Inquiry-Based Learning in LIS

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Inquiry-Based Learning in LIS Education
Enacting SOTL
Muzhgan Nazarova, Ph.D. Candidate Bertram Bruce,
Professor Ann Bishop, Associate
Professor Graduate School of Library and
Information Science
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Outline
(1) What is the Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning (SOTL)? (2) What is inquiry? (3) How
can we bring an inquiry approach to LIS
education? (4) How do students respond?
Teaching and Learning
Scholarship
Discovery
Engagement
Integration
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(1) Scholarship of Teaching

• Thinking about teaching begins where all
  intellectual inquiry begins, with questions about
  what is going on and how to explain, support, and
  replicate answers that satisfy us. With the
  blurring of the boundaries that we have long
  drawn between faculty roles in research and
  teaching- and a growing recognition of their
  common intellectual patterns of questioning,
  exploring, testing and professing-a new phrase
  has emerged, challenging the stereotypes and
  calling for further amplification the
  scholarship of teaching.
• - Bender Gray, 1999

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1998The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning (CASTL) is established
including three components The Pew National
Fellowship Program for Carnegie Scholars The
Teaching Academy Campus Program Working with
Scholarly and Professional Societies.
1990 Ernest Boyer proposes abandoning
the old paradigm of research versus teaching for
the new paradigm faculty should be engaged in
the scholarship of discovery, integration,
application and teaching
1997 Scholarship Assessed takes the academy
through a process for setting standards of
scholarly work, documenting scholarship,
developing trust in the process and suggesting
the qualities of a scholar
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SOTL Boyers Paradigm
Teaching and Learning
Scholarship
Discovery
Engagement
Integration
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Scholarship
We believe the time has come to move beyond the
tired old "teaching versus research" debate and
give the familiar and honorable term
"scholarship" a broader, more capacious meaning,
one that brings legitimacy to the full scope of
academic work. Surely, scholarship means engaging
in original research. But the work of the scholar
also means stepping back from one's
investigation, looking for connections, building
bridges between theory and practice, and
communicating one's knowledge effectively to
students.   - Boyer, 1990

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Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

• our experience confirms that faculty do see
  teaching as significant intellectual activity.
  Thus, we learned that it isnt necessary to
  create interest in the investigation of teaching
  and learning issues, merely to unleash it A
  scholarship of teaching and learning may have
  greater potential to improve teaching than any
  teaching initiative in at least the last third of
  a century Every person who supports change can
  become a leader effecting it. Many faculty
  members have long ached for change that elevates
  teaching.

- Thompson, 2003
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Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

• An act of intelligence or artistic creation
  becomes scholarship when it possesses at least
  three attributes it becomes public, it becomes
  an object of critical review and evaluation by
  members of ones community, and members of ones
  community begin to use, build upon, and develop
  those acts of mind and creation.
• - Shulman, 1999

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SOTL Characteristic Features

• It reflects the natures, values, fundamental
  concepts and modes of enquiry specific to the
  discipline
• It considers learning assessments and outcomes
• It inquires into the effectiveness of aims and
  research into teaching and learning
• It responds to the need for continuous
  improvement resulting from reflection and inquiry
  
• It communicates new questions and knowledge about
  teaching and learning
• 
  
• - Trigwell et al., 2000

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SOTL at UIUC

• Member of AAHE/Carnegie Foundation Academy Campus
  Program
• Member of the Research University Consortium for
  the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
  (RUCASTL)
• Two Carnegie scholars on campus Vernon Burton
  (2000-2001) and Michael Loui (2003-2004)
• Active in the International Society for the
  Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
• Part of Instructional Development area of the
  Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE)
• Teaching Advancement Board (TAB)
• Provost Initiative for Teaching Advancement
  (PITA)-- through Category 3 of the PITA grants,
  the Office of the Provost and TAB provide funding
  to faculty engaging in SOTL work
• University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar Program
  through the Campus Curriculum for Instructional
  Excellence sponsored by TAB
• Teaching Academies at different colleges

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                                                                                                       between the University Library and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, under the auspices of the Provost's Initiative on Teaching Advancement at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

• A theme Promoting Scholarship of Teaching and
  Learning through Action Research in LIS
• Topics of the events
• Student diversity Who are our students?
• What do we know about undergraduate learning?
  (Chip Bruce)
• Effective Lecturing series
• Learning Styles and Peer Observation (Faculty
  Retreat)
• Teaching with Technology, Teaching in
  Electronic
• Classroom, Exemplary Teaching (Lunchtime
  Symposiums)
• Linda Smith a UIUC Distinguished
  Teacher/Scholar Awardee
• Teaching Alliance Presentation at June 2002
  ALA session "Librarians in the Big Leagues
  Are You Ready for the Teaching Academy?"

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Disciplinary Styles in SOTL

• What matters is not just what the disciplines
  can do for the scholarship of teaching and
  learning, nor even what the scholarship of
  teaching and learning can give back to the
  disciplines in return. What matters in the end is
  whether, through our participation in this new
  trading zone, students' understanding is
  deepened, their minds and characters
  strengthened, and their lives and communities
  enriched.
• - Huber, 2002

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Teaching in LIS Education

• Academic librarians now provide instruction
  on how to approach academic inquiry, to utilize a
  myriad of resources both print and electronic,
  and to critically analyze and incorporate the
  information gathered from these sources. More
  than ever, librarians are partners with
  discipline faculty and take a vital role in
  instruction. Rather than solely Librarians, we
  are also Instructor, Professor, Coordinator we
  are teachers of information literacy.
• - Meulemans Brown, 2001

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Learning and Teaching in LIS Education

• The process of facilitating learning is a
  continuous one involving both the teacher and the
  learner in ongoing interaction. In some manner
  or other, virtually every librarian is involved
  in this process and it is an increasing role for
  the most positions..The understanding of the
  entire learning/teaching process influences how
  we go about that training and how effective we
  are in its delivery.
• ALA Task Force on Core Competencies
• Draft Statement

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(2) What is Inquiry?

• Creating opportunities to engage people in active
  learning based on their own questions.
• A learner centered and learner driven process.
• A cycle where each question leads to an
  exploration which will then lead to more
  questions to investigate.
• The process of asking, investigating, creating,
  discussing, and reflecting, and then asking again.

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Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL)

• Inquiry-Based Learning is often described as a
  cycle or spiral, involving the formulation of a
  question, investigation, creation of an
  appropriate solution or answer, discussion and
  reflection on the outcome but in practice not all
  the steps I this cycle are necessary to be
  followed in sequence.

The Cycle of Inquiry
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Problems of Education

• Located not in What we teach (content) or
• How we teach (methods).
• Instead, in the breakdowns between
• lived experience and formal schooling
• community and academy action and
• understanding.
• Need to re-visit the work of Jane Addams and John
  Dewey

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Community Inquiry Labs (CIL)

• Collaborative activity around creating knowledge
  that is connected to people's values, history,
  and lived experiences
• Open-ended, democratic, participatory engagement
• Bringing theory and action together in an
  experimental and critical manner

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(3) How can we bring an inquiry approach to LIS
education?

• Inquiry-based learning as an innovative method
  of instruction in LIS found its place in a field
  where dealing with inquiries on a daily basis is
  a major part of your work, providing more
  flexibility and developing and engaging in
  different communities of inquiry with people from
  all walks of life.

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Community Inquiry (CI) in LIS

• The goal of the CI track is to follow a pattern
  of user-centered services and resources in LIS
  to address the needs of different communities
  and to explore how different applications can
  foster collaborative knowledge in these
  communities.

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The Community Informatics Initiative (CII)

• Community Informatics (CI) Study and practice of
  enabling communities with information and
  communications technologies (ICTs).
• Community Informatics Initiative (CII) works with
  people to develop information and communication
  technologies to achieve their goals. It fosters
  collaborations across campus, local, national and
  international communities. Together we build
  innovative community networks, community
  technology centers, software, and library
  services.
• Core of the CII is Community Inquiry
  collaborative action to create knowledge and
  technology connected to people's values, history,
  and lived experiences the development of models
  of engagement that are just, democratic,
  participatory, and open-ended and the
  integration of theory and practice in an
  experimental and critical manner.
• Mission of the Community Information Corps To
  prepare information professionals, through
  academic inquiry, practical engagement and
  professional development, for careers in
  community and public interest work.

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CII Activities at GSLIS

• Teaching Learning CI Track, CIC Corps, Journal
  of Community Informatics
• Engagement Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC),
  Digital East Saint Louis Collaborative, Libraries
  to Prisoners, HERMES-a Student Run Free Clinic
• Discovery Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
  (CSCW), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI),
  Participatory Design (PD), Reflective Action
  (RA), Collective Practice (CP)
• Integration Center for Global Studies (CGS),
  Ethnography of the University (EOTU) ,Graduate
  Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education (GK-12), The
  National Center for Supercomputing Applications
  (NCSA) , Institute of Genomic Biology,
  International Association of Educators (INASED).

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http//www.beespace.uiuc.edu/
https//hermes.navsaria.com
http//ci-journal.net/index.php
http//www.cgs.uiuc.edu/
http//www.inased.org/
http//www.eotu.uiuc.edu/EOTUMODEL/
http//www.digitalesl.org/modules/news/
http//www.prcc-chgo.org/afc_library.htm
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Communityware Prairienet, Inquiry Page, Inquiry
Labs
http//www.prairienet.org/
http//inquiry.uiuc.edu

http//ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/
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Community Inquiry Track at GSLIS

• LIS 451 Introduction to Networked
  Systems
• LIS 490 Community Information Corps
• LIS 491 Literacy in the Information Age
  
• LIS 590 CI Community Information Systems
• LIS 590 IBL Inquiry-Based Learning
• LIS 590 SI Social Informatics
• LIS 590 PT Pragmatic Technology
• LIS 590 SJ Social Justice in LIS (Fall 2005)
• LIS 591 Practicum
• Inquiry Research Group (Spring 2006)
• CI Research Speaker Series (Spring 2005)

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(4) How do students respond?

• Pilot study
• Survey via email 36 students taking Inquiry
  Based Learning (IBL), Social Justice (SJ), and
  Pragmatic Technology (PT) courses
• Plans for the future
• Preliminary survey with 300 students in
  Introduction to Networked Systems (INS) course,
  followed by interviews with 20

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Will Community Inquiry concepts be helpful in
your career?

• CIL concepts have already changed how I do things
  and we walk away from those courses with a
  lifetime of knowledge
• I am already seeing applications for the CIL in
  other settings. Dialogue, possible courses that
  bring together people from distant areas, the
  internship opportunities for students to share
  their experiences with others in similar but
  different settings are all aspects of the CIL
  that will be used. Any tool that can be tailored
  to the use by different groups, helping to
  achieve goals is valuable to me as professional
• One of the primary insights I gained in the IBL
  course which I have repeatedly observed in
  professional practice is the importance of the
  affective component in the research process
• The inquiry approach creates a wonderful
  opportunity to serve patrons by provide resources
  that can instill this approach in finding aids,
  electronic resources, as well as in instructional
  settings.  Also, I have found that as careers
  progress that development lies more and more on
  the individual.  IBL provided tools to allow me
  to develop my on plans for my continued
  development in areas that are of personal or
  professional interest.

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What is a value of this class in LIS curriculum?

• It is a course that brings Masters Level, PhD
  Level, and students from other disciplines
  together.  It was also powerful because of the
  iLab project to see members from other parts of
  the University Community come together with their
  variety of perspectives to the content and
  process of this course.  It was a practical way
  to see how information professionals must work
  with the styles of different disciplines.

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How did using the inquiry-learning cycle help
you to represent your ideas and thoughts?

• I would say that the biggest thing that it did
  was to give a structure to the process of
  inquiry, but then it also allowed for
  restructuring and rearranging, experimentation,
  etc.
• I think the inquiry cycle is in general the
  learning cycle for me. To have the structure
  lets you feel through the part of the process you
  are currently in, and enable the focus of
  attention to the part of the cycle.

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What do you think is appealing, potentially
beneficial for LIS education and practice?

• The topics have a strong connection to LIS, but
  also have an appeal to other fields of study.
  To see that there are strong connections across
  disciplines in a valuable learning opportunity.
  I also think the topics in the track are ones
  that are often lost between the technical and
  traditional branches of LIS.

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What was the value of a course to you?

• This course (IBL) was very helpful in providing a
  theoretical frame and hands on tools for inquiry.
   This is one of those courses that impacted me
  beyond my course work or position, but had
  implications into my personal life in providing
  frameworks for discovery and life long learning.

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Students on a positive note

• Keep moving forward, for I think these courses,
  track and area of study is exciting and puts
  focus to the sensitivities to many who enter the
  LIS professions. It gives them hope and a way by
  which they might be able to do work for a purpose.

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Students on a positive note

• When I think back on the course and compare it
  with others I've taken at GSLIS, the one
  word that comes to mind is "different." The
  primary value for me was that it was
  philosophically informed (Dewey and others) and
  was a "foundational" course in that it tried to
  make the students inquire into the topic of
  inquiry itself--how we learn, why, and what to do
  with what we learn. The course also focused  on
  questions concerning the "use" (and usefulness or
  not) of information and its impact on the
  community at large. These are significant
  questions that should be raised in all our
  classes. I also enjoyed the spirit of generosity
  that prevailed often academics seem to be
  distributing knowledge/information (already
  prepackaged)instead of sharing it spontaneously.
  The first route is the safe one the second one
  isn't, so I don't think the pedagogy used in the
  course is for everyone. Still, learning
  (change?)often occurs when the unfamiliar
  surfaces in occasions least expected.

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Conclusion
Inquiry is the controlled or directed
transformation of an indeterminate situation into
one that is so determinate in its constituent
distinctions and relations as to convert the
elements of the original situation into a unified
whole. - Dewey, 1938
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References

• Bender, E. Gray, D. (April 1999). The
  Scholarship of Teaching. Research Creative
  Activity, XXII (1).
• Boyer, E. (1990). Scholarship Reconsidered
  Priorities of the Professoriate.  Princeton The
  Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
  Teaching.
• Dewey, J. (1938). LogicThe theory of inquiry.
  New York Holt and Company.
• Glassick, C., Huber, M. Maeroff, G. (1997).
  Scholarship Assessed Evaluation of the
  Professoriate. San Francisco Jossey-Bass.
• Huber, M. Morreale, S. (Eds.). (2002).
  Disciplinary Styles in the Scholarship of
  Teaching and Learning Exploring Common Ground.
  Washington, DC American Association for Higher
  Education.
• Hutchings, P. Shulman, L. (September/October
  1999).The Scholarship of Teaching New
  Elaborations, New Developments. Change, 31 (5),
  10-15.

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References

• Meulemans, Y. Brown, J. (2001). Educating
  Instruction Librarians A Model for Library and
  Information Science Education. Research
  Strategies, 18 253-64.
• Shulman, L. (July/August 1999). Taking Learning
  Seriously. Change, 31(4). 10-17.
• Thompson, S. (2003). From two box lunches to
  buffets Fulfilling the promise of the
  scholarship of teaching and learning. Journal on
  Excellence in College Teaching, 14(2), 119-134.
• Trigwell, K, Martin, E., Benjamin, J. Prosser,
  M.  (2000). Scholarship of Teaching A Model. 
  Higher Education Research and Development, 19(2),
  155-168.
• Turgeon, W. (1998). Metaphysical horizons of
  philosophy for Children. Twentieth World Congress
  of Philosophy. Boston, MA August 10-15.
  http//www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Chil/ChilTurg.htm

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For additional information please visit
http//www.cii.uiuc.edu/
http//ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilab/cic
or contact us with questions, ideas Ann
Bishop abishop_at_uiuc.edu Chip
Bruce chip_at_uiuc.edu Muzhgan
Nazarova nazarova_at_uiuc.edu