Flipping the One-Shot Library Workshop: Collaborations between Librarians and Writing Program Faculty

At UC San Diego, instruction librarians and the Muir College Writing Program (MCWP) director collaborated to redesign the one-shot library workshops provided to the college’s first-year students enrolled in a research class. Following their discussion about student knowledge gaps about conducting research, the library instruction coordinator suggested flipping the workshop so that, prior to coming to the library, students would complete an interactive online tutorial. The new flipped library workshops now consist of two sequential parts—an online interactive tutorial and an in-person workshop. Librarians created an online tutorial on database searching, made up of multimedia and active learning experiences for students to complete before the library workshop. After learning online about the research process, database search strategies, and full-text access, students find and annotate three scholarly articles. They then bring their source(s) to the in-person library workshop. During the workshop, librarians guide students through a topic mapping exercise, an open-ended research question exercise, and an introduction to the BEAM method to describe how their chosen source addressed their research question. Employing the flipped model provides benefits to both sides of this partnership. Librarians can see how well students implement the skills taught in the tutorial, while helping students begin to use their sources for the next phase of their research and writing process. This, in turn, alleviates part the instructors’ workload and fills an unmet need for the writing program. Students have responded positively to the two-pronged approach and are better prepared to succeed in their writing classes

Critical Inquiry via Annotated Bibliographies: Transitioning to University-Level Research

Content: After a brief introduction of our assignment, the first presenter will take the participants through our newly-revised library tutorial, discussing ways that it is designed to help students take advantage of the university resources. Then the second presenter will model a revision workshop, with audience participation, designed to help students move deeper in their engagement with their sources. Finally, we will share the assignment rubric and the results of our accreditation assessment. Currency: In our university’s most recent accreditation review, one of the program objectives we evaluated was student demonstration of “using writing as a means of critical inquiry.” Instructors in our program wanted to know how they could better help the students with this criteria since did not seem as straight forward as other criteria. This panel is developed out of that ongoing discussion and we believe that other writing educators would be interested in participating in it. Purpose: We envision our panel session as a useful conversation among high school teachers, two-year college faculty, and four-year college faculty about how a pedagogical workhorse like the annotated bibliography assignment can be revised and refreshed to better help students synthesize the sources they find to make meaning. Support: For this project we draw on both library studies and principles of assessment outlined by the National Conference on College Composition and Communication. Specifically we use Jean Donham and Mariah Steele, “Instructional Interventions Across the Inquiry Process,” College and Undergraduate Libraries, vol. 14, no. 4, 2007, pp. 3-18, and Anne Marie Gruber, Mary Anne Knefel, and Paul Waelchi, “Modeling Scholarly Inquiry: One Article at a Time” College and Undergraduate Libraries, vol. 15, no. 1-2, 2008, pp. 99-125. We also use Kathryn E. Joyce, “Meeting Our Standards for Educational Justice: Doing Our Best with the Evidence,” Theory and Research in Education, vol. 16, no. 1, 2018, pp. 3-22

A Community of Their Own: Developing an Asynchronous Canvas Learning Environment

Recently propelled into the new reality of online teaching and learning, writing program directors realized that establishing a sense of community in classes that emphasized peer workshops required a diferent approach for asynchronous students. In response, they provided parallel community-building Learning Management System (LMS) sites that generated student community and alleviated instructor workload. Employing this model of parallel LMS sites for asynchronous students provides them with a community of their own. Although asynchronous students enroll in diferent classes, conference with their own instructors, and receive grades from their instructors, they also fnd community through consistent engagement on a site of their own. In this session, attendees will consider how to use this model to enhance asynchronous students’ sense of community