TLA--my next favorite--Shaping the Confident Freshman by Mary W. George

This presentation was on Friday, and it was definitely worth two hours of your time. Mary W. George is a librarian at Princeton University. She has written a book about the college library research experience, entitled The Elements of Library Research. You may purchase it at Amazon.com here. The first part of the presentation consisted of a testimonial from a graduating Senior in college. She told about how her high school and college research experiences differed, and shared some things she thought might help students be more prepared for their much more rigorous assignments in college. Then Ms. George shared some background about the college students she has worked with and their assignments at Princeton and how the library instruction program is integrated into required research seminars during the Freshman, Junior and Senior years. All in all, very interesting. Ms. George went on to talk about what she has noticed are the skills lacking in students and gave some ideas for how we can help make changes that will help students be more successful in their post secondary studies.

Here is the nutshell version:

• Students are doing way too many "report" type assignments, and don't understand how to do real research where they ask open ended questions.


• Students are used to looking up facts to support a predetermined agenda, they are not comfortable with going where the evidence leads them.


• Students, and sometimes faculty, don't realize that real research is going to take time. You must kiss a lot of frogs before you find some good sources. (Evaluation!) There is a lot of reading involved. This thought was first expressed by the college senior. She said she wasn't really prepared by the 5 source "term paper" assigned at her high school. In college, she was needing to work with as many as 20 or 30 sources, and the change was a shock. Also, the amount of time she had to spend narrowing her search and reading her results to determine if she could use them was a shocker.

This leads me to something that some of you may not agree with. While working on a college preparation seminar, I came across this. As Doug says, read it, I'll wait...

One of the main ideas from this piece is something that librarians may not want to hear, but I think that it may be crucial. Teachers are driving information literacy instruction, not us. They are the ones who control what students learn, what projects students do, if the projects are good ones or not, etc. Some of these thoughts were echoed by Ms. George as well. Professors are making the assignments, not us. Now, that is not to say that we cannot make ourselves available and do whatever we can to help make the assignments worthwhile, and also help the students, but the bottom line is that Information Literacy happens in class, not in some library orientation session held once a year. A lot of teachers, especially in Texas, where TEKS for English comprise much of the information literacy curriculum, are loathe to give up even one ounce of that control. So what are we going to do? Perhaps our focus needs to shift. The suggestion in the above article says that libraries may be better served by not competing with classroom activity. We will be better off finding our own gig. What he says is "re-casting academic librarianship as part of a formal college-wide effort to support and encourage learning skills such as writing." We could apply that idea to k-12 education as well. Re-cast ourselves as part of a scool-wide effort to support learning. This may take a different shape at different schools. What you do at your school may be radically different than another librarian. Each school has its own culture, and its own mission and goals. There is a lot of talk out there about saving libraries by making ourselves "indispenable." I think that may be just so much spitting in the wind. Take up the mission of helping people at your institution learn, however that looks to you. It may not save your individual job, but it may help change the way libraries are perceived over the long term, and so benefit all of us, librarians and students and teachers and people. Because people need libraries and librarians, they just may not realize it. We have to make them realize it.

One more thought. I have come to the realization that for me, the best way to accomplish helping with information literacy, and making sure my students are prepared for college and life beyond high school is to work on the staff. If I show the staff what databases are and what information is available there, and send them updates--short, of course, on websites they may want to use in class, new resources in the library, updates to MLA format, etc., then I can influence instruction. I am not going to do that by waiting for them to come to the library. It is not true that if you build it they will come. Sometimes, you may have to go out and draft them.