More on threshold concepts and #ACRLILRevisions

The three threshold concepts in the new ACRL draft Framework for Information Literacy (Higher Ed) are noted as:

• Scholarship as a conversation
• Research as inquiry
• Format as process

From conversations on Twitter, Andy Burkhardt made a great post about how he has implemented "Research as inquiry" in his instruction. These practical examples are so helpful in understanding such a theoretical framework. Since I have been pushing research as conversation, or "Scholarship as conversation," in my own teaching, I thought I would share what I have done as well (for reference, I wrote about my initial thoughts on the new draft framework in a previous post).

Credit course and scaffolding

We have since paused our for-credit courses at the library, but in the last two sessions, I scaffolded research as conversation throughout the semester. I started off with introducing the concept, then made greater analogies to other modules, and in the end, had students create a short, animated video or comic strip (or script if they were not feeling visuals) illustrating a facet of research as conversation. (And this course is where we initially started using digital badges, as a side-note).

Searching online communities

In the fall, I had two additional opportunities of note to use scholarship as conversation, but also the other two threshold concepts. In a course in the UA's new eSociety program, my colleague, Leslie Sult, and I collaborated with the instructor to develop an in class activity and assignment. Students were researching a current event in a variety of formats/online communities (social media, local news, national/international news, news blogs, etc.), and the instructor wanted her students to do some critical thinking in groups to evaluate information and think about bias and point-of-view. I came up with the worksheet below, and we wound up having some great conversations as each group presented on their resource (YouTube and Twitter were especially interesting):

And additional questions we asked to coincide with the worksheet, after a brief lecture on related issues was delivered, included:

• Open versus closed community: impact? E.g., Facebook closed vs Twitter open – algorithms on Fbook and Google search when signed in (stay in the echo chamber)
• Primary versus secondary sources: what is the difference and when might you use either?
• How are messages changed/altered when they are retweeted or shared? Is anything lost? (like playing telephone), how do you account for this in searching? How do you know what part of the message is accurate? Methods for this
• Search strategies and tools: hashtags, groups, slang, memes, etc.
• Trolling: how does it affect communities and how might it change your search strategy?
• How do you know if someone is trolling a group or a topic discussion? Does trolling have significance in your search? Should you seek it out or ignore it?
• Back to whose voices are heard? What might the effect of being in the “echo chamber” do to whose voices you hear personally? What search strategies could you use to get out of the echo chamber?

The learning outcomes based on the instructor's course learning outcomes in conjunction with Leslie's and my goals for library instruction were the following:

1. Engage in a focused process of inquiry within an assigned online community in order to articulate the ways in which online communities function across contexts in contemporary life
2. Strategically access and evaluate information via search in an assigned online community in order to recognize various perspectives including rhetorical, philosophical, historical, sociological, and psychological viewpoints
3. Develop insight into the ethical aspects of information creation, use, access, and durability in order to be conscious of many group-related issues and practices relative to the use of computing technologies to facilitate group collaboration

Student athletes and avoiding plagiarism

When working with student athletes later in the semester, I more literally included scholarship as a conversation into my instructional design for a session I collaborated on with the Director of the athletes' writing center and my colleague, Niamh Wallace. I started the session talking about the process of research to frame positive uses of citations (how they help a conversation) and the negative effects of plagiarism, accidental or not (how they harm a conversation). To illustrate the concept in their minds first, I read them Burke's Unending Conversation Metaphor that I slightly adapted to more modern language they could relate to. I asked them to close their eyes and....

Imagine that you enter a party. You come late. When you arrive, others have been there long before you, and are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and fill you in. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you get the gist of the argument and join in. Someone answers; you respond; another comes to your defense; another aligns against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending on the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is endless. It’s getting late, so you have to take off. And you leave, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

Marisa (Director of writing center) incorporated a short lecture on how to write well when using other people's ideas, and as a hands-on activity had students write about their thoughts based on what we had presented to them (having them cite us). Then, using game design for this session, the theme was the "Citation Olympics," and we had students compete in groups for prizes as they learned content. Our format was introduce concept > practice > compete in the Citation Olympics at the end. Each module was a "sport," essentially. Here is a copy of the PPT we used to guide the session for a better idea (though much detail still gets left out from not including lecture notes).

Workshop on avoiding plagiarism for student athletes from Nicole Pagowsky


Anyhow, thought it might be helpful to share, and I hope to see how others have been teaching these concepts to gain a better understanding of how the new framework can be put into practice.

Some brief thoughts on classroom management, techniques, and future lesson plans

I started off writing this post reflecting on the negatives of a difficult instruction session that I had and although it's really helpful to examine failure, I think it's even better to look at what has gone well and what does work. The difficult class I taught was a student success course for (mostly) athletes in their freshman year. It's extremely remedial to ensure they get the right footing before entering into more advanced classes. On one hand, from what I observed, it seems like it is a necessary thing for some students, and at the same time, it seemed like they were frustrated and perhaps felt the class was beneath their skill level. So, with that situation (and numerous classroom management issues) and a last minute request for instruction, it was an uphill battle.

The ERIAL Project has highlighted the issue of students with the lowest skill level in library research being the most confident about their abilities. I definitely notice this in the classes I teach, and particularly in this student success course. They seemed to feel very confident and like they didn't need me to show them anything (not the whole class, but the majority). In contrast, the students who were excelling and were doing more advanced research were the only ones asking questions and putting effort into the activity. I think an effective method in this case is to set them up for some struggle first and then show them that they could really use instruction. For example, have them search the database without direction, and then when they see they haven't found very useful results or too many results, demonstrating tactics and tricks can better capture their attention. That way when we say knowing how to do research effectively will actually save them time in the long run, they will believe it.

On the flipside, I went back to teach another session to freshmen football during their study table hours (this is part of my work in student retention), and it went amazingly well. The lead tutor who oversees their study table hours said my colleague and I are great at engaging a very difficult population (hooray!) and asked me to come back next month even though now we've covered all the sessions we agreed upon for the academic year (orientation, basic searching, evaluating sources, and citing/avoiding plagiarism).

With this group, I have been planning game-like activities to engage their competitive nature. Anytime they can go up against one another, they seem to get really into it. We planned a BINGO-style orientation session for them over the summer and they were hardcore about enforcing no answer sharing or explaining answers until the competition is over because they all wanted to win. At this latest session, we did plagiarism court and offered candy for answering correctly. I'm already plotting out our next session and think now that they have the basics, I'd love to teach them "research as conversation," and framing it that way should really help them understand the process better. I'm working on developing some things to illustrate this in a fun way and will share what I create along with the results. This is an exciting group to work with because I can try out a lot of different things and can make it fun.