Some bite-sized thoughts and reflections on the items I’ve been reading, listening to, or watching this month.
Note: The following post contains spoilers for The Witcher (Netflix series), Selling Sunset (Netflix series), Selling Tampa (Netflix series), and Doom Patrol (HBO Max series).
It’s here! Using Context in Information Literacy Instruction is finally available! I can’t believe it!
In honor of its release, I was inspired by the Five Things posts that appear on Chuck Wendig’s TerribleMinds blog to reflect one some of the lessons learned writing my first book project.
This past summer, I was very privileged to be asked to become a co-editor-in-chief of Communications in Information Literacy, the same journal where I published one of my first peer reviewed articles back in the day and where I’ve been serving as a peer reviewer for the past five years or so. One of the first things I’ve had to learn in my new role is how to think like an editor rather than, say, a peer reviewer or an interested reader. This has been a challenge, but luckily I have a lot of great support from my fellow editors as I get my feet under me.
Learning to think like an editor is important because, at least at CIL, all of the research articles submitted to the journal are reviewed by us editors-in-chief before being sent for the next step of the process. And what I mean by “reviewed” is that we all read the article submitted and weigh in on whether we think the article is within the scope of our journal and whether the quality and originality of the writing and research is high enough to be considered for publication. If it is, we send the article on for peer review. Hurray!
A lot of times, though, the article is not sent for peer review. There are a lot of reasons this can happen, seemingly. Sometimes it’s because an article is simply not within the journal’s scope. Other times, the article may be within scope and generally well-written but there’s something about it that’s just…lacking somehow.
This the area where I’ve really had to practice thinking like an editor. In doing so, I’ve learned that for me, at least, the missing piece in many of this “almost-but-not-quite” articles is a sense of why the research the author did is important or what it adds to the larger conversation around information literacy and any subtopics it might cover. In other words, what problem is the author’s research trying to solve?
I’m off for the holidays and won’t be posting any new content until January but I thought I’d pin a thing here highlighting some favorite posts from the second half of the year, in case you missed them. (Favorite posts from the first half of the year can be found here.)
Thanks for reading and see you in the new year!
Thinking about Hamilton and Creative License
Leonardo da Vinci was the King of Creative Research, Apparently
On 10(ish) Years of Information Literacy Instruction
Hannibal and Criminal Minds are Secretly the Same Show
Who I Was as a Student Researcher
Some bite-sized thoughts and reflections on the items I’ve been reading, listening to, or watching this month.
Also: Did you read, watch, listen to, play something this month that you particularly enjoyed? Feel free to share in the comments! I’m always looking for recommendations.
Note: The following post contains spoilers for American Dirt (novel by Jeanine Cummins), Days Gone (video game), Dune (2021 version), Joe Pera Talks With You (if it’s even possible to spoil that show), and some dumb holiday movies on Netflix.
So last month I spent some time working on a program proposal for the upcoming ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. The proposal I came up with was centered on the same topic as my soon-to-be-published book, Using Context in Information Literacy Instruction, which makes an argument for incorporating conversations about context into research and IL instruction and includes some practical suggestions for how to do so in various teaching situations (#shamelessplug). Though the book is being published by ALA Editions, I don’t know how good of a chance it has at being accepted as a program but it seemed worth a try and something on the proposal application got me thinking about how teaching students about the importance of context to the research process might benefit those who have perhaps lacked access to some of the same resources as their more privileged peers prior to coming to college.
To be honest, I hadn’t thought much about any connections between my topic and ideas about diversity, equity, and inclusion before. As a privileged white person, I admittedly tend to be a bit blind to these issues until someone nudges me to think about them. I know that sucks. It’s something I need to change.
In this case, the nudge I needed came from the rubric used to evaluate program proposals. As I worked on mine, I did my best to make sure the proposal hit as many of the criteria the evaluators would be looking for as possible. One of those criteria had to do with the program’s connection to DEI.
After a couple of semesters without teaching any one-shot instruction sessions, first due to my sabbatical and then because of the pandemic, I taught a handful of them this fall. “A handful” is about the usual number for me, given that I have no subject liaison responsibilities and so mostly end up teaching a few sessions for freshman seminar courses and stepping in to teach one for a first year composition course here and there.
Over time, I’ve grown to like teaching the freshman seminar classes, more or less. In these sessions, students are rarely working on an actual research assignment, so the purpose of the class is to introduce them to the library. I don’t necessarily think this is the best use of my expertise, but I have managed to create a standard spiel that helps students learn not so much about the library but about college research in general (and the library’s role in it) and how it might be different from other types of research they’ve done. If nothing else, this lesson allows me to talk to students about some ideas related to the contextual nature of research and I’m pretty happy with that.
The first year composition classes are more difficult because with those I’m usually working with professors who are used to working with a different librarian (our first year comp liaison, who is wonderful!) and they want me to use that librarian’s lesson plan and materials. Because my colleague is so good at what she does, this is not exactly a hardship but everyone approaches things differently, so when I teach these comp classes, I’m doing so in a way that reflects someone else’s thinking and teaching rather than my own, which can be hard to do. That said, I’m happy to defer to her authority on this—after all, this is her professional turf and she’s done a lot of great work to build her program and create relationships with these professors.
I still kind of hate teaching one-shot sessions, though.
Eternals: As a longtime MCU fan who also runs an MCU Rewatch Discussion Group online (come join us!), Eternals is a movie that I’ve been especially excited about ever since hearing some of the early casting announcements a couple of years ago. I knew absolutely nothing about the comic book characters the movie would be based on or any of their associated relationships or storylines. All I cared about was that: a) I might finally have proof that Sebastian Stan and Richard Madden are not the same person(1) and b) Robb Stark and Jon Snow would finally be reunited. Alas, I ended up only getting about half of one of those things.(2) But weirdly enough, I still enjoyed the movie–much more than I thought I would after reading so many tepid and occasionally hostile reviews of it in the weeks leading up to its release. Is it the most exciting Marvel movie ever? No. Does it somehow manage to make actors as magnetic as Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie fade into the background? Yes. Does everyone in the movie look kind of dumb in their superhero costumes? Yeah, kinda. But what you have to understand about me is this: I love it when characters talk about their feelings and relationships. Seriously. If the third Captain America movie had been nothing but Steve and Bucky hanging out at Avengers Tower, talking about their feelings for three hours, I would have liked it soooo much better than Civil War. So. Much. Better. I especially like when characters talk about their feelings within a “found family” type of context. It’s always interesting to me to see what they’re willing to say about what’s going on in their heads and who they’re willing to say it to. So though not all of the characters felt as distinct as they could have, I did enjoy watching them navigate their various relationships with one another. I also liked that there were some genuinely unexpected revelations and reversals and that the movie makes it clear pretty early on that plot armor is not going to be a thing for these characters. There was a moment near the end where I genuinely started to think that I was watching the MCU equivalent of that Star Wars movie where everyone dies at the end. It was kind of exciting! I get why the critics are basically over MCU movies in general though I think their apparent disappointment that Chloe Zhao didn’t somehow manage to make the first truly “Oscar worthy” MCU movie is a bit much. First, because it’s Black Panther erasure. Second, because who really wants the MCU version of an Oscar movie? Probably no one. Eternals isn’t the best MCU movie ever, but I think it manages to be relatively distinct and I’m looking forward to seeing future installments featuring these characters. Even if those installments include Harry Styles, a former boy band star who I am young enough to know was in a boy band but too old to find particularly interesting.
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This semester was my third time teaching my 8-week credit-bearing course through the “contextual nature of research” lens. As anyone who’s spent any time teaching knows, every group of students is different, not just in personality and levels of engagement, but also in the sticking points they encounter in their learning. There are always new wrinkles and the group of students I worked with this time encountered one that I hadn’t seen before. I thought it might be worth spending some time thinking through it.
First, let me say that I’m still really enjoying teaching information literacy through a contextual lens. My students this semester were overall maybe a bit less engaged than in the last two classes I taught but even still they seemed to have a lot of interest and enthusiasm for learning about the importance of context to the research process. Finding out that their searches for information on topics like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and starting their own business counted as research as much as the papers they were writing for their classes seemed to really inspire them. Or at least make them feel less bored than they would have otherwise, as one student admitted to me in some feedback I asked for as part of a course quiz/survey.
Some of the confusion students experienced about research contexts was similar to what I’ve seen before in at least one of my classes: once they knew that there were different research contexts (academic, creative, personal, professional, scholarly, and scientific), they wanted to know what the specific rules were for each one. They were particularly frustrated that sometimes the different contexts can overlap. I did add some information to the course readings and activities that were aimed at helping students get more comfortable with the idea that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to research—only conventions. But I think students have been too well-trained by an educational system that teaches them to believe in “right answers” to be satisfied with this idea. It’s going to take time for them to develop in their thinking enough to understand that not every situation comes with rules or a right answer. And frankly, my course doesn’t have enough time to get them over that particular threshold of understanding, though I wish it did.
So students’ confusion over and frustration with the lack of set rules wasn’t surprising because I’ve seen that before. But what did surprise me was a particular misunderstanding that I saw from several students in the course where when I asked them to name the context of their research, they seemed to believe that the context was determined by the topic they were researching or the types of sources they were using rather than the purpose of the research.
In my investigation into the role of research in creative writing, I’m stumbled across an interesting wrinkle. Writers don’t talk about the research they might do as part of their work as much as you might think (at least in the sources I’ve read), but when they do, they often talk more about research as a way to cultivate curiosity and inspiration rather than research that is used to fill a gap in their knowledge. When it comes to conducting research for inspiration, their advice is usually to read widely and/or deeply and seek out experience that may be useful for a story or poem idea later.
I think cultivating curiosity is a necessary part of any creative endeavor but I’m having trouble deciding if this type of research counts as research.
Normally, I try not to be a snob about what counts as research and what doesn’t. There may have been a time when “real” research involved the use of the library and the citation of sources, but that time has passed. Now everyone with access to an internet connection conducts research in one form or another on a daily, if not hourly basis.
Not everyone will agree that the average Google search counts as research. Some might prefer to call it “information-seeking” which, among scholars, tends to be the preferred term for any type of research that happens to not be academic, scholarly, or scientific in nature. Personally, I think having two different terms for what’s essentially the same thing is kind of elitist. I prefer to think of research as any formal or informal process that’s undertaken to fill a gap in knowledge, build on existing knowledge, or create new knowledge.
That’s why I’m a bit stuck when it comes to whether cultivating curiosity/searching for inspiration counts as research.
Studying Research 