Building a Community of Practice with Faculty around the Research Process

At this point in the semester when we are deeply engaged in information literacy instruction, we are also feeling the challenges and limitations of one-shot classes.  Last summer, when we had time to strategize about information literacy instruction at Widener University, my colleague Kayla Van Osten and I set out to expand our options beyond the one-shots by creating materials and additional modes of instruction.  This fall we have offered these options directly to our subject faculty with the goal of both supporting their work with students and presenting new ideas and approaches to teaching about the research process.  While it’s still early days with our project, and we know we have much more work to do, we have gotten encouraging feedback from faculty, so I thought I’d share what we’ve been working on in case it may be helpful to those in other academic libraries.

When Kayla and I set out to develop this new community of practice with our subject faculty, we recognized that we weren’t starting from scratch.  Library faculty and subject faculty on our campus are already working as partners within the structure of the one-shot information literacy sessions, so we knew that we could build upon this foundation.  Subject faculty mainly focus on the research process as it functions within their area of expertise, so we saw an opportunity to present new ideas about the research process that we have encountered in scholarship from the library world.

Last spring, as part of our annual professional development workshop series Thriving in a Digital World, Kayla and I presented “Should I Still Be Teaching That?: The Research Process Today.”  We discussed replacing website evaluation checklists (CRAAP test) with lateral reading, moving away from seeing website domain as an indicator of credibility, incorporating Wikipedia and Google Scholar into the research process, questioning regard for scholarly articles as the ‘gold standard’ for research, challenging instructional time spent on Boolean operators, reconsidering the tendency to over-focus on perfect citations, and also re-thinking the definition of plagiarism as theft.  Our work was inspired by a presentation done last year by Jane Hammons of Ohio State University and Adrienne Warner of University of New Mexico: “Outdated Research Notions: Changing the Conversation on Your Campus.”   After our presentation, we strategized about how to support faculty who wished to incorporate these new ideas into their teaching in the fall.  Our goal was to provide tools and materials that would scaffold learning for first-year students who are completely new to the research process.  We developed an Information Literacy Faculty Toolbox in a LibGuide with materials we created and gathered that faculty can incorporate into their Canvas courses.  We also built two standalone Canvas courses for introducing citation (APA and MLA) to first-year students.  We directly addressed the fact that many students have no prior knowledge about citation when they enter college by focusing the content on why we cite, how we participate in the scholarly conversation through citation, how to manage research materials to allow for proper citation, and the mechanics of citation in the particular styles.  By providing this foundational instruction in citation, we hope to give students context for the rules about plagiarism and academic integrity that they encounter upon entering college.  We also hope to support faculty who would like to shift away from the traditional definition of plagiarism as theft.  

The feedback we have received from faculty on our campus to these new ideas about the research process has been very positive.  Our professional development workshop last spring was well-attended both in person and through views of the recording.  I noticed that several faculty members who are teaching first-year students have adopted a new take on Wikipedia by including the article “How Do I Use Wikipedia for Research?” in their courses and I’ve also seen language about “scholarship as conversation” appearing in several research assignments.  Many subject faculty were excited about our Canvas citation courses and incorporated them into their classes this fall.

We plan to continue to build this community of practice with subject faculty on our campus through more professional development workshops and more instructional support materials.  Jane Hammons’ new book Teaching Information Literacy through Faculty Development suggests additional ideas for working with subject faculty such as assignment re-design workshops and focused training programs that we would also like to explore.  Next up is identifying a topic for our spring workshop series and creating a Canvas course on the lateral reading process.