Excellence in Instruction
This award recognizes an individual (s) for excellence in instructing or providing instruction modules, systems, or services for library patrons. Qualities that are considered in the nominee might include:
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Strong record and demonstrated use of new teaching techniques,
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Innovation and creativity in teaching methods,
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Excellent curriculum design,
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Depth of knowledge of subject area,
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Outstanding communication skills,
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Exceptional teaching style and delivery,
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Special awareness of the difference in learning styles of users,
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Employment of learning assessment techniques,
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Utilization and application of information technology, and
Possession of sophisticated analytic, synthetic, and compositional skills.
Nadine Cohen, SLC/Reference
Two initiatives demonstrate how dedicated Nadine Cohen is to information literacy. The first is her Community Libraries Outreach & Collaboration (CLOC) working group composed of school media center, public, and academic librarians. Together this dedicated team has drafted information literacy standards for grades k-16 based on the ACRL information literacy standards. The hope is that teachers will design assignments that will expose their students to catalogs and indexes in grade school and high school. Each year the students’ familiarity with these tools and their critical thinking skills will broaden so that they will be equipped to tackle more sophisticated resources when they reach college.
Nadine is also the originator of the workshop for graduate students who are teaching assistants that has become part of GRSC 770. This class offers a teaching certificate to graduate students who wish to improve their classroom presentation skills. Rather than use the invitation to speak to these graduate students by focusing on resources which the Libraries own, Nadine, together with Caroline Barratt, elected to use a discussion about possible assignments that would encourage students to engage with resource material. The workshop focuses on how these sample assignments can be adapted for various disciplines.
The sample assignments are listed below:
Social Issues & Media Bias
Description: Working in groups, ask students to select a current social issue relevant to the course content (i.e. immigration, global warming, education reform, etc.) and find and compare two articles from either a domestic and foreign news source or from a scholarly and non-scholarly source. Examination of different types of sources opens the floor to discussions of bias and/or how information sources are written to different audiences.
Just the Facts!
Description: Give students an editorial, website or political speech to read and ask them to verify the information, using a variety of library resources. Before beginning the assignment, the class could examine the FactCheck.org website as an example of professional fact checking in the public interest. Close examination of a writer’s “facts” and how they are used or misused is an excellent exercise in rhetoric and critical thinking.
Survey Says?
Description: Using an assigned reading, ask students to brainstorm several ‘what, how or why’ research questions on a specific issue. Divide the class into groups and assign each group a question. The groups will find a specified number of sources to answer their question (a book, journal/magazine article, website, etc.) and present a summary of their findings to the class. Taken together, the work of each of the groups will provide the class with the “big picture” of the issue. Students will feel ownership of the topic while learning how to create an effective research statement to find a variety of research sources.
Career Opportunities
Description: Ask students to think of a potential company that they may wish to work for someday. Each student will be asked to compile a descriptive summary of that company/industry using information like company reports, statistics, and news/magazine articles. Pair students and have them role play employer and applicant at a job interview. Each pair will come up with three questions an employer would want to ask an applicant and the best answers to these questions that would get the applicant hired.
Bibliographic Trace
Description: Ask students to use a GALILEO database to locate and read a journal article on a subject, ideally one related to a current topic or class discussion/reading. Students will then examine 3-5 citations from that article and trace how the information was used and passed along. Students could then might summarize their findings from the 3-5 sources and discuss how information was “traced” from one researcher to another. This would be an excellent exercise in discussing academic discourse and evaluating appropriate use of information.
Evolution of an Idea
Description: Analyze the reception of a particular idea or concept (i.e. Natural Selection, Psychoanalysis, Communism, Woman’s Suffrage, etc.) over time by finding books/magazines/journals from various time periods, from the idea’s inception to the present. Students would evaluate these sources to create an annotated timeline of the discourse. This assignment is a great way to compare/contrast primary and secondary sources while showing how an idea develops and changes over time.
Website Evaluation
Description: Working in small groups, students are asked to examine and evaluate two websites relevant to a specific research topic. Students must determine whether these sites are authoritative, reliable, and current in the field. Students demonstrate their findings to the entire class.
Professional Problem Solving
Description: Working in groups, students are given a typical ‘problem’ that a professional in their field would confront, e.g., a teacher dealing with a 3rd grade math class with students of widely varying ability. The groups must find a website and/or journal article that would help them solve the problem.
Caroline Barratt and Deb Raftus, Reference
Caroline Barratt and Deb Raftus spearheaded a new program to enhance Library Instruction and to capitalize on the University's push for increasing writing in the curriculum. Taking their lead from other institutions such as the University of Washington and Georgia State University, among many others, they envisioned, developed, implemented and mentored the 1st Annual UGA Libraries Undergraduate Research Award Program.
This work directly spoke to several of the criteria listed in this award.
Although it employed usual teaching techniques used by all reference librarians, they had to market the services and collaborate with another entity on campus, CURO (the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities), to make the program part of CURO's activities.
Designing the program took individual innovation on their part and creativity in molding the program to this particular academic situation;
The design of the application process, the selection of the jurors, the communication needed to ensure that all entries were fairly judged showed excellent "curriculum" design.
They showed outstanding communication skills throughout the process -- from the initial concept, asking for funding for the awards, communication with the faculty and staff of CURO, partnering with colleagues from the Libraries who would serve as research coaches, making sure that the recipients were kept informed throughout the process, and finally, the awards ceremony itself and the follow up publicity about the recipients.
They utilized and applied information technology in building the webpage for the program (available at http://www.libs.uga.edu/researchaward/) as well as in helping the students to navigate the online rsources needed to complete their applications.
One could say that the Undergraduate Research Awards program is not the traditional instruction module this award was intended to celebrate. However, I feel that the work of Caroline and Deb has directly addressed one of the four major goals of our strategic plan:
"Goal 2: The Teaching Library: Building Partnerships The complexity of modern information technology has required librarians to expand our original role as custodians of books. We need to continue to actively seek opportunities to interact with faculty and students and collaborate with them at all stages of the learning process and with all sources and formats of information."
It is the willingness of our excellent librarians to implement these programs that will lead to a richer instructional and academic experiences for our students. Kudos and appreciation to Caroline and Deb for starting a program that seems to have already become a part of the CURO activities and, I hope, can be broadened to other partners across campus.