There's a Reason It's Like That: "Life Hacks" for Graduate Students Navigating Disciplinary Literature

Geoff JohnsonFollow

Start Date

3-17-2020 9:00 AM

End Date

3-17-2020 10:30 AM

Author(s) Bio

Geoff Johnson is the Graduate Teaching Learning Librarian at the Auraria Library, which serves The University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and Community College of Denver, the first two of which have graduate programs. Geoff collaborates with graduate programs and faculty in a variety of disciplines to provide information literacy instruction. He also leads graduate student outreach in the form of participation in orientations and other events. He is interested in graduate student needs assessment and information literacy instruction and assessment.

Keywords

information literacy; library instruction

Description of Proposal

Graduate students, both through in-class assignments and in their work on their theses and dissertations, are expected not to just find sources on their topics, but to read deeply and fully understand the conversation(s) in the literature around their topics. They are expected to participate in those conversations. Oftentimes, however, graduate students are still getting comfortable with the literature in their discipline(s). A variety of subtleties, idiosyncracies, “pro-tips”, “life hacks”, etc., related to interacting with the literature could be extremely valuable to graduate students, but are sometimes so intuitive to graduate teaching faculty that they go unsaid. Graduate teaching librarians can play a crucial role in making some of this “insider” knowledge explicit.

The intention of this workshop is to discuss specific lesson plans and learning activities for facilitating a greater level of comfort in navigating discipline-specific literature. The facilitator will discuss some examples of lesson plans and learning activities used on his campus, including strategies:

  • To help students organize their thinking about the important points from various sources to facilitate synthesis (e.g., the literature review matrix or other similar methods)

  • To facilitate students’ interrogation of published works:

    • How do the authors use the sources they incorporate into the published work?

    • What does the references page tell you about the conversation around this topic?

    • What information in the source could you use to locate more sources on the same or a similar topic?

The 90-minute Workshop session format has been discussed in the lead-up to the conference as “train-the-trainer”-type sessions, but the emphasis of this session, however, will be for participants to share and collaboratively develop ideas for lesson plans and learning activities. Individual tables or areas in the room will be devoted to individual disciplines, and attendees will make a plan to engage students based on a provided scenario or assignment.

What takeaways will attendees learn from your session?

Attendees will walk away with actionable ideas for class sessions and workshops, hopefully to include approaches that hadn’t occurred to them before.

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Mar 17th, 9:00 AM Mar 17th, 10:30 AM

There's a Reason It's Like That: "Life Hacks" for Graduate Students Navigating Disciplinary Literature

Graduate students, both through in-class assignments and in their work on their theses and dissertations, are expected not to just find sources on their topics, but to read deeply and fully understand the conversation(s) in the literature around their topics. They are expected to participate in those conversations. Oftentimes, however, graduate students are still getting comfortable with the literature in their discipline(s). A variety of subtleties, idiosyncracies, “pro-tips”, “life hacks”, etc., related to interacting with the literature could be extremely valuable to graduate students, but are sometimes so intuitive to graduate teaching faculty that they go unsaid. Graduate teaching librarians can play a crucial role in making some of this “insider” knowledge explicit.

The intention of this workshop is to discuss specific lesson plans and learning activities for facilitating a greater level of comfort in navigating discipline-specific literature. The facilitator will discuss some examples of lesson plans and learning activities used on his campus, including strategies:

  • To help students organize their thinking about the important points from various sources to facilitate synthesis (e.g., the literature review matrix or other similar methods)

  • To facilitate students’ interrogation of published works:

    • How do the authors use the sources they incorporate into the published work?

    • What does the references page tell you about the conversation around this topic?

    • What information in the source could you use to locate more sources on the same or a similar topic?

The 90-minute Workshop session format has been discussed in the lead-up to the conference as “train-the-trainer”-type sessions, but the emphasis of this session, however, will be for participants to share and collaboratively develop ideas for lesson plans and learning activities. Individual tables or areas in the room will be devoted to individual disciplines, and attendees will make a plan to engage students based on a provided scenario or assignment.