librarianship =

It’s funny that I feel like I’m finished with library instruction sessions this semester when I have around 15 more classes. The difference? The upcoming classes are English 101s and University Studies tours. The tours require no preparation (beyond a big smile and raging enthusiasm) and English 101s need minimum prep. English 101 sessions needing lots of prep are usually (though not always) the result of poorly written assignments.

Side note to all English instructors out there: if you are going to require a research assignment, make sure it can actually be done. For example, don’t limit your students to print sources only and disallow electronic equivalents for a contemporary novel that was written five years ago. They will just hate you, period. And they should because it’s a dumb assignment. If you want them to come into the library, require that they come into the library to do something that makes sense and is useful.

OK, off the soap box.

So, I’m done with my political science sessions. I may have a stray one come up later in the semester, but the bulk of the sessions are over. They went well, but I can’t help feeling like the students were short-changed in a couple of the sessions. The upper-level political science classes seldom have prerequisites because the department needs the bodies for enrollment, and I spend a good deal of time making sure everyone is up to speed on the basics of searching. I’ve tried to skip over basic Boolean searching only to realize while walking around the class that many of them don’t know how to do basic searching. Do I ignore the poor souls who have never had an intro library instruction class?

On average I save about 10 minutes at the end of each class for the students who could benefit from being pushed or challenged in their research. But, that is about it. I rarely get time to do justice to my specialty areas of data and government information, which honestly would be a lot more interesting for me to teach and them to learn. Of course they can always come visit with me (and oh, so many do), but they have to take the initiative and time out of their busy days to stop by the library. Plus each consultation lasts on average 30 minutes. In the spring semester I had over 40 poli sci consultations alone, plus around 25 data and 25 government information. That’s over 45 hours spent with individual people. Over a week of one semester was spent with one-on-one consultations. That doesn’t seem like a big deal in this profession, but I can’t help wondering how many of those poli sci questions could have been dealt with in the classroom setting if I had simply had the time.

More and more I wish we could teach discipline focused research classes. Poli Sci, as most other disciplines, has a research methods course, but it is focused on quantitative methods. To supplement that I would like to see a research methods class focused on research strategies within the discipline. Wake Forest University has created LIB 200 research courses that focus on research in a larger disciplinary area like social sciences or humanities. Each week features a different discipline within the social sciences and its special concerns (so, NGO research in the poli sci week). The primary point is to teach students studying in social sciences disciplines about the unique needs and characteristics of social science research. I love this class especially because the poli sci majors are required to learn a bit about research in economics or anthropology thereby supporting the liberal arts purpose of general education requirements. But it does the gen ed thing in a way that is focused and makes sense (as opposed to taking random classes simply because it fits your schedule).

I’m sure these classes have their own challenges, but I for one am a HUGE fan. Sadly, we would have difficulty implementing them at my school because of our size. Most subject librarians would need to commit to teaching a semester long class and I don’t see that happening. But, I see plenty of proposals going through the Undergraduate Curriculum committee every semester that pay much less attention to the actual needs of students. A course like this would be relatively easy to justify. If we had library-wide support, I don’t see why we couldn’t do it. As staffing shifts at UNCG, we may see some changes in the way research instruction is handled. Will this be one change? I certainly hope so, but we will see.

Do you have ideas for discipline integrated instruction? How does your school go beyond basic information literacy initiatives to support disciplinary literacy initiatives? At UNCG we teach to specific assignments as a form of “curriculum-integrated instruction,” but is that enough? The embedded librarian approach may be the future, but how do you fully embed in multiple classes in a high research department (like political science and others)?