My teaching philosophy tends to be grounded very much in doing and playing around with things. I think this is really important, especially for information literacy, because a lot of what we teach in library instruction sessions are skils not facts. And now that we're all online because of the global novel coronavirus pandemic, active learning tools that support these goals have to look different.
Of the learning games I've been exposed to, I really like Walsh and Williamson's SOURCES because I'm positively tickled by thinking about collecting sources for a bibliography as a deck building game. Naturally, handing cards out wouldn't be a super save pedagogical choice even if we could be in the same room and it's downright impossible over Microsoft Teams. So, I took the underlying structure of their game and made an activity that kept the instruction goals the same but was in a format that was friendlier to my current circumstances. You're welcome to click through the game yourself, but the core idea is that you pick a topic on the first page and then you're brought to a collection of 10-ish sources from which you pick some number that satisfy the "assignment" requirements and build toward a coherent argument. When you hit submit, you're taken to a discussion page where I describe what choices I would have made with the sources in front of me. The class I made this for was partially synchronous, partially asynchronous (students could choose what path), so I had to think about people in the Teams meeting with me on the day I was set to teach and people who would be watching the session later. What Worked: The collection of sources I put together for each prompt worked really well and offered different paths to a bibliography depending on how the player wanted to put their argument together. The students in class the day of said it was a really helpful way to think about what role different kinds of sources (scholarly, popular, etc) played in constructing an argument. And they thought it was fun which is a huge bonus because I wasn't sure how engaging it would come across on Teams. What Didn't Work: I had a little trouble getting a student to volunteer (this was the first of three classes I was embedded in for this course) so their professor ended up being my volunteer, but that did lead to a good conversation between the two of us about what he was choosing and he was a real sport about talking through his process for the students. The google form format wasn't ideal because participants had to scroll up and down between the "source cards" and the selection options. Collecting the sources was pretty labor intensive. What I Want to Change in the Future: I might not use google forms for this game. The scrolling up and down is intrinsically a significant source of cognitive load, and I'd like to minimise that so that players can focus more on learning the skill and not navigating the format. I'm not sure what a good alternative would be, and the form was fine as a proof of concept, but I definitely want to make the underlying structure less distracting.
0 Comments
One of the things I'm glad of in the UCCS library classrooms is the whiteboard wall. While it occasionally bothers me when an arrow I've drawn on one slide that then gets in the way of the next one, but the sheer amount of whiteboard space is great for getting students involved in library instruction. In particular, the whiteboard wall really works for teaching citation mapping (or ancestry searching or citation chaining...). One way I've seen this done in the past is to work it into the Google Form library worksheet, but one of my colleagues here does something different that I like a lot. She hands out slips of paper with bitlys to various articles and has students work in groups to skim the article and put up a few pieces of key information on the board. She then has them literally draw connections between the articles to show how they live in conversation. This requires a lot of prep work, but it leads to some great discussions about how scholarly conversations evolve. In one of my first solo ENGL 1410 (think freshman writing), I opted to rework this slightly to eliminate the slips of paper. The class had a sound studies focus, so I chose articles about the impact of noise on the body: What Worked:
Students got really excited about showing which articles dealt with similar topics and which dealt with very different topics. They started to think about how they might group them in an argument, which wasn't on my agenda but which was great conversation. What Didn't: The class had a bit of trouble seeing the links between who cited whom in our array of articles. What I Want to Do Differently Next Time: I might cut down on the number of articles used. I definitely want two examples by the same author, one example that's cited by more than one other example, and one example that is cited by another and cites another. I also want to have the students tell the class their article title, author, and publication date before putting them up on the board. I think that will address some of the issues around seeing who cites whom and organizing the articles by date to spark conversation about currency. As part of my role in Suzzallo's Government Publications (et al.) unit, I get to go diving into the Gov Pubs stacks to find fun and visually interesting artifacts to showcase on unit social media. They're also a fun way to show an audience the depth and breath of government documents. For instace:
Under the read more, you can find the rest of my contributions to the unit tumblr:
One of the things I've struggled with doing well is the database demonstration. It's easy to do a rote example and forget the role that sparking interest plays in learning retention when you're tasked with doing a demo. Over the past quarter, I've had the opportunity to do three database demonstrations and I think in each case I've learned something new about how to maintain engagement both for me and for my audience.
Demonstrating Failure. For a Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies class in January, I was asked to go through two of the guides in GWSS and to talk about searching finding aids. For this session, I opted not to prep a specific example but instead to feel out a search based on what the room talked about before my demo. Prior to the session, I had taken time to experiment in a couple different ways with searching so that I could respond well to whatever prompt got thrown my way. In the one-shot, we ended up stumbling on a search with very limited results. This was facially frustrating because, of course, I wanted to be able to show the depth of our collection, but for me it's important to remember that more often than not that's what the research process looks like. You usually get limited returns and have to figure out either how to find better results or why certain voices are missing. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I didn't really get a chance to go too deep into that issue, but it's a healthy reminder that "failure" is ok in front of an audience. Demonstrating Place. I also had the opportunity to demonstrate Readex's Congressional Serial Set database with a slight twist. Both of the times I got to roll through the different ways to engage the database I was presenting to other librarians. Without the frame of a class assignment, I made a three-point plan to get through a couple of the ways to engage with the database. I started with a citation search. We get a lot of reference questions, especially on chat, that look like "where do I find xyz thing the citation looks like this: ____", so this was something that the audience would need to know at some point. After that, I demonstrated advanced search by showing how to find maps and images of Mt. Rainier National Park and how to use the browse function by looking at the treaties signed by the territorial government with the tribes whose land the UW sits on. Working in a land acknowledgment to the database demonstration was about accomplishing both inclusion and justice priorities but also about making government documents immediately relevant. Looking at the browse search function this way also allowed me to gesture to what was missing and to the fact that the language we use today is not always the language used by primary sources. As part of my cataloging internship at the Federal Highway Administration Research Library through the Summer Transportation Internship Program for Diverse Groups, I wrote and presented original research on contemporary Korean collage depictions of the urban space. This combination of words might raise questions like "how was that relevant to cataloging?" and "why isn't this in the research section?" which are both completely valid. In order to make this presentation relevant to my audience (the engineers and librarians at the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center), I turned this paper presentation into an opportunity to give a brief orientation to Library of Congress Subject Heading and Call Number assignment. I first ran through my paper's argument to provide the necessary subject background. I kept to a very tight three minutes (out of a 10 minute presentation) for introducing myself and the paper to the audience to gesture to the experience of cataloging something with which you may not have subject expertise. I then introduced the subject headings we used in the FHWA Research Library and a selected few headings that I thought would be applicable to the paper if I were to be cataloging it as a whole work. Finally, I showed a few call number options with their meanings to point to the fact that in the vast majority of cases, a work can only live in one place in a collection.
At about the six minute mark, I opened the presentation up to discussion. I asked the people assembled if they heard anything in my description of the paper that they hadn't seen represented in the subject headings and what they thought about the differences between the two thesauruses. As the audience threw things out, I took advantage of a nearby whiteboard to write down what they were saying next to what I had presented. I closed out by guiding the conversation to highlight the human-ness of cataloging and the importance of the person assigning subject headings to the finding process. If I had had more time, I would have found a way to make the discussion more active. At the time, I had a brief daliance with the thought of going through classweb with my audience but ultimately scrapped that idea for time. With the benefit of hindsight, I would have very much liked to do a very quick think-pair-share before introducing my subjects and/or to do an opinion gradient on two of the call numbers to see which one people thought was more correct. All that said, I feel that my learning objective of "introduce the process of subject headings and call numbers" was accomplished. I got an email later that day from one of the engineers saying that he had learned a lot both about the work of art and the work of cataloging from my presentation and had really enjoyed the conversational element. To see an image of the art work at the core of my paper, click the read more. The Jackson School Task Forces are the Capstone project for UW International Relations Students. After setting up the general structure of the LibGuides for all of the Task Force sections, I joined Jessica Albano on Task Force J. In the second week of the quarter, the task forces come to the library for a session on concept maping and library resources to start them off on their research process.
The concept mapping part of the session went really well. After breaking up the group of 14 into three groups there was some slowness to start getting things up on the board, but once things got going they went really well. The share out also went really well. They came up with a lot of good relationships between concepts and some good starting keywords for further searching. What we wish had gone better was the division of the students into groups. Some task forces divide the students prior to their library instruction session, but this instructor had not chosen to do that. Since the concept mapping portion of the session was my responsibility, in the future I would ask the students for three over arching themes that have emerged in their research and let them cluster around those ideas rather than dividing them artificially. They expressed in the share out that the three themes we used to divide them felt artificial, so I would want to mitigate that in the future. Overall, it was a successful session despite some issues beyond my control and the rocky start that I unwittingly imposed. On April 9, I got to observe a teaching session run by another librarian directed at students in UW's GEOG 315 class. Per the catalog description, GEOG 315: "Covers the beginning steps in the research process... Students develop basic library and writing skills as preparation for future research methods classes and independent research." The instruction session asked the students to share their topics and then covered potential geography research challenges and useful resources for their upcoming lit review and annotated bibliography assignments.
One of the mainstays of library instruction is the worksheet, and I was particularly interested in the way this librarian structured that part of the session. Instead of printing out a sheet of paper for students to fill in, they used a google form. I liked this for a number of reasons. One was that it saves on paper that students may or may not keep. Another was that it sent their answers to the section TAs and to the librarian so that they could return to that document later and push useful, specific resources to the students. Of course, it's a little harder for the students to keep their answers, and since the form walked them through how to annotate a source for an annotated bibliography having that example to look back on would be crucial. I talked to the librarian later and they said this was the first time they had done this kind of a thing that this was something that they would want to fix next time. All in all, I really liked this approach and plan to use it in the future. It's a really effective way to update a really useful teaching strategy. Adapted from Tatsiana Zhurauliova. 1. What is represented in the object? Make an inventory of items. 2. Materials: list the materials and describe their visual qualities. 3. Format and size: round? square? small? large? what is the support of the object? 4. Line: identify the linear elements. Are they emphasized or deemphasized? What kind of lines are there and where do they point? 5. Geometries and formal echoes: what shapes are in the piece and do they repeat? 6. Color: identify the colors and their qualities. Are they bright? saturated? How are they distributed? 7. Organization of forms: How is 3d space implied? Is it implied? Is there negative space? 8: Relation to viewer: how does the object engage the viewer? Where are you located in relation to the object and what it depicts? 9. Temporal extension: does the object imply a narrative or action? Does it attempt to invoke timelessness? How does it do those things? This is the framework I use for performing and teaching art history and formal analysis. I learned it from Dr. Zhurauliova in her 20th Century Art class. One of the things that I think works really well is the way each element feeds into the next. I simplified the language to make it easier to use with children but did not rearrange any of the content. I find that by the first three questions are really good warmups for people that might be intimidated by art history or art. These elements are very easy to identify from the tombstone and has the effect of giving someone new to the process very concrete things they can identify. Once they get through those, looking for other elements doesn't seem as intimidating. I have applied this framework to 2d and 3d objects from painting to decorative arts and found it useful in all cases.
This was the third and final in the Learning to Look kids series. In this session, I wanted to engage with material and materiality. The learning objectives were to get the kids thinking about the role of material in the way art conveys its message and to further reinforce the concepts of formal analysis by introducing sculpture since previously they had been analyzing two dimensional objects. When confronted with non-painting objects, the kids were confused about how to apply their formal analysis skills. However, with a little coaxing, I got one or two of the older ones to get on board with the process.
My main take away from this session is not to use Will to Power in future iterations of this session. While it is arguably the best, clearest example of Art Informel, it provoked too many giggles. Additionally, the second set of images was too abstract for the younger kids and a lot of them seemed to tune out. The craft was successful and affirmed that kids love collage. This one seemed especially fun because we broke out the feathers, pom-poms, and craft sticks, so there was more than just colored paper and discarded books to play around with. Art or N'art was the adult learning component of my Learning to Look series at the Harrison Public Library. I was asked to give a lecture in part on my work and in part on some topic of general interest on an evening in mid-August; the topic I chose was the nature of art. As a modernist, I get a lot of questions about whether what I focus on is "really art" or not, so I figured it would be a fun lens with which to look at the progression of art in the 21st century. The learning objectives were to identify the aspects of a display object that the audience for this talk considered constitutive of "art" and, through discussion" to begin to develop a working definition.
Using the slide deck (partially) seen here, we worked through art since 1900. Of the small crowd that showed up, folks started to get engaged with the "artiness" of the objects under discussion around surrealism. By intentionally choosing objects that pushed be bounds of traditional art forms, I sought to challenge the audience to think about the social construction of the art object. The conclusion that they came to was that the only object we looked at that wasn't art was Haacke's "Shapolsky et al." That was instead nicely presented investigative journalism. One of the things that went really well was the selection of objects. Each piece served the purpose of the talk well and none of them went without some comment from the audience. One of the things that didn't go as well was overall participation. Of those comments, most of them came from one person. That one person was very engaged, but I would like to have been able to get more people involved. Next time I run an instruction session like this, I would cut down on the number of pieces. I would also like to make the artists discussed more diverse thant what I included here. This would add the learning objective "introduce artists excluded from the art historical canon to the audience" which I think is achievable given the response to this session. |
Interested in any of these? Use the Contact tab to be in touch!
You can also view the current state of these activities on my instruction menu: Categories
All
Archives
October 2022
|