometimes electronic sources aren’t faster. We’ve been sitting here together for twenty minutes. Does that feel faster to you?

4. The article won’t prove your point for you. You have to argue your point, using the article as evidence.

5. Research is hard, and it takes awhile.

Just a dashed off note on a day with too much in it: It is a real pleasure to teach a tool to a group of students working on a very specific research assignment that gets eleventymillion times easier if you know how to use the tool. This group needed primary media sources related to a range of historical events. I showed them our History Resource Center and Historical Newspapers.  They turned around and used History Resource Center and Historical Newspapers to get the primary sources they needed for their assignment. Ta-da! We all left happy!

I watched a student in my class yesterday struggle so hard with what to do with what she found in the library. She had a big broad topic, something along the lines of “How media affects the self-image of teenagers.” I worked with her until we found an edited book that addressed a number of narrower issues in that big broad topic. (I love an edited volume, though my publisher says they don’t tend to sell all that well.) She went and grabbed it from the stacks and brought it back and held it up and waved it at me, saying “So, is this related to my topic? Is it relevant? I don’t think this is useful!” I tried to explain that only she could tell me the answer to that, and that it would require both some reading and some thinking. I wonder if her reading skills aren’t very strong, if that’s what her resistance is about. By the end of our hour together in the classroom, she was thinking of jettisoning her topic (“There’s nothing on it”) and switching to another big broad topic that would present the same problems. Lots of frustration, lots of confusion.

I also watched her help another frustrated and confused student link from one of our citation databases to the full text of an article using our link resolver.

What’s the relationship between these two skill sets? If I’m succeeding at what I call “tool instruction,” maybe that’s as much as I could hope for as an instruction librarian. Is the rest simply beyond the scope of the library classroom? Is the reading, synthesizing, and writing in fact the domain of, well, a four year undergraduate education in the liberal arts?

I have a class coming in today for their second library session. I talked with the (wonderfully communicative!) professor earlier in the week about what these students need at this point. First, they need targeted database practice and one on one help with pulling out relevant materials. They need some technical help. Second, she said, they need help thinking about their research projects as organic, fluid, and with the potential to change the way they think about their topics. They’re mechanistically plugging in two articles, one book, and one web resource into the thesis statements they came up with a month ago. When they find something that challenges their opinion or presents a nuanced argument, they put it to the side and get back to the hunt, for something that confirms what they knew at the beginning of the research process.

This is going to sound silly, I know. But listen: I’ve discovered this great new instructional tool called… POWERPOINT! I made one of my first ones for a class where I knew I’d be reviewed by my Dean. Not wanting to look like I was ‘winging it,’ I thought I’d do what the Others do and whip up a ten-slide presentation, pass around handouts, and go from there. And for as much as people (including me) are down on powerpoint, I actually found it very useful in part for the way it forced me off my game and into something new.