Growing interest in Anthropology

As I drove into work this morning, I listened to an NPR story about the uranium mining that has been happening in the Navajo Nation, and how it has negatively effected the Nation’s people, for years now. What’s funny is that the name of the Chief/President interviewed instantly rang a bell, before I ever discovered that the report was related to the Navajo. The intro to the story was purely about uranium, in general, or perhaps I just wasn’t listening closely enough yet. Why was that name so familiar? Because I have gone through student-chosen website upon website as a regular assignment in Ellen Kintz’ ANTH 229: Film and Ethnography where his name has come up. The course schedule is divided by different cultural groups that students study by way of documentaries. The Navajo, of course, are one of these groups to be explored. It is a fascinating course (not that I have had much, if any, time to sit in on it when I’m not actually teaching in it) and one in which Ellen and I have been very successful at infusing scholarly research skills. Students are introduced to the Navajo during a time where we are simultaneously focusing on scholarly web skills – searching, evaluating, citing, and annotating. On the first or second day of class, I come in to provide a 75-minute session on web skills that move beyond the typical use of simple Google. After lots of hands-on time in class, students are given periodic assignments (as stated in the course syllabus) to produce short annotated bibliographies (3 sources) on the cultural group being studied, in the scholarly research format that we are practicing (in addition to the web, I teach students scholarly skills for finding books, journal articles, and sometimes multimedia platforms). The goal of these assignments is to have students practice and retain these lifelong search skills while learning more about the culture, beyond what can be taught with limited time in the classroom. The formula and balance of content to skills works extremely well! In a sense, students are learning the course content by using advanced research techniques as the vehicle. As I recently titled a faculty workshop at the University of Buffalo, “Broccoli, Headhunting and the Mayan Universe: Is There a Connection?” I make the analogy of sliding scholarly research skills into the course curriculum and learning goals to make “library stuff” seem more palatable much like parents hide broccoli and other greens under gooey, melty cheese or into sweets like brownies so that kids will eat the vegetables that we know are so good for them yet do not have the appeal of . . . let’s say . . . a hot fudge sundae.

Anyway, back to the Navajo stuff . . . In the past, I have compiled students’ web “picks” onto a website, but more recently, Ellen and I have developed a wiki where students can progressively post their chosen research sources and I can go in and make comments and suggestions on their annotated bibliographies (not done so well in Fall 2007 due to complete work overload, but a new wiki will begin when ANTH 229 is offered in Fall 2008). An additional benefit to the students’ wiki work is that they continue to learn, from each other in this case, as they tend to catch glimpses of what their classmates have written, with the annotated bibliographies but more so with the class readings and online discussion.

In brief and returning to the NPR story from this morning (boy, I do like to go on tangents!), I think it is amazing how much of the Anthropology taught by Dr. Ellen Kintz I’ve been able to absorb, merely by working with her and her students. I barely ever attend class sessions if I’m not teaching scholarly skills to the students (no time to do so. I wish there was more time for this.). So, all of my education in Anthropology has been gleaned from what work the students provide to me that I then assess and comment upon. Ellen and I have talked about plans for my graduate work in ANTH. I would LOVE to get a Master’s in Anthropology. It’s so funny how this discipline never came onto my radar screen in my undergraduate days (despite my studies in the French language, culture, linguistics, sociology, and international relations, all of which surround Cultural Anthropology). I do need to get serious about putting in an application for a Master’s program at Empire State College. Must look into this today since I know the most recent deadline is coming up.

 

Results of outreach (better late than never)

I received a pretty good response to my e-mail to the Social Science Department Chairs. Unfortunately, I communicated too late in the semester and was only able to sit in on one dept. meeting – Anthropology – but others responded nontheless.

In the ANTH meeting, professors seemed interested in the idea of teaching students to find required article readings (rather than spoonfeeding them) which would help professors avoid having to manage extranneous files in MyCourses. The new Department Chair, RoseMarie Chierici, later e-mailed me with hopes of getting her fall courses set up before she left for the summer, but unfortunately timing between her schedule and my trip to LOEX and later vacation to Florida didn’t work out. We will get together when she returns from her fieldwork. Barb Welker and Paul Pacheco, other professors at the meeting, also seemed interested and I know that Barb and I will be working together in the fall. I have worked extensively with Kristi Krumrine, and will be working even more closely with her during the summer camp, and I know she’ll be on board with this new method of getting required readings into the hands of her students. The demonstration of SCOPUS also peeked professors’ interest even if their own personal research focuses may not be met (i.e., lots more journal articles than books in SCOPUS). Barb left the meeting wanting to jump into SCOPUS and see what was available on her research topics. Furthermore, Ellen and I discussed an activity that would help familiarize her students this semester ( Spring 2008 ) with SCOPUS. The worksheet to be completed by students and looked over and signed by a librarian ended up counting 50% of ANTH 282 students’ final exam grade. Since I was away on vacation when students ultimately finished the worksheet and had it verified by a Reference Librarian, I’m not sure how the process went over.

For those departments who had already met for the last time of the semester before my e-mail, I heard back from Sociology, Foreign Languages, and Psychology. Each Dept. Chair said that they would pass on my e-mail to their faculty and hopefully as the fall semester gets closer, I can talk to interested professors one-on-one. I didn’t hear from Geography or Political Science, but will follow-up with them, as a whole or on an individual basis, as the fall semester approaches.

 

Trying to keep up . . .

Oh, it is late, but I feel that if I don’t write something down, I will fall into the abyss of laziness, making excuses for never having the time to write. My most current thoughts are of the Brazilian Bash that was held in honor of Dr. Kintz, Department Chair of Anthropology, and devoted professor, fundraiser, caregiver, and friend to many for the past 29 years! 29 years! I’m only about a third of the way there. The idea of the Bash was devised through a collaborative brainstorming session before the beginning of the spring semester. After witnessing ANTH 235 students reading their original poems on the Maya view of the universe, Ellen and I knew we had to create another activity for this semester’s students that could be just as fun and rewarding. Sometimes, the best laid plans go unfinished, however. The initial thought was to have students separate into groups throughout the semester and create party planning committees. One would focus on Brazilian food. Another on Brazilian music. And others on decorations, costumes, dancing, etc. The research would be done in small chunks month by month and students would be responsible for coordinating vendors, pricing, schedules, etc. Not only would a Brazilian-themed retirement party be constructed for Ellen’s last few weeks as an official full-time professor, her students would immerse themselves in Brazilian life and culture. Unfortunately, since I miss so many of the ANTH class sessions (a librarian can only be in so many places at one time), I wasn’t able to stay abreast of the progress or push Ellen and the students had I known they were falling behind. It was in my “books” session with the students, while Ellen was away on business, that I encouraged party-specific research. But after that, the planning went nowhere. I know that Ellen is just as swamped with work as I am, if not more so, so I certainly don’t fault her. The students have learned enormous amounts of information on Brazil as it is, and my guess is that they were already bogged down with reading assignments, wiki posts, powerpoint presentation development, etc. Ellen asks a lot of her students but they always rise to the challenge and come out a better student – a better person – for it.

Despite a hectic week of throwing the party together, I think it went fabulously. Ellen must have worked her butt off to create six different powerpoints, each with its own focus on issues affecting Brazil. She read numerous quotes from Brazilian authors, sharing with her audience a glimpse of the good and bad of the largest country within South America. Cake and punch were served and the coup de gras was the amazing Buddhahood. What a terrific group of guys, and so talented. They whole-heartedly entertained Ellen’s family, friends, co-workers and students with their drums, horns and dancing. I am so pleased that I was able to book them with such late notice and without too much to offer in the way of financial gain. I do hope that our little business venture (in the way of Geneseo connections) will lead to even further librarian-faculty-student collaboration on campus. Already, a COMN professor has suggested a possible student project that could benefit her students as well as The Buddhahood. Isn’t networking a wonderful thing?

 

A few goals for this blog

• I have imported an RSS feed from Scopus into this blog which will update me on all new publications pertaining to Librarian-Faculty Collaboration. When I can find the time, hopefully this summer, I will go through the articles – most recent first and work my way backward – writing up key points on each. This will be a good system for me to keep up with literature in the field. At current time, and for quite some time, there hasn’t been a moment for this kind of professional activity!
• I will document my comings and goings with professors/teachers in my ultimate goal of formulating successful relationships and partnerships, inside and outside of the classroom. The dream is to have certain academic departments working closely with the instruction librarians with a progressive, developmental approach. As students move through their major, we should have a plan in place for when library instruction takes place (in what year and in which courses) and what will be covered in each of those sessions – starting small and simple and ending with a pretty sophisticated and comprehensive approach to research and critical thinking.
• I would like to make this blog a practical place for colleagues (librarians and faculty) to gain new ideas for activities and partnerships. Of course, I cannot offer all of this information on my own, so feedback and brainstorming among those looking at my blog is greatly appreciated. At SUNY Geneseo, there have been a number of successful collaborative models happening, so there is by no means, one right way to form a successful teaching partnership.
• It would be great to get some discussion going about challenges and triumphs, from the side of the librarian and the professor . . . and even students if they were to look at this blog.
• It is possible that I vocalize my continuous “soul searching” as I consider the pros and cons of remaining in a traditional teaching role vs moving into a more managerial position. At current, I am still very much wedded to creating new lesson plans and working closely with students and faculty. Can you take the girl out of the classroom, but not the classroom out of the girl? Right now, I think not.
• Finally, as you may have already read, I have become heavily involved in a wonderful summer program with middle school students and the reasons for my inclusion in this new project stem from my previous work in the college classroom with a Sociology professor. This opportunity has me branching out and forging friendships and professional working relationships that I might not otherwise have had. Based on the CSI (now DIG) curriculum, I am developing new lesson plans and activities geared at the middle school level and this has allowed me to try similar approaches, although more advanced, in the college classroom. My use of different technologies in the classroom has certainly increased. I now find myself teaching other faculty how to implement these different tools into their teaching repertoire. Very cool!

 

Librarian-Faculty Collaboration using an LMS

I spent a beautiful spring day at a one-day workshop in Brockport, NY today. The focus: how libraries and librarians integrate themselves into campus culture using a LMS. Many good sessions although after spending three days at the Computers in Libraries (CIL) conference, today’s workshops just flew by. I could have actually sat through a few more presentations. But a little at a time is a good thing. I was happy that the venue was so close to home. The keynote speakers came from Penn State and I was immediately reminded of speakers from CIL, also from Penn State, and they presented on similar topics. The modules/tutorials/library course guides (however you want to call it) sound fantastic. And Penn State uses ANGEL, which is great since Geneseo is on the same system. For librarians not familiar with and/or adept at HTML, the PA librarians have figured out a way to get the necessary resources into the professors’ and students’ hands in the online environment. What sounded like the perfect system became very confusing as it was never explained, until later, that the templates Penn State uses have been customized in-house. Luckily, they are very willing to share the templates and have suggested this to ANGEL, but were rebuffed since “no one else was expressing a need for such resources.” If other librarians and IT depts were aware of these capabilities, there would be many of us clamoring to avoid reinventing the wheel. I will definitely have to contact the higher-ups to make my recommendation.

Other interesting sessions included the use and/or development of tutorials, using Captivate, Camtasia, and other software programs. This gives me the idea of creating an interactive tutorial/scavenger hunt for the DIG students this summer. Not only can I make the hunt come alive and make it interesting and fun for our middle school students, I can be teaching them basic research skills in the process – something that during the two week camp, I may not have time to do. I may need to enlist the help from a few librarians to create the tutorial that I envision. Student assistants may be out of the question at this point since they are so swamped with final projects and exams.

The last light bulb that popped up over my head today pertains to the situation of E-reserves. With the implementation of ANGEL, the library’s e-res system as we know it will fade away at the end of this semester. Currently, the LOR (learning object repository) for course reserves looks like a mess, and without library intervention, I’m not so sure that professors will be as diligent about cleaning out their reserves list at the end of each semester. I have already run into the problem of outdated material in an ANTH course I worked with this semester. The only syllabi I could find within the ANTH course, using ANGEL, were 2-3 years old. And the list of resources within the list were unweilding. So, my thought . . . I will see what dept meetings I can visit before the end of the semester and suggest to faculty that rather than hassle with adding articles and books to their course reserve list (time consuming to find the sources, create the PDFs, link them and then figure out whether the documentation falls within copyright parameters), I can check to see if the library has access to the materials and, if so, recommend a brief session and/or online tutorial (probably the better idea, which should be an attractive choice to busy professors worried about time constraints for delivering their course content) demonstrating to students how to access these chosen resources. Once they have the skill, it will be practiced many times over throughout the semester, cementing this process into their minds. With any luck, students in these courses will no longer come to the reference desk asking questions about how to know if the library owns such and such journal/article/book. Because course readings will be part of a student’s final grade for the semester, it will be to their benefit to perfect the skill of knowing how to access particular, pre-designated materials. Without accessing the required source, they cannot do the reading, which in turn prevents them from coming to class prepared to discuss their homework reading assignment. This may later affect their performance on course exams. I have already been utilizing such a strategy in Ellen’s courses (ANTH) and I haven’t heard of any problems from the students. As the saying goes, “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.”

The additional benefits of meeting with academic departments before the semester is up is to remind the professors of new and existing resources in the library that they may want to consider and experiment with over the summer. Scopus seemed to be hugely popular with the science faculty, but they were the only ones to attend the demonstration earlier this week. Scopus is a great tool for the Social Sciences as well. The alterior motive, of course, is to remind the departments with whom I work that I am at their service, during the summer and certainly in the fall semester.