1) Number of participants?

60

2) Who was the audience for the class/workshop/activity?

Rising high school juniors and seniors interested in International Relations, in residency at Tufts for a two week intensive summer program. Included a significant number of international students.

3) Describe your experience planning with the instructor.

I met several times with the IR director and administrative staff and with the 4 student TA’s. While the students would receive lectures from faculty, it was the TA’s who would provide the continuity of a 5-8pg paper assignment, due 1 week after the conclusion of the program. The students were given potential topics to choose from, related to their assigned readings and the faculty lectures. The director and TA’s were very responsive to our recasting of the two sessions they had allotted generally for library tours and introductions.

4) What were your goals for the class/workshop/activity?

Class Session 1: Intro to the Academic Library
-To help the students understand why and how college students make use of an academic library, and in what ways they differ from other types of libraries (K-12, public) or just keyword searching the internet.
-To help the students understand that there are a variety of types of sources about a given topic and that they might be used in a variety of ways, once placed in context.

Class Session 2: Digging in to Your Research
-To help the students identify a number of relevant databases for their research topics.
-To help explore our databases hands-on and begin building a useful reference list for their actual assignment.

5) Describe the session(s) and the logistics of any hands-on activities.

Because of the number of students and the need to do sessions for the full group at once, I enlisted three other folks to help: Ari, Dianne, and Ann Cullen from Fletcher. We divided the group of 60 students in two, Dianne and Ari taking one half, Ann and I taking the other. The two groups had identical experiences for each of the two sessions.

Class Session 2 was a more traditional demo, tips, and hands-on workshop. But for Class Session 1 we tried a couple interesting active learning techniques.

Cephalonian Method
This was a suggestion from Erica that specifically targeted potentially quiet groups of students. Rather than beginning with lecture or beginning by asking open-ended questions, this method tries to build dialogue in the classroom by having the students ask planted questions and then responding to them. We wanted these to feel casual and a little humorous to help break the ice, to establish that we’re approachable and aware of the stereotypes of libraries, but still demonstrate how we’re connected to student life and research on campus. We also encouraged follow-up or additional questions if any were spurred by the planted ones.

• Isn’t everything online. Can’t I just Google?
• Dewey Decimal right? I know how a library is organized.
• How many books do you have? Does Tufts have a big collection?
• I like a… [your favorite: loud, quiet, collaborative, access to coffee] …type of space. Do you have that here?
• What, did you say coffee? You can have coffee in the Library?
• Okay, where do I start my research?
• I can meet with a Research Librarian!? That sounds awesome. How does that work?
• Can you help me avoid plagiarism by citing my sources correctly?
• Books, Electronic Databases, Study Spaces, Coffee, and Research Librarians. Got it. Anything else cool in the library?
• I have everything written for my paper, can you just help me find two sources that agree with me so I can cite them?

The answers to these questions flowed from each other, creating a cohesive narrative introduction to the library (and generally, academic libraries) for these high school students. But the back and forth and tongue-in-cheek nature of the questions kept them engaged and a light tone.

Jigsaw Exercise
We then explored a topic, not related to any of their eventual research topics, to help students understand a variety of types of sources – interrogating them, and contextualizing them. Taking inspiration from the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings then in the news, we explored the also-contentious Robert Bork hearings. We divided the class into 6 groups of about 5 students each, and distributed copies of sources to each group, so that the each member of the group had the same source and a question sheet.

The sources included text from the hearing, an op-ed article from a non-mainstream newspaper, a NYT piece accompanying Bork’s obituary years later, a Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) piece from Russia, a scholarly monograph chapter, and a contemporaneous law review article.

First, the students spent time reading the source individually. Next, everyone in the group would discuss the source and address the questions on the sheet together:

• Who wrote this and when?
• Why did they write this?
• Are there footnotes or endnotes? What does that tell you, if there are or aren’t?
• What type of publication is this from (scholarly book, newspaper, etc)?
• Would you categorize this as a “secondary source” or a “primary source?” (you might have to reach some agreement about what that means first)
• What bias or particular interest might the author or the publication have?
• How might you imagine using this source if you were researching for a paper on the nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court?
• What other information or additional sources might be useful in conjunction with this source?

Finally, we went around the room and had the groups report back, discussing each source as a class.

6) What went well? What might you do differently next time?

I felt this session went very well, as did Ari and Dianne in their section. The cephalonian exercise succeeded in helping the class engage with us early on, and I find learning with a bit of humor fits my style and tends to help with student retention over a dry slide deck. I would like to find ways to encourage the planted questions to trigger more organic discussion.

The jigsaw exercise helped create a hands-on, tangible experience with a variety of types of sources. This can be a difficult concept for students as they sometimes struggle to differentiate types of sources and ways to contextualize and use them in their own writing. Our databases and catalogs don’t do a wonderful job of helping with this, so I’m glad we spent the time on this conceptualization before moving to the database demos and hands-on searching at the second session.

Next time I might try to have the different groups exposed to more than one type of source directly, perhaps by shortening the list of questions, and having a few of the groups exchange sources before coming back all together. There probably wouldn’t be enough time or interest for all to see each source, but maybe at least exchanging once or twice would be good.