Rory Litwin in her April 26, 2010, blog post for Library Juice asks what the role of a librarian in an academic library should be and comes up with the idea that because academia has embraced SLOs (Student Learning Outcomes) that librarians should in effect be teachers.
I find this very funny since I just spent three years getting my MLIS after teaching English composition for over 20 years with my MA degree. What this breakthrough means to me is that I'll go from teaching to. . . teaching! The big difference, of course, is that I won't be taking stacks of student papers home to grade--maybe.
Because SLOs must be measureable, librarians have to come up with some way of proving that students have "learned" something. Teachers do this all the time by giving tests, but traditionally librarians aren't test givers. Librarians are answer givers; they don't ask students to give them answers.
At SCC the librarians give tests to students after the students attend orientations. When I began as a reference librarian / orientation leader, the standard for passing the quiz was getting no more than three questions wrong. Now, I've been told, there is no such limit. Now if a student takes the quiz, no matter how many questions he/she misses, we issue a proof of attendance sheet which may get the student extra credit or some other perk in class.
So what's the point of taking the test, I wonder. If a student can sit through an orientation, check email during the presentation or text-message friends, and still get a proof of attendance (and extra credit), what is the SLO?
Maybe librarians should rethink this teaching thing until they are clear on the concept of SLOs and their measurement.
(An aside: Given my years of experience as an instructor, have I been asked to help put together orientations or their subsequent quizzes? Of course not! We all know that adjucts aren't really...well, you can fill in the blank here.)
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I would think that anyone should be able to use the library without taking a course, test or orientation at a public university but I don't think they should all get unlimited 'answers' from librarians. Help, assistance, being pointed in the right direction, etc., yes, but doing assignments, no.
ReplyDeleteBut I think there should be one or multiple classes available on how to best use the library too. Not necessarily for credit or a full semester of classes but perhaps a series every week or every other week for a hour or two.
Of course, I was practically raised in a library so generally feel comfortable finding what I need or want, I don't work in a library and I've just spent only a few minutes thinking about this - so I'm fairly ignorant and biased :D Interesting topic though with the line drawing since libraries are almost inherently educational and people learn from them.
Even if librarians figured out SLOs and their measurement, do you think they should teach? Especially since you have experience in both?!
Since the public school librarians/English teachers don't seem to be teaching students how to use a library, then I think that the colleges must do so if students are expected to find good reference sources for their written papers. That leaves the librarians or the English instructors as teachers.
ReplyDelete"Information literacy" is a byword for library instruction these days. The responsibility for making sure students are information literate falls on librarians--or at least librarians have embraced this as their venue.
My problem with all of this is that librarians aren't taught very well to be teachers. One class in library school isn't enough to make a librarian confident and competent in the classroom.
It's such a quandary for everyone involved!
i have to agree and say (which i didn't in my original post) that i assumed those classes of which i spoke, would be part of entry level english. this would mean that if you started at a 'higher' than entry level english class, you would pass a test that included questions on how to use the library.
ReplyDeletei agree that the job for an instructor is, and should be, different than a librarian. and i expect that they are when interacting and trying to glean information :)