Week 4 - Assignment: Develop an Annotated Bibliography

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Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association

ISSN: 2475-0158 (Print) 2475-0166 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ualj21

Librarians as Teachers: Forming a Learning and Teaching Community of Practice

Jennifer Osborn

To cite this article: Jennifer Osborn (2017) Librarians as Teachers: Forming a Learning and Teaching Community of Practice, Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, 66:2, 162-169, DOI: 10.1080/24750158.2017.1328633

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2017.1328633

Published online: 24 May 2017.

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Journal of the australian library and information association, 2017 Vol. 66, no. 2, 162–169 https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2017.1328633

INFORMATION-IN-PRACTICE

Librarians as Teachers: Forming a Learning and Teaching Community of Practice

Jennifer Osborn 

english & creative Writing research librarian, university of adelaide, adelaide, australia

ABSTRACT As liaison librarians embedded in the faculties and disciplines of the University of Adelaide, Learning and Research Services staff are working to significant changes in educational philosophies and practices. In 2016, we formed a Learning and Teaching Community of Practice (CoP), designed to ground our teaching of research skills and digital literacies in current pedagogy and new teaching methodologies. Our CoP was aligned with the university's commitment to 'Small Group Discovery Experience’ teaching enhanced by the 'flipped classroom' model and new educational technologies. This article examines the benefits and opportunities created by our community of practice and considers options for future development.

Introduction

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, librarians in the higher education sector are redefining their roles in the academy. The rise of mobile educational technologies, the promotion of digital literacy, changing student expectations and new directions in learning and teaching policies and practices are combining to change the way we work in university libraries. Collaborating with our academic colleagues, librarians are becoming teachers of twenty-first century research skills. To further this collaboration and to improve our knowledge of pedagogy and related teaching skills, the Research and Branch Librarians at the University of Adelaide formed our first Learning and Teaching Community of Practice in 2016.

Communities of practice are well documented in scholarly and organisational literature as valuable models of group professional development;

a community of practice is a group of people who share a common concern, a set of problems, or interest in a topic and who come together to fulfil both individual and group goals … shar- ing best practices and creating new knowledge to advance a domain of professional practice. (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002)

An increasing number of librarians are adopting this model for workplace learning, men- toring and for inducting new professionals (Attebury, 2015; Henrich & Attebury, 2010; Reynolds, Welch, & Carroll, 2016), and communities of practice (CoP) are now well

KEYWORDS communities of practice; undergraduate research skill development; liaison librarians

© 2017 australian library & information association

CONTACT Jennifer osborn [email protected]

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established in the field of higher education. At the University of Adelaide, our library’s CoP sits with the related Learning and Teaching Communities of Practice for eLearning, Learning Analytics, Flipped Classroom, Small Group Discovery Experience (SGDE) and Student Engagement.

These communities of practice at the University of Adelaide are integral to the university’s commitment to support its academic staff in the continuing development of their disci- pline-based teaching skills. The Strategy for Learning, Teaching & Assessment 2016–2018 emphasises a ‘pedagogy … grounded in the strong union of teaching and research, with the student experience of SGDE at its heart’ (2016a). Several programmes now encour- age academics to update their skills and achieve teaching excellence; these include formal peer review of teaching, eLearning training modules, coaching in best practice for ‘flipped classrooms’, Small Group Discovery Experience or SGDE (https://www.adelaide.edu.au/ professions/pedagogical-possibilities/sgde/), and membership of the Adelaide Education Academy. Increasingly, professional staff, including librarians, eLearning advisors and tech- nology support staff are also able to benefit from these measures.

In accord with this culture of continuing education, the Library of the Future Report (2016b) advises that:

Library staff will be appropriately skilled to lead and support new University learning and teaching initiatives and directions. (Recommendation 7)

The Research Librarian Learning and Teaching Community of Practice was formed to establish the groundwork for this recommendation in our workplace unit, Learning and Research Services (LaRS). During 2016, members of our group worked together in an inten- sive professional development programme designed to build on our current faculty-based teaching roles and to enhance our pedagogy and practice in line with future developments.

Professional Development and Sessional Teaching Modules

Our 2016 programme was based on the online Sessional Teaching course offered to University of Adelaide teaching staff. The 12 modules comprise a unit in the Graduate Certificate in Higher Education and cover fundamental principles of learning, teaching, assessment and evaluation. In our CoP, we held monthly face-to-face meetings facilitated by one of the Senior Lecturers in the School of Education, Dr John Willison. By the end of the year, we had completed most of the modules, leaving the final two (Assessment for Effective Learning and Evaluation for Effective Learning) for early 2017 (http://www.adelaide.edu. au/learning/teaching/sessional/).

Each course module focuses on one specific aspect of university learning and teaching, providing scholarly readings and small-group exercises in areas such as ‘How Students Learn’, ‘Learning Environments and Curricula’, ‘Student Diversity’, ‘Lectures for Effective Learning’ and ‘Tutorials for Effective Learning’. There is a module for eLearning, which some of us undertook in conjunction with the five-week University of New South Wales Coursera MOOC ‘Learning to Teach Online’. As Dr Willison is also the co-developer of the widely used Research Skill Development Framework (based on ANZIIL information literacy standards, and now called MELT: Model of Engaged Learning and Teaching), we were also able to study this framework and apply it to our own teaching practice (Willison, 2007). At the end of the year, our Digital Literacies project officer, Judy Bailey, inducted

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our group into the principles of the Digital Capabilities Framework that the university is adopting in 2017.

We conducted an end-of-year evaluation survey of our 10 CoP participants; the major- ity (70%) agreed that ‘the CoP stimulated new ideas about my teaching practice’ and that ‘involvement in the CoP led me to change some of the ways I interact with students’. One immediate benefit was access to the common terminology and concepts used by our aca- demic colleagues; for instance, Research and Branch librarians are now equipped to write clear learning outcomes using Bloom’s taxonomy, and to use the Research Skill Development Framework in establishing rubrics and assessment tasks. The pedagogy that informs the practice of teaching research skills is now much more transparent to us.

From Bibliographic Instruction to the Flipped Classroom

As Research Librarians embedded in the faculties and disciplines, we have long supported the university’s teaching programme with our professional skills and expertise. Like many higher education institutions, the University of Adelaide established subject-specific library liaison positions in the 1980s. As library collections and resources changed from reliance on printed books, journals, bibliographies and indexes to CD-ROMs and then online databases and the Internet, the teaching of undergraduate research skills also progressed. Where we once conducted ‘bibliographic instruction’ classes based in the library, we now collaborate with academic staff in seminar rooms and lecture theatres, using the ‘flipped classroom’ methodology and SGDE teaching techniques. These changes are reinforced by the recent introduction of the Digital Capabilities Framework Project and a variety of new educational technologies.

One of the acknowledged benefits of communities of practice is that they ‘provide a shared context for people to communicate and share information, stories and personal experiences in a way that builds understanding and insight’ (Cambridge, Kaplan, & Suter, 2005, p. 1). SGDE teaching philosophy and practice was introduced at the University of Adelaide in 2012; as first-year programmes have been rolled out across all faculties, Research Librarians have been required to adapt our teaching of research skills to this new format. Our monthly face-to-face CoP meetings gave us the opportunity to regularly discuss these changes in our teaching experiences; in the 2016 evaluation survey, all members strongly agreed with the statement that ‘the CoP gave me the opportunity to share ideas with and learn from my colleagues’.

Obviously our experiences vary according to the different learning outcomes, learning and teaching activities and assessment tasks of the courses involved. For example, Arts librarians work in a first-year humanities and social sciences foundation course (Arts 1007) that includes assignments requiring students to find information, critically analyse and synthesise it, conduct an investigation and report findings. Our student groups produce an annotated bibliography and a research essay after participating in introductory research skills seminars that we co-teach with academic staff.

Biology students in ‘Principles and Practices of Science I’ participate in their SGDE research skills session in a lecture theatre, where they are required to work in small groups, on mobile devices, to find and evaluate scientific journal articles based on particular hypotheses and relevant methodologies. Small groups of students in a first-year health sciences course are expected to post their information sources on a wiki, and to create

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videos analysing the steps of their research process (http://www.adelaide.edu.au/learning/ teaching/curriculum/sgde/).

Our Research Librarian CoP meetings gave us the opportunity to exchange ideas and information about these teaching sessions. They function as a form of group-oriented reflective practice, ‘help[ing] people improve their practice by providing a forum to iden- tify solutions to common problems and a process to collect and evaluate best practices’ (Cambridge et al., 2005, p. 1). Discussions can vary from issues with mastering new forms of presentation technology such as Echo360 to discussing which kinds of problem-based learning activities best engage different cohorts of students. As the leader of our CoP, I am responsible for maintaining the shared files that include best practice examples of the learning and teaching resources that we have created (statements of learning outcomes, lesson plans, learning and teaching activities, assessment rubrics and so on).

Before, During and After the Flipped Class

The ‘Flipped Classroom’ model is an integral part of SGDE teaching, which can require stu- dents to use lecture time to work in small groups rather than simply listening to traditional lecture material (lecture readings and recordings are made available online before the class). The principles of flipped instruction ensure that ‘class time is used to do the harder work of assimilating knowledge through strategies such as problem-solving discussion or debates’, engaging students through active learning ‘that allows deeper exploration of content’. It promotes the best use of teaching time, allowing experts to answer questions and provide feedback rather than simply presenting lectures to an audience (University of Queensland Institute for Teaching & Learning Innovation, n.d.).

As discipline-based Research Librarians, we are in a strong position to collaborate with academic staff in the teaching of research skills in these flipped classes. The model requires student learning to take place before, during and after the teaching sessions. For example, course-specific pre-class reading material (relevant book chapters and journal articles) is uploaded to the university’s Learning Management System by the library’s Digital Resources Management Centre. Research Librarians have also developed other learning objects, such as online quizzes and short instructional videos. Arts librarians created the ‘Finding Scholarly Sources’ online tutorial for the Arts 1007 foundation course; students are expected to com- plete this short skills-based module as part of their learning before the first week of lectures. Our health sciences librarians have used the Camtasia screen-capture software to create a series of YouTube videos on database searching skills, and their online quizzes using PubMed and other tools are made available in the Learning Management System.

Research Librarians adapt their in-class teaching of research skills according to the requirements of the course co-ordinators; our sessions can vary from lecture presentations to problem-based learning seminars conducted with mobile computers and student mobile devices. Arts librarians have used seminar time to teach the Annotated Bibliography module of Arts 1007 since the inception of this SGDE course in 2014. Next year, the co-ordinator intends to convert all of the didactic weekly lectures to video lectures, in order to facilitate small-group-based interactions in lecture times; we will adapt our teaching sessions accord- ingly, using the recently acquired Echo360 Active Learning Platform that enables videoing and polling of classes in the lecture theatre setting. The practical teaching strategies and

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techniques that we studied in our CoP modules (particularly ‘Lectures for Effective Learning’ and ‘Tutorials for Effective Learning’) will be invaluable to us here.

The provision of learning and teaching material after the flipped class is a more traditional library instructional method, but one that is changing with new and emerging technologies. Whereas we once provided printed handouts and library website guides to related course material, we are now offering online resource guides via alternative web-publishing tools and the university’s new Learning Management System, Canvas.

At the University of Adelaide, we use Springshare’s LibGuides – a web-publishing plat- form adopted by many academic libraries in America, the United Kingdom and Australia (including the three South Australian university libraries). Its benefits include ease of cus- tomisation, the capacity to reuse content and to distribute it via courseware and social media, as well as a mobile-friendly interface. The rich content that we create in our resource guides is developed to course-specific requirements and based on the students’ research skills assessment tasks, whether these involve the creation of a wiki, a report, an essay or a video. The guides are often heavily used: for example, the Arts 1007 resource guide received well over 5000 views in Semester 1 2016, with daily hits peaking at 454 in the week of the Annotated Bibliography assignment.

Digital Literacies and the Community of Practice

While the main focus of our CoP was the pedagogy and practices of teaching undergraduate research skills, we also used one of our monthly sessions as a springboard for discussing the university’s proposed Digital Capabilities Framework. This project is jointly funded by the University Libraries and the Pro Vice Chancellor (Student Learning), and is scheduled for implementation during 2017–2018. Essentially, Research Librarians will be asked to assist academic staff to embed clearly defined digital capabilities in their students’ course work. Six digital capabilities – ranging from information literacy to digital scholarship – have been identified, using the concepts and framework established the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK (http://www.adelaide.edu.au/library/digital-capabilities/).

The Digital Literacies session was rated highly by CoP participants in the end-of-year survey. Research Librarians are well aware that this framework is incorporated in the Library of the Future Report (2016):

Recommendation 4: The Libraries will lead and partner in the development of our students’ advanced digital literacy skills embedded in the curriculum.

In accordance with the principles and purposes of CoPs, we aim to incorporate this kind of new knowledge and skills: ‘Communities of practice … generate new knowledge to help people transform their practice to accommodate changes in needs and technologies’ (Cambridge et al., 2005, p. 1). The Digital Capabilities Framework will remain on our agenda as a major learning and teaching initiative; the librarian Project Officer is an active member of our CoP.

The Community of Practice and the Library of the Future

The Research Librarian Learning and Teaching Community of Practice will continue for the immediate future, and as the leader of the CoP, I have the responsibility of organising

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the programme for 2017. The first priority is to complete the Sessional Teaching course, focusing on the ‘Assessment for Effective Learning’ and ‘Evaluation for Effective Learning’ modules. We will undertake these with our experienced academic facilitator; later sessions will be convened with experts invited from a range of learning and teaching areas across the university.

The schedule for the year reflects the university’s changes in pedagogy and practice, as well as the recommendations for the Library of the Future. Flipped classrooms in lecture theatres are becoming increasingly common, so we will work on presentation skills by training in large venues, and on building and maintaining our networks with specialists in the university’s Flipped Classroom Community of Practice. As Peer Review of Teaching has recently been formalised at Adelaide (with the introduction of a Peer Assisted Development & Reflection Program (PARD-P), we will work with this process of formative evaluation of our own teaching practice (http://www.adelaide.edu.au/learning/teaching/peer-review/ reflection-development/). Digital Literacy will also become a major focus of Research and Branch librarians’ work.

Research Librarians need to become more familiar with the university’s new educa- tional technologies, particularly the new Learning Management System (Canvas) and the Echo360 Active Learning Platform. Canvas is used as a virtual classroom for coursework and assessment; we need further training and experience in its modules in order to participate in instructor access on the system, just as we have done for many years in the university’s former LMS. Echo360 is a newly acquired tool designed to ‘enhance delivery of traditional lectures and small group discovery’ enabling students to access lecture recordings ‘anywhere, anytime’ and to participate through interactive polls, and question and answer sessions with peers and teaching staff (https://www.adelaide.edu.au/learning-technologies/active- learning/). While we will continue to receive formal training and development in these new technologies, I expect that our regular community of practice meetings will provide useful opportunities for further discussion and experimentation around them.

Conclusion

Clearly the Library of the Future Report guides our CoP’s priorities; of the 25 final recom- mendations, five make specific reference to ‘Future Library Services: Learning and Teaching’. I cited Recommendation 7 in my introduction to this paper: ‘Library staff will be appro- priately skilled to lead and support new University learning and teaching initiatives and directions’. In 2017, the Research Librarian Learning and Teaching Community of Practice will maintain its necessary focus on pedagogy and practice aligned with the University’s philosophy and continue to serve as a valuable forum for Learning and Research Services staff. The suggested organisational structure and vision of the university library points us in this direction:

In support of their enhanced educational roles we envisage our library staff will work increas- ingly in collaborative partnerships and multi-professional teams. Librarians will work with academic staff, eLearning advisors and learning technologists to design and deliver research skills development and digital literacy (University of Adelaide, 2016b, p. 17)

We are looking forward to our Community of Practice expanding its role in the Library of the Future.

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Implications for best practice

Communities of practice provide an opportunity for  groups of professionals to  come together on a regular basis to discuss topics of strategic relevance to their institution and their profession, and to deepen their knowledge and expertise.

Liaison librarians in academic libraries require excellent teaching skills in order to teach undergraduate research skills effectively.

Liaison librarians in academic libraries require a commitment to professional develop- ment that will enable them to adapt to changing pedagogies and teaching practices in the twenty-first century.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jennifer Osborn was appointed English & Creative Writing Research Librarian at the University of Adelaide in 2007, with an ensuing expansion of her subject portfolio to other disciplines in the Arts. A graduate of the university, she has over 20 years experience working in professional positions in academic libraries. She is the leader of the Research Librarians Learning and Teaching Community of Practice.

ORCID

Jennifer Osborn   http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9783-0304

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