How working with a librarian can transform your teaching practice
By giving librarians some teaching agency in your courses, students learn the importance of research skills as well as how to do them the right way.
Some of us live in libraries and do our best work and much of our research there. One of my favourite places in the world is the British Library at St. Pancras in London, U.K. But as I’m writing this I’m doing a writing retreat in my own library and it is also a wonderful place to be. For those in the hard sciences, libraries don’t necessarily hold the same allure. Those folks tend to do their research in labs. Whatever your relationship to the actual space, you may have forgotten about how librarians work and how you can work with them.
Most of us, if we are in the humanities or social sciences, put materials on reserve, so we often don’t interact with library service personnel. However, trained librarians are a wonderful resource for us and for our students. In terms of your own scholarship, I can attest that a good librarian has been able to find sources and information about archives that I was simply not able to find myself. They can assist with interlibrary loans and provide valuable research assistance even to those of us who are quite advanced. Especially with the changes in technology and search strategies, we can all learn something new from our librarians. Students can also benefit from librarians because they can get help with research, writing and even thesis formation.
As a professor, you can also engage librarians in your teaching practice. As we all know, information literacy and artificial intelligence are important areas to tackle and our students can best learn about these tools from a librarian. But, they can also learn about sophisticated search strings, backward and forward searching, and even how to take notes from a librarian.
I teach a foundational course in music history for majors and non-majors that culminates in a research paper as well as assignments that require information literacy at a fairly high level. That is why I decided to collaborate with my wonderful librarian to co-teach my course. To be fair, he does not teach half the class. But I was getting tired of upper year students who lacked a mastery of basic search tools, so I decided everyone in my program would have to learn these skills in the first term. We start with an introduction to the library space for 20 minutes during the first week. Then two weeks later, a whole session is given in my normal classroom on basic searching tools in our catalogue. A few weeks later, the librarian returns to do a session on advanced search techniques using databases. This is paired with a two-part assignment that asks students to look up information around their paper subjects and search a wide variety of types of sources.
My librarian also did a short (20 minute) workshop on proper citation which really helped my students.
The result has been magical. At the end of the term, I received well-researched papers and carefully crafted footnotes and bibliographies that would just not have been possible without the help of my librarian. Not only that, but the students loved the days he came to class (he was very entertaining and used engaged learning strategies like citation games) and were always looking forward to sessions that you might otherwise think of as dry. This combined course has been a real game changer for my students. I even have a picture and slide of the librarian included in the PowerPoint presentation I give on the first day of classes. I also include his email address on the syllabus to encourage students to go to him for assistance.
Not only are librarians helpful, they are enthusiastic. Part of their jobs is to show that they are having an impact at their institution. Involving them as classroom guests can help their careers and chances of promotion. My librarian marks the library assignments, so that takes a little pressure off of me in a busy course. Everybody wins when we team up with our librarian friends and make them a vital part of our research and teaching practices.
Elizabeth Wells is a professor of music history and musicology at Mount Allison University as well as author of the book The Organized Academic.
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1 Comments
Wonderful! That kind of embedded approach is ideal–so much more effective than the “one and done” session with a librarian that tries to cover everything and results in information overload.
It would be nice to mention your librarian by name so that they can take some credit as well!