Teaching the contextual nature of research: lessons learned

March 24, 2022March 22, 2022 ahosierLeave a comment

Last week, I reflected on some of the successes I experienced while teaching my first information literacy course focused on the contextual nature of research. In this course, I based units on different types of research (academic/scholarly, personal, professional, creative, scientific) and asked students to produce both examples of academic/scholarly work and another type of research of their choice. Overall, the course really did go well but there were definitely some difficulties too, both expected and not.

First, I was surprised and pleased that the students in this class had an easier time grasping what creative research is than students in past courses where I’ve brought up this idea. In the past, when I talk to students about creative research, they express confusion. They want to know: isn’t all research creative? And when I tell them that, yes, all types of research can be creative but not all research is creative research, it doesn’t always quite sink in. To be fair, the course is short and back then I wasn’t spending quite as much time explaining the different types of research to students—only telling them that there were, in fact, different types.

The students in this course really seemed to get creative research and for their second project a few of them even submitted examples of creative research products (including drawings they’d made, photos they’d taken, and poems they’d written) with some great reflections on the role research played in these projects. I was very happy!

But there was still one type of research that students didn’t seem to get: professional research. This surprised me. A lot.

Teaching the contextual nature of research: What went well

March 17, 2022March 17, 2022 ahosierLeave a comment

Image by Ralf Kunze from Pixabay

So this semester, I got my first opportunity to really put my money where my mouth is with all this talk about the importance of teaching research as a context-based activity with a new (to me) course where I planned units around the different types of research I’ve written about elsewhere: academic, creative, personal, professional, scholarly, and scientific. These are ideas I’ve incorporated into my teaching in different ways before but this was my first time teaching a full course that was really focused on approaching information literacy through this lens. I was a bit nervous about how it would work out, especially since I just published a book where I talk about how great my teaching ideas are without having been able to use a lot of them myself.

So how did it go?

Mostly, it went surprisingly great. For the most part students really seemed to respond to and enjoy learning about the different research contexts that they have participated in or will participate in over the course of their lives and where college-level academic research fits into all of that. That said, there were also some definite challenges, both expected and not.

For this post, I’ll be focusing on what went well. Next time, I’ll share some of the lessons learned and reflect on some changes I might want to make before teaching the course again in the fall.

Isn’t all research creative?

March 10, 2022March 8, 2022 ahosierLeave a comment

Image by Joshua Woroniecki from Pixabay

I’ve spent a couple of semesters now teaching students about different research contexts, including academic, scholarly, creative, personal, professional and scientific. For the most part, they do really well with understanding the idea that research works differently in different situations and what some of the differences between each context might be. They seem to especially like learning about personal research because they like hearing that all of the Googling they’ve been doing all their life to fulfill their personality counts as research, at least by the standards of our particular course.

There’s one type of research they have more difficulty with than others, though, and that’s creative research.

On productive(?) procrastination

March 3, 2022February 22, 2022 ahosierLeave a comment

So about a year ago, I finished a six month sabbatical in which the main research project I worked on was a literature review on creative writing pedagogy (as well as related topics such as the history of creative writing as an academic subject). This project was meant to strengthen my foundation of knowledge on the topic so that I could write an article exploring why creative research is not a standard part of creative writing instruction. I wanted to know enough so that I could publish my work in a journal outside my own field without looking like a complete idiot.

Admittedly, I didn’t get as much done with this project during my sabbatical as I was perhaps hoping for when I first conceived it. Mostly this was because when I applied for my sabbatical in fall 2019, I wasn’t expecting that by the time it actually started in fall 2020, the world would be in the middle of a global pandemic. But also I ended up working on a book project that I hadn’t entirely planned for, either.

Still, by the time my sabbatical was done I’d read about 11 books and 20+ articles on the topic. Based on what I’d read, I managed to complete a draft of my intended article by the end of spring 2021. I knew that what I had needed a lot of work but I thought I was in good shape to submit the thing by fall 2021.

Now fall 2021 has come and gone and spring 2022 is under way. My article continues to go unsubmitted.

It’s not that I’m not working on it. There was a short period of time where I did have to put it in a drawer for a little while to focus on other, more urgent things. But I’ve been working on it steadily for about three months now and, if anything, I feel further from being ready to submit than I was last spring.

What I’m reading: February 2022

February 24, 2022February 22, 2022 ahosierLeave a comment

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 contains spoilers for Assassin’s Creed Unity, Cheer (Netflix series), Spider-Man: No Way Home, and the Spider-Man PS4 game.

My approach to creative research for fiction writing

February 17, 2022March 3, 2022 ahosier1 Comment

Image by Bishwas Bajracharya from Pixabay

In the few years I’ve spent investigating the role of research in creative writing, I’ve started thinking a lot about the role research plays in my own creative work, and how that’s changed as a result of my scholarly work.

I write fiction for fun, which I know is a statement that is likely to make a lot of professional writers grind their teeth at least a little. In saying that writing is a form of play for me, I’m not trying to trivialize or diminish what professional writers do or how much work it is. But in this life there are people who knit without the goal of one day becoming a fashion designer. There are people who run without the goal of one day becoming an Olympic athlete. And there are people who write without the goal of one day becoming a bestselling author. Or even getting published.

Because fiction writing is a form of play for me, I don’t focus that much on the quality of what I’m writing. Questions of authenticity and accuracy are pretty much moot. Which means research is pretty moot too. So except for a quick Google search here or there, I have always tended to paper over gaps in my knowledge with imagination or, frankly, BS. What does it matter? No one’s ever going to see any of it.

But in studying creative research, I thought it might be interesting to start practicing some of what I was trying to preach. Or at least attempt to explore the role of research in my own work so that when I talk to authors about their creative research, I have some experience of my own to work from.

So I recently finished a novel-length story that I’ve been working on for roughly a year and a half. I have a drawer full of stories like this—finished drafts of works that I have little or no intention of returning to. This time, rather than moving on to the next idea or the next project, I felt compelled to go back and actually try to revise what I had done. If nothing else, I wanted to spend more time with these characters and, after spending a lot of time reading about revision, I wanted to see what the process was actually like.

Research is a lifetime activity

February 10, 2022February 7, 2022 ahosierLeave a comment

Image by David Mark from Pixabay

In designing the information literacy course I’m teaching this semester, I made the decision to end the course with a list of takeaways: ideas I wanted students to carry with them after the course was over. The last activity of the course is for students to add their own takeaways to this list, to tell me what made the most impact on them and what they expect to do with what they’ve learned in the future. The course just started, so I haven’t gotten a chance to see what students’ responses to this might be just yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with and what it might tell me about how successful the course was overall.

Among the takeaways I listed for them, one went in a direction that I wasn’t entirely expecting. The takeaway is basically that research is a lifetime activity.

In information literacy circles (and library circles in general) there’s a lot of talk about lifelong learning. So including a takeaway that tells students that research doesn’t stop when they graduate—that it’s something they will be doing in one form or another in various contexts throughout their lives—isn’t particularly surprising or new.

Also not particularly surprising is the fact that a lot of our talk about lifelong learning is forward-looking. By doing this, we’re positioning our instruction as “the start” of something: the start of what students know about research. What we’ve given them is a foundation on which to build future knowledge.

In writing this takeaway for my course, what was unexpected for me was how much time I spent talking not about the future, but the past.

A(nother) conundrum for teaching research context

February 3, 2022February 1, 2022 ahosierLeave a comment

Image by Daniel Roberts from Pixabay

This semester I’m using the opportunity of teaching a new (to me) course to teach information literacy through the lens of research context. This is something I’ve been doing to some extent for a while now but now research context is a much bigger focus of the course than it used to be.

Because of that, I’ve now introduced a second project to the course. The first project is the usual annotated bibliography, tweaked slightly from past iterations. This time, students complete the annotated bibliography in order to show that they understand the conventions of academic and scholarly research and, along with the annotated bibliography, they submit a reflection explaining how their research-related choices fit those conventions. Not too different from what I’ve been doing the last few semesters, but different enough that I’m curious to see how it goes.

The second, newer project comes at the end of the course. For this project, students will be creating a research product representative of one of the non-academic, non-scholarly contexts we’ll discuss in the course (personal, professional, or creative). This can be anything: a work-related PowerPoint, a social media post, a painting. As long as research was involved in the making of the work, it counts as a research product. The student then has to write a reflection explaining the research that went into the work and how that research is representative of their chosen research genre.

In theory, I like this project a lot. I’ll be very curious to see what research products students submit and what they say about the research that went into those works. I’ll also be curious what stumbling blocks they run into when it comes to completing the project since it requires them to submit non-academic work for an academic course.

Which brings up an interesting question: in an academic environment, is there such a thing as non-academic work? Can there be?

What I’m reading: January 2022

January 27, 2022January 25, 2022 ahosierLeave a comment

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).

What I learned writing my first book

January 20, 2022January 18, 2022 ahosier1 Comment

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.

Studying Research

Research is not a basic skill

Author: ahosier