Academic Librarian

Today I taught my first class of the semester, 80 minutes on political rhetoric. The first day of class always wears me out because it’s me talking almost the whole time, which isn’t usually the case. Come November and research paper time I’ll really be worn out, and sometimes I wonder why I keep doing it every year. I guess I like teaching because it makes me feel slightly more a part of the intellectual community on campus and gives me an opportunity to develop relationships with students that I never could as a librarian. I also like discussing rhetoric and political philosophy with smart students, too. Oh, and I get extra pay. A semester’s teaching pay is a semester’s tuition for my daughter’s school. Every little bit helps.

I get something out of teaching personally and professionally, but I don’t often ponder what I get as a librarian out of teaching a regular seminar, or what other librarians might get out of teaching regular courses. That’s something I plan to do here more often as the semester progresses, but I have some preliminary thoughts.

First, I get a very different view of what the students are doing in their classes, or at least one of their classes. As a librarian, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the importance of the library. The library is important for freshman rhetoric, and we have an intensive research essay, but the library and research aren’t the center of the course. The intellectual engagement with the readings and the writing are the take up the bulk of the time. Writing with sources is an important part of the course, but for much of that writing the sources are provided by the instructor.

I remember this being true for me during most of college. I majored in English and Philosophy, and hardly ever went to the library, though I read constantly. In my humanistic education, learning to read difficult texts carefully and craft strong essays were more important than library research.

By the time the students are juniors and seniors, or especially graduate students, this obviously changes. Then they use and appreciate the importance of research collections, depending on their field. But in the humanities the library, except as a place to get the core texts they need, isn’t necessarily important to students until they’re advanced.

When it comes to the research essay, I also get an improved view of student work. When I teach a library instruction session, I rarely see the end result, but in my own seminar I get to see the students progress from vague research topic to working thesis to final draft. I see the results of the library instruction and the research consultation in a way I usually don’t. Did it work? Are the sources scholarly enough? Did they explore the research on this topic, or just take the first five articles that popped up on Proquest? Did they immerse themselves in a scholarly conversation, or just make a claim and then try to find a few sources that agree with them?

All the writing seminars here are assigned a librarian to work with. I’m my own librarian, and I work with the students on every part of the process, both the writing and the research. After several years of this, I’ve come to believe that it would be ideal if the instructor and the librarian were the same person. Never can I address research needs as effectively as when I’m also the one teaching the course. I know exactly what the students need and when. I know exactly what advice to give them. And I’m never in the position of having to say, “well, I might do it this way, but you should probably check with your instructor,” as I sometimes do when I’m just the consulting librarian. The research/writing process is seamless.

By teaching the whole course, I also get to show students that librarians know about things besides card catalogs and shushing. That in itself might be worth the effort.

Watching the vision of students video last week got me thinking about ways to engage students. This led me to consider as well ways in which I don’t think we should try to engage students. Here I’m thinking mostly of engaging students in the classroom by trying to identify with them as kids in some way or to show them that we’re on their level somehow, to show them that we’re fun or relevant, to treat scholarship and learning like a bitter pill that needs a coating of fun to make it palatable.

Some ways to make ourselves fun I see as completely inappropriate. One comical way in which librarians sometimes try to be “fun” is by engaging in pop culture references allegedly appropriate to teenagers. If the librarian is young enough, this might work for a while, but inevitably the pop culture references date too quickly. What I might remember as a recent hit song might have been a hit when a student was 9. And how likely is it that any of us watch the same movies as teenagers today? I would probably have better luck making pop culture reference appropriate for someone twice my age than half my age. This might make it seem like only I would be ridiculous making pop culture references, but unless one has a teenager around the house how likely is it that teen pop culture references come to hand easily?

Another comical way is to try to talk like the kids do today, using their slang. Perhaps it works for you, but it would never work for me, because I don’t know the slang and I rarely use slang anyway, especially with students. Slang is a great way for a cohort to communicate amongst itself, but outside of that context is often hinders communication. Regardless, slang is so quickly out of date and teen historical memories are so short. Just today in class a student was referring to some slang term I’d never heard. I said, “you kids today, with all your slang. I just can’t keep up. Everything’s the bee’s knees or groovy or whatever.” Another student asked if that was slang from my day, and I don’t think he was kidding.

I can’t relate to the teens as teens, and I would never try. I try to be witty and clever and even funny sometimes, but being funny is different from being funny in the same ways their friends would be funny. I want to show them that being a scholar isn’t the same as being a grind, but it’s also different from being their buddy.

Other librarians and teachers try to be relevant in different ways, but this can also backfire, because we’re not always sure what is relevant to teenagers, and our job isn’t to be relevant to where they are now, but to show them how anything can be relevant or interesting if approached from the right perspective. (On a semi-related note, read this article in the Chronicle on teaching a course at UMass about the Grateful Dead. Here I think it’s not the professor trying to be relevant, but a critic of the professor demonstrating how out of touch he is. The course about the Grateful Dead is criticized “as the latest example of modern higher education pandering to consumers.” Is the Grateful Dead what college students are pandering for these days?)

I want to engage students not by going to them but by bringing them to me. It’s no use me trying to find out what interests them, because it will never work. I’m not a teenager or a college student, and my memories of what it was like to be one are necessarily partial and limited by my own experience. But that’s okay, because it doesn’t matter what interests them now; what matters is whether I can make what I’m doing interesting to them. Admittedly this is more difficult for me in a library instruction session than in the ordinary classroom. I can make political philosophy interesting more easily than database searching, but I still try to make library sessions interesting. Research is a problem to be solved, and we engage students by showing how the problem presents interesting challenges, how it’s not just searching Google or searching the catalog or searching a subject specific index. Research is a complex endeavor that many enjoy for its own sake. Finding sources, relating sources, solving problems, answering questions, creating new questions, entering into a scholarly conversation about a subject and the give and take of debate—these are worthy and intellectually challenging activities. If we’re trying to train scholars, even junior scholars, we don’t need to go to their world. We need to bring them into our world.

Are we trying to become like students, or make the students become like scholars? The classroom is a stage, and like it or not we’re performers. Teaching is a performance, and we should carefully consider the personas we create. Do we create a persona of a teacher who desperately wants to be relevant to student life? I fear that way disappointment lies. Instead, we should create the persona we want students to model. We should show them a world beyond their world, a world of intelligent and educated and even witty people who are thoughtful and like to learn, who question the world and who take scholarship seriously. People with the historical and moral imagination that makes learning about the wider world an invigorating challenge. We don’t need to make scholarship or learning fun or relevant to them now. We need to mold them into people who instead find enjoyment in scholarship and learning.

Scholarly librarians help students with research better than unscholarly librarians, I believe, but sometimes, pace the old chestnut that those who can’t do, teach, librarians who not only know how to write but how to teach writing have an advantage over those who don’t.

Right now I’m glancing through Studying Students: the Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. At the end of chapter 1 I was stuck by this sentence:

“Last but not least, the faculty interviews made clear the need for librarians to understand the pedagogy of writing in order to assist students through the final steps of preparing a well-crafted research paper.” (15) I couldn’t agree more. This led some of the librarians at Rochester to train to be writing consultants and work regular shifts in their writing center.

Without hesitation I can say that training in writing pedagogy makes me a better librarian. The English program at UIUC wasn’t very good about placing their graduate students in decent tenure track jobs, but it was outstanding in training those graduate students to teach writing, and reinforcing that training by requiring most of the students to teach two sections of rhetoric every semester in order to survive. (Do I sound bitter? It’s probably just heartburn.) I taught a dozen sections of rhetoric at UIUC as a graduate student and later as an adjunct, worked for five semesters as a writing consultant in the writing clinic there, and am teaching my fifth writing seminar at Princeton. All of this is valuable training for helping students with research essays.

It’s hard to articulate just how it helps, at least within the confines of a blog post. Teaching basic research skills is easy enough, but what librarians rarely see are the results of student writing. The librarians are concerned with locating resources, and we understand how complex the information world currently is, but professors want good essays, not just well researched ones.

According to the study, “when discussing their expectations, faculty commented more extensively on the problems of writing and critical thinking than on those related to locating the right sources. Evaluating and interpreting the information appear much more difficult for students than finding it.” Another source of complaint was that “students tend to summarize readings instead of reflecting upon them and writing critical, thoughtful papers.” And, “finally, all interviewed faculty complained about mechanical problems that plague students’ writing: ‘florid, overwrought language, jumbled and verbose’; ‘grammar declining over the years’; spelling mistakes; lack of clarity; poor organization of the text; inappropriate style for the discipline or intended audience. In the faculty’s opinion, bad writing is an acute problem that turns out to be the main obstacle to students’ success in research” (5). In other words, research is the least of these students’ problems.

In one sense, librarians have done their job. One way or another, students often find at least some resources for their essays, but they just don’t know what to do with them once they’ve found them. Unfortunately, these skills aren’t taught in regular classes. Professors expect students to know what to do with sources, but typically don’t spend much class time addressing these issues because that takes time away from the content of the class, which might also be why most professors don’t schedule library research sessions.

Teaching writing and research skills is the most fundamental part of academic preparation, and the least glamorous. That’s why librarians and rhetoric instructors are usually at the bottom of the academic hierarchy. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s still important, especially for the students who won’t pick these skills up on their own, i.e., most students.

Because of my experience teaching writing and working on research essays from possible research question to final revision, I understand what students are expected to do and where they may have problems. My research consultations often become to some extent writing consultations, and it would be difficult for me to separate the two. As a writing consultant, I would have appointments with students. They would come with anything from an idea to a finished draft, and within 30-60 minutes I’d have to read and comprehend their writing and be able to suggest possible areas for revision. I worked as a writing consultant and a reference graduate assistant all through library school, and I noticed that as I got better at reference my writing consultation skills for research essays improved.

The opposite is also true. Though I rarely read their writing, my research consultations with students often incorporate many of the same skills. I find myself asking questions about their research, discussing their topics with them, pointing out pitfalls they might encounter, suggesting alternative ways of looking at a topic that might be more fruitful for their research question (and thus their library research). I can do this because I’m trained to do it and have done it on and off for 15 years, and I also think that the students benefit more from it, rather than having a writing center that might be able to discuss ideas unrelated to possible paths of research, or a librarian who can discuss ways to find sources but doesn’t think of how these sources will be used in writing the research paper. It’s also why I’m my own librarian for my writing seminars, because I’ve found that my intimate knowledge of the subject and the expectations of the students allows me to give them the best research consultations. Often I’ve thought that librarians should help train the instructors and let the instructors train the students.

Academic writing and research are necessarily and fundamentally entwined, and the more we know about each the more we’ll be able to help students write good research essays.

By now some of you might have heard of this strange story. An instructor of introductory writing classes at Dartmouth threatened for a while to sue Dartmouth and several of her students because they resisted her ideas, or something like that. The story looks complicated, and based on her own statements and those of students it seemed the instructor had a number of problems that had nothing to do with unruly students. (Follow the various links in the story.) Some have interpreted this controversy as the typical result of the relativist absurdity run amok in the humanities. While there is plenty of absurdity in the humanities these days, a more mundane interpretation might be that this instructor just wasn’t a very good teacher. Specifically, it seems to me she failed in at least three ways: she tried to base her authority on her degree rather than her abilities (based on student comments); she treated her students with disrespect; and she mistakenly thought her job was to teach French theory and something called “science studies” when in fact her job was to teach them college writing. Generally, though, she was unable to establish a proper ethos in the classroom, in part because of a failure of logos. All teachers can learn lessons from this.

Ethos and logos are two of the three standard appeals in classical rhetoric, the third being pathos. Logos is the appeal to reason. Ethos is the appeal based upon the character of the speaker. Both of these are crucial for establishing authority in classrooms, at least in classrooms of intelligent college students. Both our intellectual abilities and our characters affect how students view us.

Our writing instructor blamed the students for being resistant to French theory, among other things. If she was a product of the same sort of English department I toiled in, she had probably been surrounded for years by people who were unable or unwilling to challenge the theories propounded by their professors. Once one leaves the intellectual hothouse of graduate school, one necessarily meets people for whom the phrases “Foucault says” or “according to Lacan” carry no argumentative weight whatsoever, and some graduate students aren’t prepared to respond to the normal reaction to such a statement, which is “So?” Lacan may be like a god to radical psychoanalysts, but nothing he says is likely to be accepted by critical people without a lot of argumentation. Unfortunately too many academics take a hagiographic approach to too much French theory. French theory is so alien to Anglo-American intellectual traditions that to use if effectively, one needs to start at the beginning and build the necessary base upon which one can later erect the extravagant superstructure. One cannot rely upon the claim that one’s graduate training proves one is correct. One has to be able to make arguments and overcome objections. The problem is that these so-called “theories” are hardly self-evident and rarely subject to verification or falsification, which makes them difficult to prove. Nevertheless, regardless of their validity or lack thereof, or even whether they would implicitly deny their own validity and render moot why anyone would accept them, it is still necessary and possible to provide arguments for why anyone would even find these thinkers compelling.

This is logos in the classroom. At eighteen college students may be immature in various ways, but they’re rarely stupid, at least ones at places like Dartmouth or Princeton. The students I teach are usually very intelligent and also very critical. To treat them as babes who should sit at the feet of their French masters and accept everything told to them without argument is disrespectful both of them and of the common activity of learning in which we should all be engaged. Nothing I read made it sound like the students were just rowdies, at least until their criticisms had been ignored. The students were critical and challenged ideas. That’s what college students should do, though never in a belligerent way. If teachers cannot respond effectively to legitimate criticism of their ideas, then it’s clear that either their ideas are faulty or that they have insufficient grasp of them. Either way, the fault is in the teacher.

I had little sympathy for the teacher in this situation because she seemed to place an inordinate amount of importance on her degree rather than her abilities, as if this is enough to establish intellectual authority. We’ve probably all known plenty of people with PhDs who were nevertheless intellectual lightweights. I’ve taught several writing seminars at Princeton similar to the one at Dartmouth. I didn’t go to an Ivy League university and I don’t have a PhD, but I’ve never had any trouble establishing my intellectual authority with students or responding to their criticisms. I’ve also not had any trouble with students resisting my readings, whether those readings are liberal, socialist, feminist, or conservative. Almost any reasonable arguments can be made compelling if taught properly.

I think the main reason students don’t challenge me belligerently is because I deliberately try to cultivate an ethos based both on logos and on mutual respect. First, logos. I assume that every reading in my class is up for argument, and indeed choose sources that argue with each other. They might all be wrong, but they can’t all be right. Logos in a class such as this requires taking both sides with equal rigor. The best way to appreciate any argumentative text is to read it three times. First, as sympathetically as possible, trying to get into the mindset of the writer and understand why such an argument would be appealing and making the best possible case for the reading at hand, whatever it may be. Second, as contrarily as possible, subjecting every statement to as rigorous and hostile critique as possible. Only after these two approaches is it possible to approach an argument open-mindedly, understanding both its merits and faults. The assumption is always that people make their arguments in good faith and have justifiable reasons to believe as they do, even if I think they’re absolutely mistaken. But what I think doesn’t matter. Learning to write academic essays shouldn’t be about learning to regurgitate what the instructor thinks about an issue or to parrot the party line, but instead learning to enter critically into a scholarly conversation on a particular issue.

This technique is shunned by zealots who think they’re absolutely right and everyone else is absolutely wrong. The zealots rarely engage counterarguments and surround themselves with the like-minded. Unfortunately this unwillingness to engage counterarguments makes them intellectually slack until they reach the point they cannot defend their ideas against criticism and instead try to dismiss their critics without bothering to reason with them. Hence, assumptions such as that people who don’t agree with you are just evil or stupid or ignorant or intellectually resistant whatever. That might be the case for some people, but pretty much any theoretical point of view has articulate defenders somewhere. If you can’t understand why someone would believe other than you do about an issue, then you just don’t understand the issue. For example, if you can’t understand the appeals of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, feminism, libertarianism, republicanism, communitarianism, communism or whatever ism has attracted articulate followers in the past century or so, then that usually shows an lack of knowledge and imagination on your part.

Despite the neglect of the zealots, it’s remarkable how effective this approach is in the classroom, both for teaching students how to think critically and challenge their own dull and often unsupported ideas and for teaching an ethic of respect that should carry on into classroom discussion. Such a discussion makes it clear to students that we are all fallible human beings who argue and disagree but that it’s possible to come together in an intellectual endeavor, even if just for the brief period of the seminar. While avoiding the easy relativism of saying there’s no right and no wrong and I’m okay and you’re okay, I still try to convey the undeniable fact that when discussing politics and rhetoric there is room for healthy and considerate disagreement. Such is the case with French theory as well. The way to handle objections from students isn’t to assert your alleged intellectual authority, but to establish that authority in their minds by meeting their objections with better counterarguments while still showing you respect them as interlocutors. Classroom discussion is a rhetorical activity. In the humanities, at least, teachers have to persuade, not just dictate, if they want to be taken seriously by serious students. It’s not that hard if you know what you’re talking about.

Last week I wrote about an experience with a bad teacher, but I wasn’t ruminating on that just to complain. Moments like that make me reflect on my own teaching, and my own teaching makes me examine other people’s teaching more carefully than I did before.

Part of the problem of that particular professor was probably that he hadn’t been able to experiment on undergraduates while working on his PhD in library science. In other graduate programs, the graduate students gain teaching experience by making the freshmen suffer, or at least that’s how it was at UIUC. It pains me to think what the students had to put up with during my first year teaching. I was shy and quiet, and supposedly when I did speak I spoke too quickly and paced too much (at least according to my evaluations). Though I never got the abysmal evaluations some of my peers did (the best one I heard about: “This is the worst TA I’ve ever had, and he needs to wash his hair!”), they were mediocre at best that first year. The students were somewhat forgiving because they didn’t know any better. However, had those first students been 30 years old with several years of teaching experience, they would have known how pathetic I was.

Bad experiences in the audience have affected my library instruction as well, which is probably where many of us give most of our public performances. When I was boring the students that first year, there was always one day of the semester where I knew they would be even more bored—the library instruction day. We teachers were all supposed to set up an appointment with the library, and we’d spend a class period with a library graduate assistant teaching the students about the catalog and maybe a database. It’s hard to remember what was happening in the early 90s. Perhaps we got a demo of Infotrac or something. What I do remember is this library GA lecturing us for close to an hour on the catalog in a complete monotone while we just sat and stared. The only good points were that I didn’t have to teach that day and that the lights were turned off, thus making it easier to sleep. After two semesters of complaints about how boring and useless these sessions were (and they all seemed to be by the same person), I stopped taking the students and started doing the introductions myself. We were both learning to teach, and were using those poor freshmen as our guinea pigs.

Sometimes we complain that professors don’t want to let us into the classrooms to provide library instruction, but how much of that reluctance is based on bad experiences just like the one I had? We want to give the students help, but is our library instruction uniformly good? When I started teaching research sessions as a librarian, I always had in mind that poor GA from years past and how mind-numbing those sessions had been. The real benefit of those awful sessions was that I always knew at least some things to avoid.

Over the years I’ve had some great professors, and have often modeled parts of my teaching persona directly on them. As a teacher, I’ve benefited from bad teachers as well. I know not to hand out grades willy-nilly without being able to justify them, but I also learned to be honest with students when I don’t know something and not try to bluff my way out of a bad situation. Part of my anger with the bad professor was that he was trying to bluff me. He didn’t know what he was talking about, but seemed to treat me as some lesser being who could be lied to with no consequences. With him I think it was the product of nervousness and not arrogance, but still I didn’t like it. He was anxious and trying to hide his embarrassment instead of just being honest.

Other teachers do this in the classroom. I’ve seen a couple of different teachers go out of their way to mask their ignorance. (Though my favorite story was second hand, about an English professor in a seminar who spent fifteen minutes of discussion time avoiding admitting he knew nothing about Condorcet, as if this is some sort of crime.) Librarians probably do this in instruction sessions as well, but I haven’t seen as many of those. Yet I’ve never had a student who seemed to respect me less if I answered a direct question with, “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you with an answer.”

This post isn’t so much about cataloging lessons learned from bad experiences as a student or audience member, but more about how I’ve tried to learn from other people’s mistakes and avoid them myself. My teaching might not be great, but I know at least some things to avoid so that it doesn’t become execrable, and for that I have even the execrable teachers in my past to thank. Thank you, execrable teachers from my past.