1) Number of participants?

17

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

Undergrads, faculty, and TA in cross-listed Film & Media Studies/Japanese course.

3) Describe your experience planning with the instructor.

• Reviewed research paper assignment and faculty guidelines.
• Reviewed the syllabus, particularly the latest themes and “texts” discussed prior.
• Reviewed research topics from students received the evening and the morning prior to the session; faculty expected me to use them in the session.
• On site of course classroom with iPads for follow-along and hands-on.

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

• Inspire curiosity and joy in research
• Raise awareness of library sources beyond Google
• Learn from search results regardless where you search (Google or library sources)

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

Reflect and Share

On 3×5 index cards, with pencils:

• Your experience doing research, e.g., what works and what frustrates you the most?
• Research strategies for this assignment, e.g., what’s your first go-to sources, why, are they sufficient?

Share, discuss and record on the whiteboard; and test out these strategies/sources

Review of LibGuide:

• What are familiar to you?
• Any surprises?
• Anything missing for how you’d approach your topic?
• Which of the “new” sources you’d like to try out first and why?
• Any of these and how might it help you with “problems” identified in previous discussions?

Student research topics, lead to faculty guidance, leads to Librarian search strategies

A problem in the research topics at this stage is that they tend to be either too broad or too narrow.

Faculty offer guidance in working with this problem. For example:
In terms of topic, it’s fine to be broad at the beginning, e.g. I want to explore something about gender and modernity. Then think of some texts or examples that seem to be relevant. Then, start looking around for books or essays that can be about the texts, the topic, or both.

Then, I translate faculty guidance into library research steps. For example:
Student research topic of the role of manual labor in the films of Miyazaki and Takahata, can become:

• Ask, ask, ask questions. Go wild with your imaginations
• How did you arrive at this topic idea? Some readings inspired you? Particular themes/imagery in the texts interested you?
• What about the idea/word labor?
• Hard/physical labor as redemption, as punishment?
• Types of labor – cooking, housekeeping, as related to gender roles?
• Labor outsourced to foreigners in today’s global settings?
• Manual labor and technology (robots, automation)
• Labor and the Japanese cultural tradition of fine craftsmanship

Connect your texts/examples to the (faculty language) topics to contextualize/frame your texts.

Subject databases provide context:

• Film studies
• Japanese Studies
• Gender Studies

This adds to strategies/sources identified by students in the previous share-and-reflect activity. I emphasize subject-databases as the place where faculty/scholars gather to talk about their research.

Start with what you already have

• authors/titles they have read that inspired your research interests
• filmmakers/artists/literary authors/texts you are examining
• names and titles as initial keyword search would work here because we are searching in a different environment as compared to google or JumboSearch

Interrogate search results

• Who are talking about your filmmakers/artists/literary authors and their works? (authors, what disciplinary perspectives as suggested by the titles of the journals, currency of the scholarship, etc.)
• Which texts are being examined? How are they contextualized/framed?
• Anything unexpected and surprising? Why?
• Note the language used, e.g., topical clues in the subject indexing terms

Bear in mind, we research to listen in the scholarly conversations around a topic and join the conversations with our own voice rather than to find answers to an assumed position/argument prior to the research.

More examples of the back and forth between texts/examples and topic

Texts/examples	Suggested searches (for the topics/contexts)
Significance of jewelry in Miyazaki films	Narrower: specific types/functions (e.g. ring, Jade), how and when they’re present/used Broader: symbolism you’d associate with the jewelry in your reading of the texts Research on the topic: significance of jewelry in Japanese culture: family bond, beauty/cuteness, wealth status
I wanted to work on villains in Miyazaki’s works, but I can’t find anything about this topic.	Research conventional characteristics of villains both in Japanese film and in film of similar genres. How do they compare and contrast with those characters that you associate with villains in your texts? Writings about your characters, similar characteristics discussed differently or not at all? Why?

Hands-on exploration and check in with students individually

Follow-up with class via Canvas with review/summary of discussions in the session.

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

Faculty feedback: I really appreciated how you picked up on my point that they are not just researching “Satoyama in Miyazaki” but researching “satoyama,” “landscape,” and “rural lifestyle” as well. This kind of approach is invaluable and though I may talk about it, you SHOWED it. Many of these are students who have never written research papers and I feel like you have given them some extraordinarily useful tools to carry away with them.

It went well, because I was able to help students see how to apply faculty guidance to the actual research process.

For this type of research assignment, subject-databases make sense; their scope would allow a more effective exercise of moving from texts/examples to topics.

I would bring a copy of the faculty guidance with key points highlighted to class; chances are students haven’t studied the guidance as closely as I would have by then.