It's Academic

Connect and Communicate Presents:Working with Student Organizations to Enhance Outreach to Underrepresented Groups

August 4, 2022

August 16, 2022 at 11:30 am EST

Recruiting and retaining a diverse student population is extremely important for any college or university. Students from traditionally underrepresented groups come from a wide array of backgrounds and are able to bring new ideas and new perspectives to existing knowledge. Libraries can play an important role in helping universities welcome these students as well as provide a safe environment that nurtures their growth as researchers and practitioners. The Engineering Library at Penn State — University Park recently created a program to let underrepresented students know of our resources and services and to enlist their help in making those services better, with the assistance of student organizations whose memberships are primarily comprised of these students. Beginning in Fall 2021, we have given multiple groups a month at a time to create displays and events that showcase the contributions of their membership and alumni to Penn State and the engineering field in general, while also allowing other patrons and visitors to get a glimpse into their cultures and history. We will explain how we set the program up, our successes and failures, and where we see our outreach going in the near future.

Registration Link – August 16, 2022 at 11:30 am EST

Paul McMonigle is the Engineering Instruction Librarian at Penn State University.

As a reminder, the Zoom link will be sent approximately 48 hours before the session. We will mute participants on entry into the Zoom room. Session will be recorded and available on YouTube after the session. We will enable Zoom’s Live Transcription feature during the session.

If you would like to present with C&CS, please contact the C&CS team.

Topics and Tacos: A Workshop Template for First-Gen Students

August 1, 2022

tags: first-gen, Information Literacy, instruction

by Amanda Boyer

At Susquehanna University, first-generation college students make up about a third of our student population. I serve on a First-Gen Working Group at SU, and our purpose is to increase awareness and support for these students. When I was asked to serve on the group, I began researching how I could help first-gen students at the library. Most of what I read was that first-gen students tend to avoid asking for help. They assume everyone else knows how college and libraries work, so they try to tough it out on their own.

I decided to break down that barrier and make first-gen students feel more comfortable with the librarians. My hope was that if they saw how friendly we were, then they would be more likely to come to us for help. To accomplish this, I designed a workshop intended for first-gen, first-year and second-year students. I hosted the workshop in the fall ahead of midterms and in the spring before finals. Both workshops were held around dinner time for about an hour. In the fall, we offered walking tacos, and in the spring, we had pizza. While any first- or second-year student could come to the workshop, first-gen students were given priority.

I opened the workshop by discussing some general new services and initiatives the university had implemented for first-gen students. The students were generally not aware of these services, and they were happy to learn about them. After this, I walked them through a paper prompt I had adapted from Teaching Information Literacy: Threshold Concepts Lesson Plans for Librarians (2015, p. 51). So many students were struggling due to pandemic learning, and while many of them had visited the library with their basic English class, they still didn’t seem sure of the overall research process.

I helped them identify key parts of the paper prompt, and from there, we used Mentimeter to create a word cloud of potential keywords we could search in the library databases. For this activity, I gave them two broad terms, “social media” and “self-esteem,” and they had to submit more specific topics related to those concepts. Once we had some keywords, I demonstrated how we could enter two of these terms into an advanced search. From there, we talked about how to narrow down our topic based off the results we found in our search. I also showed them how to limit the results to peer-reviewed sources or filter by a date range. Once we had determined a research topic together, I gave the group tips on getting the citations and permalinks for the articles to refer to later.

We ended the workshop by encouraging students to share any assignments they were currently working on for a class. Some students didn’t have any, so they finished their food and left. Other students staid for quite a while and allowed us to work one-on-one with them to help identify a topic for their paper and to search for relevant sources. Many of the students who attended expressed how helpful the workshop was, and they recommended we offer it each semester. They were also happy to hear that the library supported first-gen students, and they seemed more comfortable interacting with us as the workshop went on. Hopefully, this meant they would be more eager to come to us for help in the future. We plan on hosting the workshop each fall, as the fall workshop was better attended than the spring one.

References

Bravender, P., McClure, H., & Schaub, G. (Eds.). (2015). Teaching information literacy: Threshold

concepts lesson plans for librarians. Association for College and Research Libraries.

C&CS Presents: “Five Revolutions for Advancing Cultures of Openness in Higher Education: Looking Beyond 2022” recording now available

July 22, 2022

by Adam Balcziunas

Thanks to Steven Bell for his recent Connect & Communicate Series presentation, “Five Revolutions for Advancing Cultures of Openness in Higher Education: Looking Beyond 2022.” The recording is now available on the C&CS YouTube channel.

Whether you attended live or view the recording, please take a minute to fill out the evaluation form. Your feedback is very important to us, as we are required to submit evaluation data as part of our LSTA grant application.

Faculty Perspectives on Mis/Disinformation

July 18, 2022

by Christopher Lemery

Shortly after I wrote in a previous post about my work with the Pitt Disinformation Lab, I read a related article: Faculty Perspectives on Mis- and Disinformation across Disciplines by Dr. Laura Saunders. The article discusses her survey of higher education faculty to discover their understanding of mis/disinformation in their disciplines and how they address it in their classes.

Saunders’ survey was answered by 86 respondents in a variety of disciplines, and she conducted follow-up interviews with only 6 of the respondents, so she cautions that it’s a small sample size. Not surprisingly, over 90% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am concerned about the impact of mis/disinformation on social media” and similar responses were received to a question about the news media. However, when respondents were asked whether there was concern about these issues in their fields, the answers varied widely, as illustrated by this figure from the article:

FIGURE 3

I am concerned about the impact of mis/disinformation in my field/discipline

When first seeing this, I looked at the Communications/Journalism line several times to make sure I was reading it correctly. Over 60% of respondents strongly disagreed that it’s an issue in their discipline?! Even given that this percentage translates to 3 or 4 people, it’s still a remarkable result. I emailed Dr. Saunders to solicit her comments on this finding and she said, “ I completely agree with you about the oddness of these results. …the respondents might have been reading the question a little differently than I intended– for instance, maybe they were thinking about the spread of misinformation by trained journalists or by communications/journalism instructors as opposed to whether misinformation is spread in this field in general…although that seems a bit of a stretch as well. And certainly there are trained journalists and reporters who do purposefully or inadvertently spread misinformation.” Unfortunately, since no one from Communications/Journalism was available for a follow-up interview, Dr. Saunders couldn’t get more clarification on this result.

The article also discusses faculty interaction with librarians on mis/disinformation. The vast majority of all respondents have not worked with a librarian to specifically address the topic in their classes. However, Saunders notes that respondents’ most popular method of addressing mis/disinformation in their classes is “requiring students to cite trustworthy sources in assignments.” Assisting with this, of course, is often a focus of our instruction sessions, so perhaps in faculty’s mind we are addressing the issue. While some of the skills used to find academic research are helpful when assessing the veracity of information on Facebook, I believe they’re not identical.

Any effort on our part to integrate discussions of mis/disinformation in class instruction sessions requires among the most precious of resources on a college campus: time. Using a portion of our already-constrained instruction time to focus on these issues rather than how to use our catalogs or understand a citation won’t be welcomed by all faculty. That said, I think it’s a topic worth exploring and about which I hope to have conversations with my faculty in preparation for this fall’s classes.

In her message to me, Dr. Saunders noted that she conducted a parallel survey of academic librarians, an analysis of which she hopes will be published soon. I look forward to that article and to reading others about how we can address mis/disinformation.