More important than the curriculum is the question of teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given.
—Bertrand Russell
My colleagues and I have spent a lot of time over the years in meetings together discussing information literacy and all that it encompasses, but most particularly how it impacts our classroom teaching. There has been an evolution of practice, to be sure, in that amount of time as we have consistently reflected on our collective and individual practice. We have grappled with standardization, best practices, one-shot instruction, and the seeming lack of interest or attention from students and their professors for our efforts. There is an endless debate over the role of librarians in the classroom as well as the recent controversy over the necessity of information literacy. The times are changing, for sure, and while I don’t normally mind getting caught up in the controversy, I have come to the conclusion that the endless debates that those in our profession engage in effectively displaces our attention from our current practice and our own agency. Instead, we need to think about how we can make a difference in our sessions, one class at a time. One hardly needs a mandate in order to reflect on our own practice and to simply try something different. Trust our own instincts? Well, yes.
I have an abiding belief that learning begins in conversation. My instincts and my own experience in the classroom tell me that when you engage a student in conversation about their “topic” you are often engaging them in a way that gives voice to an idea that has just been rolling around in their heads, one they may be really struggling with and not even know how to approach.
For this very reason, and the fact that I am often met with that glazed-over look by the students who I stand before, I have decided to take a “hands-off” approach during my first session with students in any given class. What this means is that the students before me and all of their attendant informational needs are, at that moment, more important than the technological tools and databases before them. In fact, I prefer to have my first (usually of three) session with students in a regular classroom and not a lab for this very reason. That means I get to look them in the eye, and they, too, get to size me up. They cannot hide behind a computer screen and I cannot use my “bag of tricks” to deflect the “conversation,” where I believe the seed of real learning takes root.
Conversation is natural; so natural in fact, that most of us engage in it countless times over the course of a day in many different settings and we often do not think twice about it. Humans engage in conversation with one another as a way to share secrets, intimacy, an exchange of information, among other reasons. As a professor librarian, I have tried many different ways of connecting with students in the classroom—some successful, some failures. But one way that I have consistently been able to engage students and have them actually respond to my efforts has been to take a “hands-off” approach to teaching. This means that I decide to focus on conceptual teaching rather than teaching that is tool-based. This is a very intentional style of teaching on my part, and I can say with full honesty that it has worked very well in my classes and has been encouraged by the professors that I have worked with in the classroom, even when it has been very different from their own style.
I firmly, in the tradition of the great radical educator Paulo Freire,1 reject the “banking” system of education—the notion that we, the educators, stand up in front of a room and “deposit” knowledge into the heads of our students who come to us as “blank slates” with nothing to offer and everything to gain—that is, what we as the “all-knowing” professor can give them. I want to do exactly the opposite. I want to break down those barriers and engage students in what they may be thinking. I will often begin with a conversation about the expectations they may have for the session—which are usually pretty low—I joke about how tired they look, how much coffee I myself just slugged down, how I know how difficult it is to go from a topic to a paper. I empathize. I meet them where they are. They begin to open up. But more importantly than getting them to speak to me in class, is getting them to speak with each other. I encourage a loud class. I like to pair them up and hear their conversations. I almost never have to remind them to keep on topic since it is a great relief to be given “permission” to voice their thoughts and concerns about the assignment at hand. Here are students, for a time, “unplugged,” and it is both a rare and beautiful thing to behold.
Be prepared that this style of teaching may make professors nervous because it does not seem as though any “progress” is being made. What about databases? Key word and Boolean searches? I assure them that I take a scaffolding approach and that I will get to all of that and that the first session is just “priming the pump,” for lack of a better term. Ideally, I get to speak to professors about this beforehand. I am a professional and I feel that it behooves me to act like one when I am in the classroom—particularly as an embedded librarian. This sometimes means that what a professor would like me to do is not actually the best way to approach things. Then we have a conversation.
Educational theories are continuously changing to reflect the time and place in which we and our students find ourselves. This is a good thing. Encouraging our students to begin to converse with themselves, with us, and with each other is far from radical, though in the present climate of tools-based learning, where content knowledge is packed into databases just waiting to be unlocked with a magical key, it can seem as though it is.
All of learning begins with inquiry; of this there can be no doubt. J. F. Lyotard,2 the French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist, asks the questions all educators should ask themselves: “Who transmits learning? What is transmitted? To whom? Through which medium?” Librarians, in thinking about their approaches to information literacy, may want to begin with what seems most natural: getting in touch with your students and surveying the landscape of their thoughts. Allow for progress to be made through process. Begin by creating a climate that encourages the verbalization and articulation of their thoughts, fears, and their intellectual anxieties.
Kenneth Bruffee3 has written extensively about the importance of conversation in education and learning. Bruffee has astutely stated, “Conversation is of such vital importance to learning that without it, few of us would stand a chance.” Conversation forges community, and in a community learning and support of learning happens. It’s a beautiful thing! A lovely by-product, too, is that while engaging students in conversation, you are laying the groundwork for a connection to be made. It almost always follows that if a student can make a connection with you in class, he or she will be more likely to seek you or a colleague out in the library, having begun a conversation with one of you outside of it. We can’t underestimate the anxiety students seem to feel around librarians in the first place, so breaking the ice will serve our students well in the long run. And, after all, it really is about them.
Creating a conversational style in the embedded classroom goes a long way toward contributing to a dialogic environment rather than a monovocal one, something I will talk about in a later chapter. It is more of a democratic environment that encourages the voicing of opinions and questions and allows a student to hear his or her own “voice” in an environment of support and acceptance. I have found this to be one of the most rewarding aspects of being an embedded librarian: I have a bit more latitude in what I do to be able to draw out students in important ways. I have also found that students did not fear that I would be censorious with them or criticize concepts that they could not grasp at first. Because so much of what I do in the classroom is teaching students to conceptualize, they often have to vocalize their thoughts, let their words reverberate, and then have others join in the conversation. This is how thoughts and ideas become challenged, but also clarified and validated.
You know the old adage, “I don’t know what I think until I hear myself say it”? It’s true. It really is. And the librarian in the embedded classroom is in the ideal position to enact this process.
• Students often have anxiety about libraries and are intimidated by librarians. Establish contact early and often with students. Setting up initial appointments with each of them where you discuss, among other things, what concerns they may have with the material in class and how you may help them specifically is a good place to start.
• Have students fill out an “intake” form which will collect information from them that will help you to establish a “baseline” idea of what their strengths and difficulties are with research. Take notes throughout the semester on this form each time you meet with a student. For instance, each time a student meets with me individually (which is often) I pull out their sheet and note any changes (for example, perhaps they changed the text with which they will be doing their thesis on), but I also am careful to note the nature of our conversation: the student’s concerns, any insights, strategies shown, and so on. This approach is, admittedly, a bit ethnographic, but seems wholly appropriate and helpful, given our position in the class. No class is a monolith, and while the class may have certain aspects in common (they all need to write a thesis, they are all majoring in the same discipline, etc.) such as a knowledge base, individually their strengths and weaknesses and interests will vary greatly. Being able to understand where they are individually helps to enact and encourage cohesive learning together in the classroom.
• Set aside time after each class or shortly thereafter to “debrief” with the professor in class. In my case, both of the professors that I worked with were often surprised at their students’ perspectives on what they were learning and the difficulties they were having. At least in my case, there was a tendency to tell the professor that all was well when, in my individual sessions, they would admit that they were not. It seemed easier for students to be able to share that with me. I was seen as an ally in the class, a role that I acknowledge but am, of course, not limited to. Being able to debrief after the class while impressions were fresh helped to build upon, together, our strategies for the next session. Armed with what was working and what wasn’t, we worked together to address the issues for the next and subsequent classes.
• Keep good notes. Keeping a process journal is a great meta-cognitive activity and a wonderful reflection tool. While we are often exhorting or requiring our students to keep a class journal, I have found keeping one indispensable. While some may think already being embedded in class is holistic, reflection on the process makes it even more so. Looking over your notes after class will help you to concretize your thoughts about your impact on student learning and other facets of the process. The process of keeping notes in general wholly focuses your attention as you are participating in the process.
While there are so many variables in the embedded classroom, preparing the students for your involvement is just as important as the preparation that you will do with the professor beforehand. Students need to know what they can reasonably expect from the librarian in the classroom. Whatever you decide, be consistent in your teaching style—if you begin fully engaged, by all means, remain that way. If you are the type to hang back a bit and decide that being participatory in class is not your best style, honor that. Be who you are everywhere, but most especially in the embedded classroom.
NOTES
1. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. Ramos (New York: Continuum, 2002).
2. Jean Lyotard, Keith Crome, and James Williams, The Lyotard Reader and Guide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
3. Kenneth Bruffee, Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence and the Authority of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
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