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PARTNERING IN THE CLASSROOM
Although a strong advocate for information fluency principles, Brian Winterman makes it clear he’s not a salesman with a product to pitch.
“You can’t take standards and put them in your suitcase like a door-to-door salesman,” Winterman says. “It’s not going to make as much sense that way.”
Part of why it doesn’t make sense, Winterman says, is because information fluency is a concept that works best when fully integrated in the classroom. Its goals—to ensure students have a framework for understanding, finding, evaluating, and using information—are most meaningful when advanced by the teaching of the university.
So Winterman has taken a different approach. “I started listening a lot more to faculty, asking them questions and getting involved in the scholarship of teaching and learning,” Winterman says. “That told me a lot about what their ideas about education were, what their goals were.”
He knows that librarians and faculty share the goal of encouraging students to think critically and evaluate information wisely. In that way, it’s not a matter of selling, it’s a matter of partnering.
“Well, maybe I can help you,” Winterman recalls saying to faculty. “I might be able to help your students write better papers by showing them how to find information, or to cite properly.”And, after identifying real-world benefits, Winterman says, “things kind of took off from there.”
Winterman and others have long taught instructional sessions for L113, an introductory lab course, in which undergraduates learn to use journal literature indexes and to navigate the Libraries Web site to find appropriate articles. In fact, instruction programs in the Life Sciences Library today reach about 1,800 students, up from 1,000 students a couple of years ago.
Now, however, Winterman also co-teaches a one-credit course to teach the information-based skills undergraduates require in the life sciences. He’s proud of its success in teaching information literacy standards within the context of the sciences.
The course encourages students to think about information, so they write science-related proposals. “They identify and develop a topic,” Winterman says, “then they learn about the world of information, the structure of it, what you use journal literature for, what you use review articles for, what kind of information you might find in different types of resources.”
They present articles to each other and criticize them as a way to sharpen their critical-thinking skills. Winterman models the exercise on a graduate class commonly called “paper bashing.”“That’s what they do,” he says. “They bash papers. They argue about them. It’s all part of evaluating information.”
Students have adapted class projects, reformatted them, and received research money from grant-funding agencies. “There’s a real practical value,” Winterman says. “I get a lot of good feedback from the students and faculty.”
Winterman knows librarians can be helpful in advancing the information fluency standards they believe are so important. But he knows that faculty, instructors, and librarians share the same goals to ensure students learn the information skills they need to be successful in their academic studies and beyond. “Librarians don’t own information fluency,” Winterman says. “It belongs to everyone.”
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