Credit for the subject of today’s post goes to Lindsay LaChapelle, writing center acting director, and Alicia Vaandering, education and instructional design librarian, at my university. They can be contacted, respectively, at lindsay [dot] lachapelle [at] salve [dot] edu and alicia [dot] vaandering [at] salve [dot] edu.
I attended a presentation by the above-mentioned individuals on leveraging the expertise of academic support staff when using research-driven writing assignments. Undergraduates trying to complete these assignments typically lack proficiency in critical skills like:
- Identifying peer-reviewed journals for literature reviews.
- Knowing when and how to cite sources.
- Decoding the rhetorical techniques of scholarly literature.
- Applying the authentic writing principles of role, audience, and format.
For example, students often locate a pile of sources that they believe are pertinent, and only then begin writing. Or they do the writing first and then seek out what they think are a sufficient number of not-really-that-relevant sources to cite in the text.
Incorporating instruction from your university’s writing and research specialists can help solve these problems. The first step in the process is to consult with writing center and library staff, to share assignment information, identify your goals and expectations for the assignment, plan classroom workshop content, and schedule the workshops in relation to assignment due dates.
Workshop topics should reflect the four phases of the research writing process: exploration, reflection, revision, and becoming a creator of information. Each workshop can target one or more of the specific objectives for each phase, as shown in this table. “L” indicates a practice that normally falls within a librarian’s area of expertise, while “W” indicates a focus on writing. Think of the table as a menu from which to choose the skills in which your students most need training.
The classroom workshops allow both academic support staff and the course instructor to interact with students about their work as they proceed through the research and writing process. They can include probes of students’ pre-existing knowledge of college-level research and writing principles and the review of students’ work as they complete different components of the assignment.
Collaborating with librarians and writing specialists benefits both me and my students because it:
- Reduces redundancy in instruction.
- Shares the workload for lesson planning, delivering instruction, and assessment.
- Reduces the instructor-to-student ratio in the classroom.
- Models the collaborative nature of academic research.
- Allows writing center staff to identify research-related problems that require librarian support, and vice versa — instead of leaving students in the dark about the kind of specialized help they might need and who can provide that help.