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| A group of 20 colleagues came together to explore strategies for teaching our current students to embrace the methods and challenges of scholarly research. Amanda Folk (Director of the Library), in collaboration with Regina Martin (Director of the Writing Program), led us in a discussion of the Framework for Literacy for Higher Education. We began with some brainstorming about the steps in the research process that tend to cause “bottlenecking” for our students. Our list included Google Inertia (coined by Regina–the reluctance to look beyond Google or AI as a search tool), not wanting to invest time in a slow and complicated research process, and a lack of necessary tools to evaluate sources effectively.
A key underlying issue is often students’ unfamiliarity with foundational ideas (threshold concepts) in our disciplines, which leave them unaware of the variety of ways of thinking and knowing that scholars value in different fields. During the course of the session, we explored ways that the Framework for Literacy can help us to bridge this “novice-expert” gap with our students and help them to understand and appreciate the value of scholarly research methods. The core concepts of the framework helped us recognize the ways in which deep research skills are cultivated by understanding ideas such as “scholarship as a conversation” or how authority is constructed in our sources. Not surprisingly, each small group took this discussion in a different direction, and we all walked away with useful ideas to help us strategize about more effective ways to communicate with our students about disciplinary expectations and build their research skills. |