Category: Research-as-subject

The Contextual Nature of “Un-Research”

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Image by David Mark from Pixabay

At this point, I’ve written a few things about the contextual nature of research and offered some thoughts on how to bring that idea into information literacy classrooms. I’ve also mentioned that my opportunities for changing my own teaching in the way I’m advocating for are somewhat limited at the moment.

Then I realized that some of these ideas actually have connections to something I tried in the past and wrote about in an article that was published in Communications in Information Literacy called “Teaching Information Literacy Through ‘Un-Research.’”

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Studies of Research: “I’d Say It’s Good Progress”

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Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay

I spent some time recently answering some of the questions that came up about my presentation at the ACRL 2019 Conference in Cleveland way back in…wow, April. Now that all of that is done, I want to change the focus a little to other presentations and papers that came from that conference. Specifically, ones that focus on the study of research.

I’ve mentioned before that one of the cool things about the study of research is that it’s already out there, in so many forms and in so many fields (not just library and information science!), even if that’s not what the researchers doing this work would necessarily call it. I saw a lot of examples in the ACRL Conference program and I hope the researchers whose work I plan to talk about for this series don’t mind that I’ll be applying that label to what they do, but in each case I’ll try to make it clear why I’m doing that.

So let’s take a closer look at “I’d Say It’s Good Progress: An Ecological Momentary Assessment of Student Research Habits” by Emily Crist, Sean Leahy, and Alan Carbery.

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Using the annotated bibliography as the “establishing shot”

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Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Lately I’ve been reading some scholarly literature from the writing studies field for a project I’m working on. I’m always fascinated by the parallels I see between how writing studies practitioners/scholars and information literacy practitioners/scholars talk about what they do and the challenges they face. I really think we need a space for practitioners and scholars in these two fields to talk to each other about their work.

Anyway, I found what I think could be an interesting new parallel in the article Documenting and Discovering Learning: Reimagining the Work of the Literacy Narrative by Julie Lindquist and Bump Halbritter.

This article has me thinking: what if the research we ask students to do in information literacy classes came at the beginning of the course instead of at the end? What if we used it as an “establishing shot”?

Let me explain.

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ACRL Questions: Talking to faculty about the contextual nature of research

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Image by TeroVesalainen from Pixabay

This is a new post in an ongoing series where I’m answering questions that came up during my ACRL presentation “Research is Not a Basic Skill.” Previous posts discussed student proficiency versus student confidence, models for teaching the contextual nature of research, why we’re talking in terms of “research” instead of “information literacy,” and the relationship between some of these ideas and critical information literacy.

Today I’m going to spend some time on talking to faculty about the contextual nature of research.

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Defining research

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Image by Hebi B. from Pixabay

I’ve been talking quite a bit here so far about research and I realize that I haven’t really defined my terms. On the one hand, “research” is a term that doesn’t seem to need defining. You know it when you see it. For example, when you type “research” into Pixabay, the images that come up show things that are recognizably related to the idea of research. There’s a guy staring at a bunch of notes pinned to a board. A microscope. A book with some glasses resting on it. A woman sitting at a computer while sipping from a cup of coffee. Stacks of books in a library. Another woman in a white coat in a lab. Beakers. Charts. Graphs.

Research. Obviously.

But maybe it’s not so obvious.

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Questions from ACRL: Critical information literacy and genres of research

ahosierLeave a comment

Image by TeroVesalainen from Pixabay

This is a new post in an ongoing series where I’m answering questions that came up during my ACRL presentation “Research is Not a Basic Skill.” Previous posts discussed student proficiency versus student confidence, models for teaching the contextual nature of research, and the difference between “research” and “information literacy.”

One of the harder questions I got was when someone asked me to clarify the tension I saw between critical information literacy and the idea of teaching genres of research. I stumbled a bit in the moment, so let me see if I can provide a clearer answer here.

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Research is not a basic skill (neither is writing)

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Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay

So I don’t know how noticeable it is, but the tag line I chose for this blog is “Research is not a basic skill.” This has also been the title of various presentations I’ve done related to my article “Research is an Activity and a Subject of Study.”

As tag lines go, it’s not the catchiest or the cutest but I chose it because if you come to this blog and you leave only remembering one thing, I want it to be that: that research is not a basic skill.

Here are the details on why that matters.

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Questions from ACRL: Information literacy or research?

ahosierLeave a comment

Image by TeroVesalainen from Pixabay

This is a new post in an ongoing series where I’m answering questions that came up during my ACRL presentation “Research is Not a Basic Skill.” Previous posts discussed student proficiency versus student confidence and models for teaching the contextual nature of research.

Here, I’m going to address a question about why I’d chosen the term “research” rather than “information literacy” to frame my discussion.

To answer this, let me begin with a story.

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Some thoughts on inviting guest posts

ahosierLeave a comment

Image by 742680 on Pixabay

So one of my big goals for this blog is to start a conversation around the study of research, among other things. I’m at the beginning stages of figuring out what that might look like and how to get it started and even set up a new page with some details about what I would be looking for. But I also wanted to share some vague notions here to at least get the ball rolling.

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