Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.
—William Zissner
Embedded librarianship made sense to me even before I had an actual name for the practice; indeed, before I knew that it was a concept of growing popularity. This was a good thing, in my case, because I was free from any strictures of practice that I felt I was transgressing. Instead, I began the practice of “being there” simply because I felt that I needed to be there. I had been feeling, with ever-increasing frequency, disconnected and auxiliary to the teaching process, and both witnessed and felt the sense of inertia and resistance so many academic librarians have felt from the students whom they are tasked to teach. I had no sense of the “ecosystem” of the class in which I showed up, was totally in the dark about their knowledge of doing research, what they had done in the past, and where the most difficulty often lay. And in a 45-minute session, I was never going to find out. I began having a lot of one-on-one sessions in my office, which both I and the faculty that I most often worked with would recommend. Here, students would ask me questions about things I had covered in class, vaguely remembering search strategies and other skills, but having totally forgotten them in the interim. At first I saw this as an abject failure on my part. Why couldn’t I seem to generate any interest in research or search strategies in the information literacy sessions I was teaching? How did the majority of students ever hand in successful papers with relevant and authoritative sources? How best could I teach them in the limited time and frequency with them that I had? The answer came to me almost immediately. The truth was, I simply couldn’t. What I felt would make my teaching effective and facilitate learning among students who did not deem library skills on any level to be important would be to be in the class with the students and to work collaboratively with the faculty member in concert, rather than at cross-purposes.
While attempting to forge my way into more embedded practice, both literally and figuratively, I learned a lot from Jean Lave’s and Etienne Wenger’s model of learning in what they call a “community of practice.” Simply, this means that learning occurs in the same place in which it is applied. While some might argue that this practice does not strictly apply to the classrooms in which librarians may embed themselves, I assert that it does—and, in fact, in my own experience, has worked to my, the professors’, and the students’ great advantage.
To be sure, the practice of embedded librarianship will not fit all of the strict characteristics of the practice, but I felt that the three main tenets of this theory of learning made a lot of sense to me and validated the way in which I felt my presence could make a difference. The basic tenets1 of the practice as defined by Wenger are as follows:
What it is about: understanding the community as a joint enterprise, the foundation of which can be and usually is renegotiated by those who participate in it;
How it functions: members working together to a common purpose which enhances a feeling of connectedness and builds community; and
What capability it has produced: a shared repertoire of communal re-sources by way of routines, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, styles, and so on.
What I understood from this theory of learning was that learning happens best in a community where goals are shared, proper support can be given, and knowledge is not deposited, but rather created through a variety of participation strategies. Wenger makes an important distinction when engaging in this practice: that this community is different than a community of interest or one that is situated in a common geographical place. This is an intentional community and, even though in the case that I will present, that of being embedded in a English senior thesis course, some would argue that it is a required community, it is a community nonetheless and one which I could define by the dimensions of the practice listed above.
In the embedded classroom the librarian’s job is no longer “decontextualized,” a problem that I would assume many academic librarians feel as we are “kept in our place” by making what I have often thought of as “appearances” in class. In these “appearances” we are asked to teach skills (which faculty have never failed to point out is a much lower level than actual knowledge, which is prized), with usually only the bare outline of the assignment that students are given, if even that. We have not been able to understand classroom lessons from the students’ vantage point, simply because we have never been in class with them. Traditionally, we have been situated to deliver content or “skills” (often seen as rather low level) at times that were not particularly useful in terms of learning. Before there was an embedded librarian working in thesis class, students would occasionally ask for my help over the reference desk, but I felt it was all rather sterile. The thorough reference interview revealed that far from knowing how to do research for such an important class, it was assumed they already knew how to do the research, and often when they finally came to me they were frustrated, and by that point merely wanted me to find the sources they were looking for, rather than take them through any steps. This is what I have termed the “find me something and let me plug it in” reference question. For a class that relies so heavily on research, the students really had no sense of what to make of their own topics, where to go to find correct sources, but more importantly, they had no idea how to think about their topics. And this last point, for me, as it pertains to embedded practice, is one of the most important. Being in the classroom and building a learning community while you are there entails, for the most part, being “conceptual” rather than tool-based—at least in the beginning. Moreover, learning becomes focused in interactions and relationships, meaning that the librarian is uniquely situated to be able to aid in initiating, facilitating, and maintaining these types of conversations. While I recognize that the situation that I am writing about here is not strictly egalitarian—the professor leads the class and the librarian mediates a lot of the understanding and the learning that takes place in the spaces in between—a community does, in fact, take place and pleasingly, sooner rather than later. Learning begins to take shape in community as students are encouraged to think out loud, have their ideas critically and respectfully questioned, and are encouraged to fine-tune or change their perspectives on an issue based on conversations and diverse viewpoints in the learning community. Students begin to hear what they are thinking, and their thoughts are released and added to and expanded upon. The student finds a way to express him or herself, slowly gaining confidence in him or herself and the information process. Lave and Wenger praise this style of learning in contrast with internalized learning because “increasing participation in communities of practice concerns the whole person acting in the world.”2 Wastawy, Uth,3 and Stewart believe that the “social nature of information seeking means that essentially all information seeking can be seen as collaborative at some level.”
My experience in the embedded classroom exemplified this point almost perfectly. I and the professors in the two sections I participated in saw early on the fear in students’ eyes at the word thesis. Indeed, this was their thesis class, their capstone, a chance to choose a text that resonated with them on some level and write critically about it, to be presented at the end of the spring semester in front of English faculty, adoring parents, friends, and peers. A seemingly tall order to students, but to the rest of us a natural culmination of four years of learning. In regard to students, I have learned from my mistakes and I no longer make any sudden moves, but rather simply observe. In the first few weeks of the fall semester, I began to see a group dynamic doing its job, and while the professors and I had rather methodically set up and integrated my exact role and the strategies I would enact as the librarian in the classroom, none of us knew, exactly, how the class would function as a group, as the learning community that I had envisioned. While each and every student was known to us—having encountered each of them in class over the years—how they would help or hinder one another (yes, it happens!) was an unknown. Admittedly, I as the librarian had more leeway in being able to observe and take notes on both social and academic behavior in the class. I also watched to see which, if any, alliances were being forged, so as to “exploit” those alliances for the greater good later on. One of my aims was that the class would, indeed, function as a community of learners, or as we like to say at my university, a “community of scholars.” I was enacting what Annemaree Lloyd would call an “outside observer”4 position, an ethnographic stance in which to situate myself in order to be able to understand the class dynamics along with their informational needs. Lloyd’s work is based on her fieldwork observing firefighters, leading her to understand that “information literacy in a workplace context requires recognition that information and knowledge are socially produced and distributed, and that access to it can be affected by social relationships.”5 This ethnographic approach comes easy to me, though some may bristle at the seemingly passive activity. All of the planning and setup done before an embedded class actually takes place becomes an exercise in futility if the group dynamic is not taken into consideration. And while one can hardly know the needs of a class or how it will function before everyone is assembled together in the same room for a few weeks, it is a necessary step in fulfilling the promise of the learning community. One can easily translate Lloyd’s use of “workplace” to be “classroom,” where she describes the setting of this sort to be made of “a constellation of skills, practices and processes that depend on relations with experts who afford and mediate the process and thereby, enhance the information practices of the novice.”6
Much of the way I see embedded librarianship being enacted in the classroom is that of being an intermediate between the students and the professor and facilitating instances of learning and knowledge acquisition. I usually tell my classes that among other functions, I will be there to get them from point A to point B and even further still. Sometimes the distance between two points is lesser and sometimes it is greater. This is largely dependent on a myriad of factors, though I feel it is part of my job to figure this out. This is a unique position to function from, as my students have not had this opportunity before. As much as I am touted by the professor in the class to be “our very own resident information specialist,” I feel that I am certainly the bridge between the professor and the students. In class I take notes on everything from content to students’ expressions and the questions that they ask in class. This helps to provide a “picture” of each session. I have been able to discuss with professors after class where I think there are areas of misunderstanding. These can be smoothed over and explicated in the next class. After a few weeks, I begin to address those issues in class. This is when some real work begins and I move (but do not abandon!) from my predominantly quiet ethnographic stance as observer into that of active participant and mediator. To more fully realize that role, it was my responsibility in one of the sections of the thesis course to initiate group discussion, pair up students as research partners, and solicit questions or raise a particular thorny topic in the literary theory that we read in class. Theory seems to confound students—coupled with the fact that they are learning some difficult concepts while at the same time attempting to apply some of them to the thesis they are writing—so the discussions usually go from abject frustration, for instance, “What does Derrida have to do with my topic anyway?” to a sort of totally breaking down an issue or topic and facilitating participation in putting it back together again. The average student struggling alone is less likely to do this. Usually frustration will win, and a sort of paralyzing effect will set in, preventing the student from moving from one point to another, preventing the advancement through the weeks that is expected of them. I have long taken a hands-off approach to teaching information literacy, preferring instead a conceptual approach, where I have long felt learning begins. When we begin with a conceptual approach, we allow for greater participation among students. We can see how knowledge is created, in community, not isolated, unchallenged, unspoken. Ideas come out of the dark into the light of day.
James Elmborg in “Critical Information Literacy: Implications for Instructional Practice” takes a community view of learning that encompasses both the social and political concerns of educators and theorists, among them, Freire and Giroux. This view moves away from learners as strictly individual, alone in the wilderness, needed to prove or perform knowledge, but instead shines a light on learning as produced, distributed, and used as, in essence, a sociopolitical process that depends upon and encourages the participation of community. He further asserts that “people produce, read, and interpret texts in communities not in isolation. Communities reach consensus about interpretation, sometimes easily and sometimes contentiously. Literacy cannot be described, therefore, in broad terms as a set of universal skills and abstractable processes. Rather, literacy is in constant flux and embedded in cultural situations, each situation nuanced and different from others.”7 Librarians have previously been focused on a skill set—a one-size-fits-all “tool” or a set of tools that can be applied to any information or research need. But conceptualization, the process of meaning-making, is missing from this formulaic approach and it has clearly outlived its usefulness. Since the librarian is instrumental in leading students to those information sources, it makes sense that the librarian, as well, takes part in the conceptualization process, and that process takes place in the classroom, among a community of learners, with the regularity (such as a semester) needed to build upon the process step by conceptual step.
Perhaps some who read this will feel that what I propose is not concrete enough, is devoid of strict guiding principles, and does not have enough agency in the classroom given our current roles in academia. If you have gotten to the point in which you are embedded you have that agency. This approach does take time, and it does take stretching teaching muscles that may have, as yet, been unstretched. But at the outset, embedded librarianship itself is not business as usual. The practice entails a change of culture, a change of expectations, and a change in the way we enact our profession, our goals, in the classroom. It seems almost heretical to some librarians that we would have our own goals for what our (yes, our) students will learn in the classroom and how they will learn it. When we are embedded librarians, we can no longer be content (as if we ever were) to sit quietly on the sidelines. If, in fact, our expertise is needed (and it is), then we need to assert what we know in our own discipline and give a rationale for why it is used, why it is needed, and how it affects change in the classroom.
In the past I have been frustrated to the point of distraction when I am asked to teach something in a way that I know will in no way benefit a classroom of learners. What is worse is that such a lesson will often reinforce to students (and others) that our lessons are useless, boring, and not applicable in the moment to what they need. One of the reasons that I chose to concentrate only on embedded librarianship in the classroom is because I feel so strongly in the librarian as a full participant and facilitator in and among a community of learners, rather than simply being embedded in an online learning system, a strategy which has its place, but does so with technology and from a distance. I am a proponent of hearing, listening, engaging, and assessing from right where the students are. A messy process, to be sure, and one not suited for everyone in every situation.
Because learning communities are constructed, as in the example of my English senior thesis classes, students can benefit from the shared goals and shared language of the subject and topics at hand. At the very least, these students are bound emotionally and academically by one common goal: each of them must produce a thesis. What I have found after years of being embedded in this class is that nearly every person, at first, has no idea how, exactly, they can or will reach that final goal. That one big commonality binds them from the beginning. They know this at some level, but not on a conscious one. They have not allowed themselves to get to the point of what they themselves might produce, let alone how exactly it will get done. And most if not all are not worried about how anyone else is going to do it. They just know that they have to. It is at this stage that I along with the professor will work on group dynamics, linking students in research groups and encouraging interdependence on each other. Traditionally, in my experience, students do not like “group work” and so they will often misunderstand the intent of the research groups. They will not be constructing an assignment together, per se, but instead they will be grappling with concepts together. Because often everyone is at different levels of understanding on any given topic, this strategy helps them to help each other to understand and removes the authorities from the process. They learn to depend on each other. As the librarian, this is my cue to work on the periphery for a while, to do the ethnographic observing I spoke about earlier, to watch and try to learn their particular learning styles, their anxieties, how they function in their group, and, of course, what their special interest or capability is in a topic. Lave and Wenger speak of “legitimate” peripherally as being an empowering position, “as a place in which one moves toward more intensive participation.”8 But, they warn, this is not a position in which one should situate oneself as a distinct position per se. Neither is the “center,” as they define it, an appropriate position to remain in. Even “complete participation,” as they see it, suggests a closed-off domain of “knowledge or collective practice.” They prefer the term full participation denoting that which does “justice to the diversity of relations involved in varying forms of community membership.”9
I will often talk to students and their need to “grapple” with concepts that they do not understand. And the process is often confusing, messy, and frustrating. I urge them to often take leaps in their thinking, while telling them that the process itself will cost them nothing. (I have seen students struggling and studying alone, going through the motions of attempting to gain knowledge, or what they believe is an understanding about the subject at hand, but their efforts are often strangely decontextualized from any collaboration that could be taking place.) Librarians can integrate learning strategies that help students to grapple with intellectual concepts and problem solving by the creation, location, and evaluation of information together.
Librarians can help to implement various modes of conceptualization, learning styles, conversations, and explication of texts. This is done not necessarily separately from the instruction provided by the professor (though sometimes it may if this has been mutually agreed upon beforehand), but instead in concert and collaboration. It is not separate from learning in the class, but instead, integral to the learning needs of the class. Conceptualization of a topic, indeed, the very way we think and approach a topic often comes before we begin to have students place their fingers on the keyboard to begin what is an often frantic search for “articles” —not information per se, not specifically what they, in fact need, but something. Anything.
While topic learning in classrooms is expected of students, and is in fact seen as the goal, traditionally “library skills” have been thought of as “auxiliary” to the main subject knowledge of any given course. The word skills denotes lower-level learning. In the embedded classroom as a community of learning, librarians can integrate subject content with information literacy strategies so that they are not separate learning tracks, not unintegrated but holistic.
Our professional literature is filled with both anecdotal and statistical evidence that students, particularly millennials, do not know as much as they think they know. They are facile with being able to use technology, do Google searches and come up with something which they can (and often do) shoehorn into their research. Or, in fact, they can change their research topic entirely to somehow “fit” the information that they have, with great relief, found. How they are able to actually make sense of what they have found, and in fact even knowing in the first place what it is that they actually need, seems often not to figure into their information-seeking equations. There are a few reasons for that, as I have seen in my embedded practice. One is that they simply do not know what they do not know. I have lost count of how many times, as an unembedded librarian, I have been asked to do information literacy sessions only to meet the blank stares of students, some often visibly irritated. “We know this already,” they will often tell me. When I ask them if they have any questions, rarely if ever do I get a response. They seem to think that with a myriad of databases, the free Web, and most especially Google, if they can’t find it there, it simply does not exist.
The second reason is that I believe most students think that they should already know what they are in class to learn. They have not reconceptualized what they are tasked to do as “inquiry” which is deeper and wider than research, which seems to be a more “targeted” approach. How does a student begin to explore a topic in which they feel as though they must already know something? With great difficulty. Most students feel as though they are alone in their “unknowingness.”
I would like to take Jean Lave’s concept of the apprentice in a community of learning and use it as a metaphor to fit into the way in which I attempt to enact the concept in class. We start at the beginning.
Recognizing that students bring tacit knowing to the class and acknowledging that students who may feel deficient or intimidated by the scope of what they are required to accomplish in the class are beginners, apprentices help to contextualize expectations. Any student in any given subject can be seen as an apprentice simply based on the fact that they are taking a particular class. We will rarely if ever encounter students who consider themselves experts on any given topic.
Speaking to students about knowledge acquisition and their part in making that happen sets them up to be active rather than passive participants in their own learning. The librarian will facilitate collaboration and interaction between and among students with questions or problems that they will learn to grapple with together. It has been acknowledged that throughout the entirety of our lives we encounter more instances of collaborative learning than of individual learning.10 I have seen that students know how to draw one another out in regard to expressing their thoughts or difficulties with the subject at hand. I have witnessed tongue-tied students in class attempting to express themselves, emboldened by an emphatic “Yes!” or a nod of a head in their direction, validating the students’ response. The classroom becomes a laboratory of learning, not a place to showcase the knowledge one perceives oneself to have, but rather a place where ideas are often confronted, intellectually challenged, revised, expanded, and built upon.
When we grapple together with their topics, we are not yet using the “tools” that they are used to librarians beginning a lesson with. We deal in concepts first, because how we think about and conceptualize a subject will determine how and why we will use a particular tool, such as a database, and so on. I consistently remind my students that because our tools cannot think for us, we must conceptualize what we need before we begin to use one. We become practitioners, producers of our own knowing. Over the years I have had heated conversations about a conceptual approach with my colleagues and others in my profession. It would seem that “concepts” are relegated quite low, along with “skills,” in preparing students to “know” what they need and want to know. Exploring concepts is a disposition of the apprentice as one learns by doing. Concepts are not meaningless abstractions, not showpieces of capricious thought, with no endgame, but are rather the result of great mental activity and when fostered in a classroom community can develop into useful strategies for knowing and into pathways to understanding. When facilitating the kind of classroom community that prizes a conceptual approach, the practicing in community of what we aim to know, we must be careful not to present these concepts as fixed or rigid, but instead ever-evolving and developing in class. The student as apprentice in the learning community must be allowed, in fact must be actively encouraged to contribute to and benefit from others in their learning community.
This approach is not always intuitive to students, and some may resist, given the propensity for education to still be, in many instances, a passive practice, of listening and note taking, of perhaps doing a group project with others that they may or may not have any sort of connection with at all, but basically learning, struggling, and processing on one’s own. The embedded librarian can help to aid in the enculturation of this community by facilitating his or her own instruction at the outset to be one of open inquiry.
I have begun to dislike the term research as it applies in this situation, as it seems to leave out the curiosity aspect of finding out, the journey involved and not just the end result. I prefer the openness of inquiry, the way it “invites” the learner. Even with senior college students working on their final projects, I knew the word was an intimidating one and seemed to imply one way of doing things, and either you knew how to do research, or you didn’t.
I would often begin sentences with the call to “explore,” which was meant to encourage exploration together. I listened more than I spoke and I stayed with them through the process, but with varying levels of involvement. I was careful not to interfere too much when they would begin a line of inquiry and I allowed them to take it where it needed to go unless it got so off-topic that it became counterproductive. This did not happen often.
Because the class was involved in writing an English thesis with the authors and topics as varied as there were students in the class, the professor and I would start the class with a question for discussion, something that they’d discuss together while at the same time having their specific text in mind. One of us would write the question on the board and we would ask everyone to write it in their notebooks. We’d ask one volunteer to read it out loud. We tried to make the questions accessible in terms of discussion, but conceptual enough to encompass a variety of responses that students inevitably would explore with ever-increasingly open minds. Once such question was “Is there such a thing as universal experience?” It was interesting to see students cling vociferously to their own points of view in the first few classes of the semester as group dynamics began to take shape. By the fourth week, our “community” of learners had built trust and mutual respect and felt that for all intents and purposes, they really were in it together. And, I believe, better for it, each and every one of them.
• Have patience with group dynamics. Even if students know each other, the classroom is a unique setting—they do not yet know you as the librarian in the classroom, nor you and the professor in the classroom, nor all of you together. Some processes will occur organically.
• Encourage participation in class by showing a tolerance for differing opinions (no matter the subject matter of the course) and mistakes. Students will have different opinions and make mistakes. Class discussion can be modeled by the librarian and the professor by having discussions between and among each other and the class.
• Everything can be a teaching moment and often in indirect ways. Students can often find their way around a particular problem or difficult research dilemma by talking it through. Resisting the urge to jump in and solve problems will encourage students to grapple with issues to find a solution, thus empowering them further.
• Respect what students do not know. I have often been among librarians who endlessly and often bitterly decry what students do not know, which does not quite make sense—that is why they need us! The privileged and unique position of the embedded librarian provides numerous and often vivid insights into what students do not know—thus providing wonderful opportunities for learning. Be grateful for the insight, which is not often seen through chance encounters over the reference desk!
If we are good alone, we are better together. The embedded classroom is an incredibly unique opportunity to create and nurture a community of learners. Having patience with group dynamics, encouraging a warm, accepting, and non-judgmental environment will encourage the expression of thoughts and attitudes and will encourage students to do the work they are capable of doing. The embedded librarian can help to transform the classroom into a true laboratory of learning.
NOTES
1. Etienne Wenger, “Communities of Practice: Learning as a Social System” (1998), Systems Thinker, www.co-i-l.com/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml.
2. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
3. Sohair F. Wastawy, Charles W. Uth, and Christopher Stewart, “Learning Communities: An Investigative Study into Their Impact on Library Services,” Science and Technology Libraries 24 (2004): 327−74.
4. Benjamin R. Harris, “Communities as Necessity in Information Literacy Development: Challenging the Standards,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 34, no. 3 (2008): 248−55.
5. Annemaree Lloyd, “Information Literacy Landscapes: An Emerging Picture,” Journal of Documentation 62, no. 5 (2006): 570−83.
6. Ibid., 576.
7. James Elmborg, “Critical Information Literacy: Implications for Instructional Practice,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 32, no. 2 (2006): 192−99.
8. Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning, 36.
9. Ibid.
10. Lauren B. Resnick, “Learning in School and Out,” Educational Researcher 16, no. 9 (1988): 13−20.
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