I have been thinking about instruction a lot recently. I’m the kind of nerd who actively thinks about teaching when she’s not doing it. This relates directly to why I don’t have a life, but that’s kind of outside the box. Anyway, I was thinking about the nursing students in particular over the summer because I was fretting about taking over that collection this year. I’m not really sure what kind of relationship the past librarians who collected for nursing had to the department, but I tend to think of myself as “the nursing librarian” much more than “the nursing selector”. As of this year that’s pretty much how I introduce myself to them when I teach their classes in the library.
They are an interesting bunch in that they have the chance to come and see us every term, but not all of them do. We book standing classes for them the first three days of the first week of every term. They aren’t required to attend a class and thus we have that self-selection thing going on. The students we see are like info literacy and research sponges. They eagerly absorb anything I put out there and have awesome questions—but we only have 50 minutes to an hour.
This got me thinking that those particular students would probably come back if I created a space and invited them. They are intensely busy, it’s true, but I think they see the long-term savings in time. I also think they might advertise to their peers who, understandably, hadn’t had time to figure out why they needed us by the first or second day of the term.
Recently I read an email on the information literacy instruction list about a librarian offering small group instruction sessions. Basically if 5 or more students commit to the session the librarian will teach it. This particular librarian (at Spokane CC, if I recall) works with a lot of nursing students so this caught my attention. Nursing students are a great target bunch for all kinds of library services because they have such focused research needs, at specific and predictable times of the year.
I’m not surprised that the small group offerings were well received—but I’m still hesitant to start offering such a thing at our library. We recently started offering a 1 credit class and I don’t want to offer small group sessions and derail the 1 credit class. We need steadyish enrollment to keep it going, I’m sure.
I spoke to nursing faculty at the start of the term and they were into the idea of a customized LIB 101 nursing-specific 1 credit course. Ideally I’d like them to make the course mandatory for their students, but that comes later. I gave them my card and have been waiting for them to call or email, but I haven’t heard from anyone yet. Yet another reason I want to hold off on the small group offerings. I don’t want to devalue the credit course in the eyes of the nursing faculty, it really would be perfect for the students. Also we spend a lot of desk time with nursing students. Which is fine, but you know…
Our class is designed to start several weeks after the term has begun. We also don’t assign a research project, it’s up to the student to have one of their own. We start late enough in the term that they’ve already been assigned something for their writing class or biology class or perhaps some assignment that didn’t even come from faculty at our college—whatever. They bring their assignment to class and we work through the entire process over several weeks rather than 50 minutes. All of the assignments we give should further the research goals related to their assignment. So I think it could work very well with nursing because the students progress through their classes in a specified order. It’s easy to select a time when research and “library” skills will be easily integrated with their coursework. We can focus on APA specifically, because that’s what they need and use. I have also been pushing Refworks to these students pretty heavily so it would be awesome to integrate that into the class (maybe nursing can help pay for it one day, ahem).
What troubles me is that plenty of students aren’t going to take a 1 credit class, won’t have the benefit of a class with an instructor who believes in scheduling IL instruction sessions with librarians, or are otherwise not getting the benefit of our instructional services. So when I see them milling about, in need, should I make them an offer they might actually take? When you look at it this way it seems kind of goofy not to. There are limits to how much we can do on an individual basis and perhaps encourgaing students to organize their own classes is part of the solution. Students whose instructors don’t bring them in for a class with us often remark that they wish their class came to the library. Add to this the recent addition of prerequisites and we have a rapidly changing educational environment in terms of basic research proficiency. I remember when I worked at MHCC and they were implementing prerequisites, the counter-argument was always “students have the right to fail!” Egad.
Perhaps in a few years prerequisites really will work as intended and students won’t find themselves adrift in research-heavy classes for which they are totally unprepared. I’m skeptical, as I am about most things, so we’ll just have to see. In the interim I still have to work out how best to help all of the students. I’m generally fairly day-by-day with this but it seems some long-range planning may be in order.
But not tonight. There’s a two hour long Einstein special on History. Sweet.
non-sport snow boots. Kinda like puffy nylon Uggs?
Are you a Columbia or a Joe’s Sports? If you’re not sure, you might want to take some time exploring the idea. What are the experiences you have in the “real world” that cause you to reflect on the library experience? I have some other thoughts involving our campus cafeterias…more on that later. Those snowboots from Columbia are awesome, but I’m stuck on this moon boot thing, so I’m off to do more searching… Oh, these are cool.