Karen M. Drabenstott
Associate Professor
School of Information
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1092 USA
Voice: (734) 763-3581
Fax: (734) 764-2475
karen.drabenstott@umich.edu
New topic -- "Librarian's Role in Teaching and Learning"
Many thanks to Anne Abate for leading a stimulating discussion on "Making the Most of Associations." Despite the occurrence of both the annual meeting of the American Library and American Independence Day Holiday, our membership made "Associations" a valuable and lively discussion. Thanks again to Anne, and special thanks to Special Libraries members who tuned into CRISTAL-ED for the last two weeks and participated in the proceedings.
We now turn to a discussion of the "Librarian's Role in Teaching and Learning." Paul Gherman is our guest editor for this topic. Paul serves as the university librarian at Vanderbilt University. Before coming to Vanderbilt, he served as director at Kenyon College Library and at the Virginia Tech Library. He was also instrumental in establishing the Blacksburg Electronic Village; an early experiment in community based networks. Paul's interests are in teaching and learning, electronic publishing, and digital image collections.
Please join us for the "Librarian's Role in Teaching and Learning."
Paul M. Gherman
University Librarian
611B General Library
419 21st Avenue South
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37240
Voice: (615) 322-7120
Fax: (615) 343-8279
gherman@library.vanderbilt.edu
Dear CRISTAL-ED Subscribers and Others,
When I was at Kenyon College, we were fortunate to have a grant from the Pew Foundation to integrate information technology into the first two years of the curriculum. This grant came at the same time as the term "Teaching and Learning" was becoming popular.
As I understand those ideas which the term "Teaching and Learning" implies, it is that teaching, as we have known it for centuries, should move from being teacher centered to learner centered. We should move from the "sage on the stage" to the "guide by the side." Teachers should become mentors, and learners should become more empowered and responsible for their own learning.
Technology allows new means of teaching to evolve, through which learners can teach learners -- the classroom expands in both time and space. Asynchronous learning is possible: students, via LISTSERVs and discussion groups, can communicate across great distances and at different times. In-class presentations by both faculty and students can be much richer, involving images, sound, and motion.
Many believe adopting the new technology in teaching is a high-stakes game, and that those who do not use the new technology may no longer attract the best students who will expect to find it in the curriculum.
Most faculty do not have the time to investigate these new teaching methods, and typically no campus organization is charged with improving or changing the way in which teaching is provided. On many campuses, librarians are knowledgeable about new electronic information resources and other software programs to enhance teaching.
To begin the discussion, here are several questions to get us started:
Ray McInnis
rgmc@shuttle.admcs.wwu.edu
Let's get this discussion going. Paul has raised some very interesting, exceedingly important questions about how, when the dust settles, librarians can/will re-situate themselves into academe.
Here at Western Washington University, we in the library are just launching a major new program (July 1, 1997). Western Washington University is composed of seven colleges (although, one, the College of Arts and Sciences, makes up 75 percent of the university).
The bulk of the library faculty are reorganizing themselves into a cadre of "College-Based Librarians," each of whom will be responsible for two major tasks:
Each of these responsibilities need to be elaborated to a much greater extent than space or time allows, but I will say this: as instruction coordinator, I plan on organizing a center or clearinghouse for pedagogy, designed primarily for the college-based librarians' interests and needs, but also potentially useful for the faculty at large. In the center, naturally, much attention will be given over to the "new pedagogy," to which Paul refers. By doing this to meet our own needs, we can escape the onus that we, as librarians, are venturing into uncharted ground, and prescribing to the rest of the Western faculty the approved pedagogy, that they should be adopting.
Paul Doty
Information Literacy Librarian
Jim Dan Hill Library
University of Wisconsin, Superior
pdoty@staff.uwsuper.edu
In response to the first question in Paul Gherman's excellent discussion introduction, I think that librarians have an opportunity to lead by assisting those faculty interested in changing their approach to teaching. Our credibility in this can be established by arguing that a reference-desk's-eye view on how student go about their research is a perspective from which we can help faculty understand what students expect from information technology. Ray McInnis is right in observing that librarians cannot and should not impose a pedagogy, however if we are confident that we have a clear idea of where of students find the technology engaging part of academic study and where they find it a distraction, we can raise a bridge between the objectives within a discipline and real potential in technology. Librarians could be there to help faculty come to grips with the changes technology brings to information mediums. In this way I think librarians can be of great assistance in helping faculty make effective use of technology.
Diane Nahl
Assistant Professor
School of Library and Information Studies
University of Hawaii
Honolulu, HI 96822
Voice: (808) 956-5809
Fax: (808) 956-5835
For several years I have been sending LIS graduate students out into faculty offices to discuss the faculty's information seeking habits. It is an illuminating exercise to sit with faculty members and hear that the library's resources are not too important for their own research, but that they do expect their students to use library resources.
In general, with some exceptions, faculty are not using online resources much. They still rely on networks of colleagues, conferences, and their own subscriptions for information in their field.
My students find that they become instant consultants and coaches in faculty offices, helping them use the online catalog, databases, and the Web to discover unknown and great resources.
Clearly, faculty need individual assistance with electronic sources and librarians are the only group prepared to offer it. Faculty need to use these sources because their students use them, because they can make connections in their own research that aren't possible with the "scientific college" approach, and because they need to understand how information structure grows in their disciplines, and often, across disciplines.
Ned Fielden
San Francisco State University
Reference/Instruction
1600 Holloway Ave.
J.Paul Leonard Library
San Francisco, CA 94132-4030
Voice: (415) 338-1454
fielden@sfsu.edu
Department faculty (or perhaps better, "teaching faculty") and librarians often have an uneasy relationship on campus. Even in places like the CSU, where librarians possess faculty status (however much a concession this may seem to other faculty) the profession is usually not viewed as representing the same exalted level, unless one is in possession of a doctoral degree, which often helps considerably.
Faculty are often touchy about the arena of teaching, for a variety of both very good and bad reasons, but it seems to require an unusual environment (including close personal relations) to provide the opportunity for true collaborative work. This often means a campus accounting process that does not penalize faculty for a decline in their own FTE if working w/ other departments. I am probably overgeneralizing badly, but it seems to me that most faculty are most comfortable w/ limited involvement w/ librarians in their own teaching. They prefer close control over their own curricula and approach. We are often viewed as handy adjuncts to be brought into the classroom when dealing w/ information gathering issues related to some part of the research process (and this is particularly true in methodology classes, altho there are plenty of those run by Type A faculty who do not want their own methods diluted by an "outsider.")
(As a side note here, I should think that greater attention to teaching methodology would be an asset to both LIS programs AND to various subject doctoral programs, whose best graduates often make the quick transition from student to faculty themselves, w/o ever doing any real teaching during their own graduate studies. But increasingly, LIS grads are doing more and more instructional work, and it would pay pig dividends if LIS programs found ways to extend instructional theory and practice education to their own students.)
With the right working relationship however, marvelous things happen, and both students, faculty and librarians are enriched by the contact. We get to learn more intimately the kind of information issues the students are struggling with (and what are the current burning research arenas for the faculty member), the faculty inevitably learn something new about information technology, and the students get a close look at some of the methods behind the madness that is the organization of information (and perhaps discover why their subject searches often have disappointing results.) Luckily, faculty who are "library friends" are often vocal and enthusiastic advocates, willing to go out on a limb to departments and administrators, allowing us means and resources to improve our contribution to the educational mission of the institution.
JQ Johnson
Academic Education Coordinator
115F Knight Library
1299 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1299
Voice: (541) 346-1746
Fax: (541) 346--3485
jqj@darkwing.uoregon.edu
College teaching is itself an academic discipline with its own literature, taught in some (very few) schools of education, and on most campuses in specialized inservice training programs with names like "Teaching Effectiveness Program." To what extent are librarians familiar with this literature and set of techniques, and to what extent would their ability to assist their mainstream teaching colleagues be enhanced by the exposure?
For example, I know that on some campuses the "teaching effectiveness program" is organizationally a part of the university library. On such campuses are librarians more effective as teachers, either of traditional BI or of more recent areas of networked information access?
More generally, how many of us practice currently popular pedagogical techniques in our own library-related teaching? How many BI classes, for instance, explicitly incorporate collaborative learning or small group problem solving techniques? How many of us have recently had a videotape taken of our teaching so that we could critique our own teaching styles?
Caroline Coughlin
SCILS
Rutgers University
coughli@rci.rutgers.edu
Many of the suggestions and comments about strengthening teaching by librarians and improving library knowledge of teachers ring true from my vantage point as a sometimes teacher, sometimes librarian. Last August I was part of a team that designed and offered a week long seminar entitled Transforming Libraries, Transforming Learning for a group of 35 Finnish and Estonian teachers, administrators and librarians. As exhilarating as it was to meet with such a diverse group, it was also instructive to realize that by focusing on learning needs we offered the best logic and widest opportunity base for the wise use of libraries and library resources in different educational centres. An article on the program has been submitted to a professional journal, other information is available upon request.
Irene Schubert
Acting Chief
Preservation Reformatting Division
Library of Congress
Washington, DC 20540
Voice: (202) 707-5918
Fax: (202) 707-6449
isch@loc.gov
In one of my other lives, when I was head of reference services in an undergraduate library, we developed our own curriculum, with objectives and teaching opportunities for undergraduates. I think this curriculum provided focus for our mission and how we were going to accomplish our goal of fostering life-long learning skills and successful information-seeking strategies among students. The curriculum overlapped with the formal educational goals of the faculty, but not completely. The librarians had a springboard to use to discuss mutual goals with faculty and the curriculum (or at least the exercise of developing a curriculum) helped to establish their role and contribution to students' education.
You may join the discussion and look over the list of past and future topics.
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