Please enjoy this brief interview with adjunct Professor Jan Bone regarding her experiences with library instruction sessions in support of her English 102 class.
Q: Professor Bone, how long have you had students taking English 102 come by the library for library instruction classes?
A: I’ve been teaching English 102 (Argument/Analysis/Research) since the 1990s. I can’t imagine not incorporating library instruction classes into their coursework for this class. The librarians give these students, many of whom are second-semester freshmen, excellent groundwork for research—not just in the traditional databases, but also in where to look for resources that the average student might not think about. Everyone in my 102 classes comes to the library for these sessions.
Q: Please comment on the ways in which the library instruction sessions that your English classes have participated in have helped your students use better quality articles in order produce more scholarly research papers…
A: If we assume (as I do) that timely, appropriate, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal articles not only raise the quality of the research papers, but also acquaint the writers with content-specific knowledge, then the library instruction sessions get a 4.0 on my grading scale.
Much of the reason for that is the close cooperation we, as a class and writing community, build with the library and librarians. Usually two months before a semester starts, I not only schedule library instruction, but also discuss with the librarians the text students will use, as well as the major themes and assignments.
Before the semester crunch starts, then, the librarians are familiar with what my students in each of the two sections will be doing. I add the librarians to our Blackboard site, so that before students come in for instruction, the librarians can log on and see the topics the students have picked for their papers…student by student.
Joe Davis and Laura McLoughlin, Schaumburg research librarians, use that list to plan essentially targeted, customized library instruction. They prepare in advance an outline of what the sessions will cover, emphasizing the appropriate academic databases best for locating the information students can best use for their specific topics. At the sessions, Joe or Laura show students how to get into those databases, how to use them, how to get keywords, and how to do Boolean searches to pinpoint pertinent information. They also lead the class in hands-on demos that give students practice in e-mailing the selected articles to their student accounts along with the appropriate citation style for that discipline—usually MLA or APA, depending on the paper’s topic.
Q: Recently, with your first English 102 project, the class wrote papers on the topic of “How do I plan to keep my job from being outsourced?” by gleaning ideas from the book The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. What changes did you make in teaching the class this past Spring?
A: My Spring ’09 English 102 classes used, as their main text, Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman’s 2008 book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Revitalize America. Student partners chose research topics for spinoffs, including wind, solar, biodiesel, auto industry, India, China and Southeast Asia, retrofitting buildings, and paying for energy efficiency.
Joe and Laura had taken those topics, and besides scholarly journals, showed students how to use resources like Mediamark Reporter, GreenFile, and Encyclopedia of Associations to locate statistics and industry experts to contact.
On February 18, the class hosted a speakerphone interview with Washington D.C.-based energy expert, Ben Goldstein, of the Center for American Progress. The CAP is a policy think-tank that has been recommending energy-efficiency initiatives to President Obama. Students in both sections wrote interview questions and forwarded them to Ben, who had given students two significant articles he’d published to read before the interview. Ben had been impressed by the excellence of the students’ questions. Our thanks go to the Dean of the Schaumburg Campus, Antonia Potenza, for letting us use the Tucker Board Room for the interview, providing the speakerphone, and covering the phone bill!
Thank you, Jan. For further information regarding Jan’s English 102 classes see the March 20, 2006 Chicago Daily Herald article, Preparing for the future: Teacher adapts style to suit needs - of her students by Eric Peterson.
