1) Number of participants?

Less than 10

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

Students enrolled in the Resumed Education for Adult Learning (REAL) seminar: adult students with some college education enrolled in a bachelor’s program at Tufts

3) Describe your experience planning with the instructor.

This seminar does not have any required research assignment, but Deans Carmen Lowe and Kendra Barber, the seminar leaders, felt strongly that it was important for REAL students to have early exposure to the library. The age range of students in the REAL program varies, with the youngest students being in their mid-twenties, all the way through their 50’s/60’s, meaning that for some students, research has changed significantly! When I met with Carmen and Kendra, they didn’t have any definite ideas about what they wanted from the session, so I offered what I thought would be most relevant to their students.

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

My learning outcomes for the session were:

At the end of this session, students will be able to:

• Use JumboSearch to find a book in their discipline & read its call number
• Identify parts of a scholarly journal article
• Identify the librarian that supports at least one of their classes

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

I started the session with introductions and sharing the agenda, as well as asking students’ their names since it was such a small group. I then did a very brief demo of JumboSearch as well as showed them interlibrary loan and Ask A Librarian. I normally try to avoid website demos but because the REAL students have such a wide range of experience with library research, I wanted to ensure that everyone had some grounding in what JumboSearch is/does and how to get help.

I then did a quick activity where I had students find the librarian for one of their classes on the Ask A Librarian Page. They were then asked to go to the Research Guides page and see what guides that librarian had published and explore one that could be relevant to that class/topic. Students were asked to share out one interesting/useful thing they found on the research guides as a way to highlight that Tisch has lots of specialized resources that may be useful to them as well, beyond just JumboSearch.

Next I passed out hard copies of the following two articles:

• Growth mindset
• SOAR

I selected the articles based on seminar topics. Half of the class got a copy of one article and half the class got a copy of the other. I gave the students five minutes to skim the article, asking them to determine what the article was about. I then gave them three minutes to write down what they thought the article was about and where in the article they looked to find that information. Next, they had two minutes to talk with their colleagues that skimmed the same article, before sharing out with the rest of the class. The students were tasked with sharing what the article was about with the other half of the class, as a collaborative effort: one student would start to explain, and then another would jump in with more detail, until we had a fairly good picture of what each article was about. We then talked as a large group about how they determined what the articles were about in such a short period of time, giving the students a chance to share reading strategies. Then I led a discussion about the component parts of scholarly articles (introduction, literature review, methods, etc.) and we talked about what information could be found in each section. Students found it valuable to have scholarly articles explicitly broken down, as they seem very daunting at first.

I then had students search JumboSearch for a print book on a topic of interest, and write down the call number. I passed out a copy of the “Call Numbers by Major” handout, which has a stacks map on the back. I explained how to read a call number very briefly, by comparing it to a street address.

Lastly, I gave students a few moments to reflect and write down any questions they wanted me to answer, along with their contact information so that I could follow-up with them later.

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

Overall this workshop was very well received. This group can be challenging because of the wide range of ages/experience, so thinking to the future, it might be good to develop some flexible activity options that I could use on the fly if I got the sense that students were more/less comfortable with library research.