September 18, 2020
Congratulations on being selected to be a part of SAC's Research and Engagement Academy (REA)! We look forward to collaborating with all of you this year and hope everyone enjoys the experience.
The Research and Engagement Academy's Place in the College
The Research and Engagement Academy is a central part of SAC's new Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), Fearless Learning. The Fearless Learning program was developed by a cross-campus team of faculty, staff, and students to address a key student learning area at SAC: the support and development of SAC's first-time-in-college students’ information literacy skills. The QEP Development Team more narrowly defined information literacy as integrated reading, writing, and researching skills. To start examining and testing collaborative means of supporting our students' further development of these skills, SAC Leadership sponsored the creation of a professional development vehicle, the Research and Engagement Academy, where a working group of faculty and staff can continue these important conversations.
REA Goals
The Research and Engagement Academy's goals are to assemble a group of instructors, tutors, and librarians who will examine, develop, and test collaborative means of empowering students to 1) more comfortably engage diverse texts from across the curriculum as critical readers and writers and 2) view more class projects, assignments, and/or activities as empowering means of understanding and contributing to discipline/profession specific conversations.
To achieve these goals, tutors, instructors, and librarians in the REA will 1) support and learn from each other; 2) study, discuss, and test various curricular and co-curricular means to help student writers and readers attain a greater sense of agency in their courses and disciplines; and 3) employ some shared language and strategies to support these goals in the classroom, the reference area, and the tutoring labs.
The Spirit of the Program
A Community of Engaged Researchers: Reading, writing, speaking, and listening--those four communal means of critically engaging and shaping ideas and conversations will drive ALL of our REA collaborations. Please notice we refer to these four activities as communal. As researchers in the REA, we will use these more interpersonal modes of active learning to enter and sustain ongoing conversations about our efforts to support our students. We promise that with our colleagues from the REA close by, learning and studying won't be such a lonely experience. : )
A Culture of Mutual Respect: We believe that conversations and collaborations between peers about our own best practices are as important as our examination of published practices and approaches championed by colleagues at other institutions. Each member of the REA working group brings invaluable insights and experiences to our conversation. We are eager and excited to share and really learn from each other. Please know that as we work together, we will do so with a firm respect of each member's professional authority and autonomy. In other words, nobody at the REA will dictate or force any REA participant to make any changes to the curricular or co-curricular support they provide the students. Whatever smaller or larger changes REA participants choose to make or not make as a result of these conversations is completely up to them. Each member of the REA retains their right to decide how deeply they get involved in the REA's collaborative opportunities.
A Culture of Support: The support provided by your peers during our REA sessions and events also extends to the participating programs. Please know that the Writing Center, Library, SLAC, other tutoring centers, and Fearless Learning staff are happy and ready to help support you and your students in any way possible. As a member of the REA team, each of you can find comfort knowing you just inherited a sizable support staff ready to make the SAC experience more exciting and enriching for you and your students. In your binder you will find information about these supporting programs, and of course our current REA class is filled with ambassadors from those services who will be happy to share how you and your students can make full use of their services.
A Team Who Values Your Job and Your Time: Since the REA team is very aware of the busy schedule of our fellow instructors, librarians, and tutors, we took the following steps to ensure your REA commitment does not unintentionally fatigue any of you, our valued REA participants:
If you have any concerns or questions about our supporting your participation in the program, please let one of the co-directors know, and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Research and Engagement Academy Faculty Fellows will:
REA Faculty Fellows will be required to:
REA Fall 2020 Calendar
We will meet in our Canvas Course Zoom room on the following Fridays from 10am-11:30am:
Session One: September 18 Session Two: October 2 Session Three: October 16 |
Session Four: October 30 Session Five: November 13 Session Six: TBD week of December 4
|
REA Spring 2020 Calendar
Session One: TBD Session Two: TBD Session Three: TBD |
Session Four: TBD Session Five: TBD
|
Your fearless co-directors,
Ernest Tsacalis, MFA, English
Celita Avila, MLIS, Library
Our goal is to help our students see themselves as researching readers and writers. Reading, writing, and researching as a singular process, a process that is inquiry-rich, highly recursive, very rewarding and very meaningful. Without this integrated sense of the process, students artificially separate the three activities and frequently avoid whichever activity they see as most timely and/or difficult. Before we can let our students experience some manageable small successes with this integrated process, we will explore our own understanding of being a researching reader and writer.
As academics, we intuitively integrate reading/writing/research in many ways. But we rarely slow down enough to make more strategic and explicit use of these moves. This explicitness forms the very foundation of our Fearless Learning program: to identify and use a common language for specific integrated read/write/research strategies amongst ourselves and for our students.
What are our roles? What relationship does that create with our students?
TEACHERS | STUDENTS |
facilitator | content creator |
coach | scholar |
encourager in chief | researcher |
hero | expert |
listener | author |
guide on the side | leader |
WONDER WOMAN | discoverer |
friend | listener |
hero | involved |
investigator | |
What roles do our students play? What does that say about their relationship to us?
1. Get your Group Letter - A, B, C - and designate a Team Recorder
Group A -
Group B -
Group C -
2. The Team Recorder will open up this document and locate their Group Letter - A, B, C: REA Group Storytelling You Will Need.docx
3. The Team Recorder will ask the rest of the team to look at their individual icebreaker responses for examples of the listed items requested for their Group Letter - A, B, C.
4. Going down the entire list of items for their Group Letter - A, B, C, the Team Recorder types one response next to each item on their Group Letter's list.
5. Team Recorders? Keep your document open. You will need it for the next part!
Group A
fill-in-the-blanks-story-3.pdf
Group B
fill-in-the-blanks-story-1.pdf
Group C
crazy-story-summer.pdf
Group D
fill-in-the-blanks-story-5.pdf
Your group has been given an 8 1/2" by 11" sheet of paper with a picture of some shapes and lines:
Introduction
"Making predictions is a strategy in which readers use information from a text (including titles, headings, pictures, and diagrams) and their own personal experiences to anticipate what they are about to read (or what comes next). A reader involved in making predictions is focused on the text at hand, constantly thinking ahead and also refining, revising, and verifying his or her predictions. This strategy also helps students make connections between their prior knowledge and the text." (Fries-Gaither, 2011)
Jessica Fries-Gaither. 2011. "Making Predictions: A Strategy for Reading and Science Learning". Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, Ohio State University. www.beyondweather.ehe.osu.edu/issue/the-sun-and-earths-climate/making-predictions-a-strategy-for-reading-and-science-learning (Links to an external site.)accessed July 5, 2018.
Learning Outcomes for this Module
Participants will generate predictions to activate prior knowledge.
Participants will evaluate their predictions and refine them if necessary as reading progresses.
At the end of the reading, participants will test their predictions and should verify or modify the accuracy of their predictions by finding supporting statements in the text.
Optional Readings
framework-for-success-postsecondary-writing.pdf Download framework-for-success-postsecondary-writing.pdf
Teaching Students the Skills of Expert Readers (Links to an external site.)
Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) (Links to an external site.)
Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard
read The Storm ending
discuss predictions
read back through text for evidence supporting predictions
a little negotiation with meaning (words like birthright, stolidly, sombre, etc.)
BREAK
predictive analysis with other genres
give part of the works, out of context (chunking) - opening paragraph of a news story, section of scholarly article, etc.
practice predictions along the way
give whole works and use "peek-a-boo" predictions
Hey hey! Thank you in advance for trying out one of the tools in the librarians' teaching arsenal -- LibWizard!
Click on the link and make some predictions about a research article that we've chopped up into 5 sections: https://alamo-sac.libwizard.com/f/predict (Links to an external site.)
Your goal? Predict what will come next in the article as you progress through it. What will the authors share with you, the reader? What types of information will the authors include? What clues do the authors provide to guide your predictions? If you have any prior knowledge of the topic can you make some educated guesses as to specific content?
And herrrrrrrrrrrre's....your predictions! (Links to an external site.)
And a link to the full NYT article: Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked (Links to an external site.)
Ernie sez: "Incorrect predictions help us make more interesting and less obvious connections."
In a paper published last week in Nature Plants (Links to an external site.), researchers reported they had found the cause: calcium ions. By inducing the flytraps to glow when calcium entered their cells, a team of scientists was able to show how the ions build up as the hairs are triggered, eventually causing the snap.
Introduction
What does it mean to actively read a text? We ask our students to do it and show them that active reading involves annotating—which requires them to slow down and engage a text one manageable bite at a time by writing comments and questions in a text’s margins.
But what is really happening when students put their words, their understanding and questions next to the words and ideas of the printed text? What happens in these initial student attempts to use their own language and ideas and prior knowledge to grapple with the language and the ideas and forms presented by the author? I’ll tell you what is happening. Your students are actively and boldly engaging in a conversation WITH a text—which is a really big deal.
Think about it. Students are used to having conversations ABOUT texts in class. However, as active readers, they are empowered to sustain conversations WITH texts. Their margin notes document the questions and comments they use to challenge and engage and understand a text. But this back-and-forth between the author’s words and their words, the author’s ideas and their newly contextualized and ever-evolving understanding of those ideas, this back-and-forth is better characterized as a negotiation. Readers actively negotiate meaning with a text. Your students, as active readers, are empowered to negotiate meaning with a text. Wow.
We agreed that we want our students to see themselves as autonomous agents of academia. So maybe inviting students to view themselves as negotiators of meaning and participants in important conversations may help them gain that type of confidence. When a student reader successfully negotiates meaning with a text, the value of their language, experiences, and prior knowledge are affirmed. Today we will start talking about how to help students develop this empowering view of their tasks and capabilities as researching readers and writers.
We know a great deal about what good readers do when they read. We will revisit the following list of vetted strategies from time to time to consider which ones you may want to more explicitly promote in your learning environments:
• Good readers are active readers.
• From the outset they have clear goals in mind for their reading. They constantly evaluate whether the text, and their reading of it, is meeting their goals.
• Good readers typically look over the text before they read, noting such things as the structure of the text and text sections that might be most relevant to their reading goals.
• As they read, good readers frequently make predictions about what is to come.
• They read selectively, continually making decisions about their reading - what to read carefully, what to read quickly, what not to read, what to reread, and so on.
• Good readers construct, revise, and question the meanings they make as they read.
• Good readers try to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words and concepts in the text, and they deal with inconsistencies or gaps as needed.
• They draw from, compare, and integrate their prior knowledge with material in the text.
• They think about the authors of the text, their style, beliefs, intentions, historical milieu, and so on.
• They monitor their understanding of the text, making adjustments in their reading as necessary.
• They evaluate the text's quality and value, and react to the text in a range of ways, both intellectually and emotionally.
• Good readers read different kinds of text differently.
• When reading narrative, good readers attend closely to the setting and characters.
• When reading expository text, these readers frequently construct and revise summaries of what they have read.
• For good readers, text processing occurs not only during "reading" as we have traditionally defined it, but also during short breaks taken during reading, even after the "reading" itself has commenced, even after the "reading" has ceased.
• Comprehension is a consuming, continuous, and complex activity, but one that, for good readers, is both satisfying and productive.
Block, C. C., & Pressley, M. (2001). Comprehension instruction: Research-based best practices. New York: Guilford.
Pressley, M. , & Afflerbach, P. (1995). Verbal protocols of reading: The nature of constructively responsive reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Learning Outcomes for this Module
Participants will improve reading comprehension through the use of text annotation.
Optional Readings
Study Strategies: A Simple Guide to Text Annotation (Links to an external site.)
NEED HELP with Hypothesis? Take a look at this how-to video for Canvas student view (Links to an external site.). You can fast forward, speed it up (chipmunk voice!), rewatch. Cool.
1. Continue your annotations of King's Letter from Birmingham Jail in Module 4: Activity 2 for just the first two pages. Your focus? On selecting words, phrases, sentences that help you predict what's coming next in pages three to the end of the Letter. Include your predictions in your annotations.
2. Load and read and annotate the article "Hands-Off Teaching: Conversation as Pedagogy in Library Instruction" by librarian and author Michelle Reale in the Hypothesis annotation tool below. This article is also available in standalone PDF Download available in standalone PDF . Select and annotate unfamiliar words or concepts, familiar scenarios, or things that make you go hmmmmmmm. Bonus points for linkups in your annotations to definitions or external sources!
3. Reply to at least ONE of your colleagues' annotations within the Hypothesis annotation tool.
Here are the 3 steps to get you off the ground with Hypothesis annotation tool
Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3:
1. Re-read your entries and your colleagues' entries/replies to Module 4: Reflection on how you might integrate annotation and negotiation of meaning with your students.
2. Re-read the Reale "Hands-off Teaching" article and your colleagues' annotations/replies on the article. Try really hard NOT to add more annotations or replies, but we completely get it if you feel compelled!
3. Circle back to your Module 4: Reflection and read the posts and replies one more time.
4. Split into two breakout rooms and have a conversation around: What do you see between these two collections of texts? What do you wonder? Where is the conversation going? How is the process affecting you as a researching reader and writer?
5. We called an audible yesterday afternoon and decided to throw in another text -- just a few paragraphs -- about reading and about the power of 'No' from poet and author Anne Boyer. When you engage students in making connections, when we engage ourselves in making connections with them, it becomes a lot easier to discover and relate to additional texts which add to our original conversations. We'll go into the breakout rooms again and compare what Anne Boyer says about 'No' and how it connects to King's Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Also see Anne Boyer's 'No' from same source: (Links to an external site.)
History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, escaped to the desert, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly also. Animals refuse: at the zoo they gaze through Plexiglas, fling feces at human faces. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades, and workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts and aborting the embryos, and the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible daily lesson in just not.
Saying nothing is a preliminary method of no. To practice unspeaking is to practice being unbending, more so in a crowd. Cicero wrote cum tacent, clamant—“in silence they clamor”—and he was right: never mistake silence for agreement. Silence is as often conspiracy as it is consent. A room of otherwise lively people saying nothing, staring at a figure of authority, is silence as the inchoate of a now-initiated we won’t.
...
Some days my only certain we is this certain we that didn’t, that wouldn’t, whose bodies or spirits wouldn’t go along. That we slowed, stood around, blocked the way, kept a stone face when the others were complicit and smiling. And still we ghost, and no-show, and in the enigma of refusal, we find that we endogenously produce our own incapacity to even try, grow sick and depressed and motionless under all the merciless and circulatory conditions of all the capitalist yes and just can’t, even if we thought we really wanted to. This is as if a river, who saw the scale of the levees, decided that rather than try to exceed them, it would outwit them by drying up.
While it is true that refusal is a partner to death—I think it was Mary McCarthy who said even a gun to the head is merely an invitation—death is also a partner to refusal, as in often not the best option, but an option nonetheless. Death as refusal requires as its material only life, which if rendered cheap enough by the conditions that inspire the refusal, can become precious again when selectively and heroically deployed as a no.
We talked a little bit about genre analysis and audience/purpose in our last session. With those related concepts in mind, we want to introduce you to just one part of a very formal document written by academic librarians for other academic librarians, faculty, and administrators. Pleasure reading it ain't! But it is a specific type of genre for a specific audience with a singular purpose: to begin and guide conversations around student information literacy. The Framework is very purposefully non-prescriptive and offers up a multitude of desirable difficulties and grappling opportunities. In short, the Framework shook the very foundation of academic librarianship forcing us to rethink our approach to teaching and learning. Cool. But like any formal document it was a product of much debate among experts before it was eventually pulled and squeezed through the keyhole of compromise. Therefore the Framework is not perfectly perfect in every way. So we invite you to help us gnaw around the edges and heck maybe even go full revolution and burn it to the ground. We'll see how it goes.
-Celita and Ernie
There are SIX frames in the Framework, but we want you to engage with only ONE frame for our next session: Research as Inquiry.
1. First, take a quick peek at the infographic in this Module's intro. Let some of that stuff walk around in your head a bit coupled with the fact that not much as changed since the survey was conducted.
2. Second, please read the Introduction to the Framework for Information Literacy (Links to an external site.) for context. Then launch the Hypothesis annotation tool below to complete nos. 2-3.
3. Highlight two things from the bulleted lists of Knowledge Practices and/or Dispositions that make you say YES! and annotate WHY.
4. Highlight two things from the bulleted lists of Knowledge Practices and/or Dispositions that make you PAUSE... or say NO! and annotate WHY.
Let's pop back into our annotations of the Research as Inquiry Frame, review the bulleted items and our thoughts on those, then scroll to Scholarship as Conversation and annotate those bulleted items.
What do you notice? What do wonder? Highlight and annotate any Yes/Maybe/No reactions to the Conversation Frame.
BREAKOUT ROOMS to discuss, compare, negotiate meaning...
Directions:
A. Objectives:
B. Second Seed Source: The Conversation Continues
Now that we have read, collaboratively annotated and discussed the clergymen's "A Call for Unity" we actively and collaboratively read King's response, "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Download "Letter from Birmingham Jail," to see how accurate our predictions are. As we read King's letter, we will continue to fold predictions into our annotative practices.
C. Activity Directions:
1. Go back to Activity One of this module and reread "A Call for Unity," all our annotations, and your predictions.
2. Click the link at the bottom in this page to access King's letter in the Hypothesis annotation tool (Links to an external site.)
3. Read and annotate only the first page of the letter. Use your annotations to make questions or comments about interesting and/or surprising. Your annotations may even comment on how some of your "Call for Unity" predictions were correct or incorrect.
Here is a quick reminder on how to annotate in Hypothesis:
Highlight the phrase or passage you wish to annotate
Click the "" annotation tool button. On the right side of the screen you will now see an annotation box with your name and the highlighted passage.
Write your margin note in the annotation box
Save your annotations by clicking "Post to SAC Fearless Learning" at the bottom of your annotation box.
4. At the bottom of the page add one more annotation where you predict what King will argue next and how he will shape/present that argument.
5. Actively read just the second page of King's letter and repeat steps three and four.
Today we are going to consider what engaging a document may mean and look like. To enlarge our sense of this type of engagement we are going to focus on our more communal and purposeful sense of what reading and writing can be. The document we will engage today is the instructions we read and followed last class.
Read and evaluate the linked class instructions as a teacher who is always looking for new tricks and new ways to change up parts of your lessons or assignments. Read it multiple times and reflect on what happened last class. Look at it through your teacher lens and give it an evaluative squint. Use your experiences, knowledge, and values as a teacher to start considering what smaller or larger parts of this lesson can be reconfigured and/or repurposed for your class. Think about what parts you might merge with what you do best to change up any class activity, lesson, and/or assignment.
Introduction
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy defines searching in the following way: Searching for information is often nonlinear and iterative, requiring the evaluation of a range of information sources and the mental flexibility to pursue alternate avenues as new understanding develops. (Links to an external site.)
Simply put, searching for information does not happen by moving from point A to point B in a straight line. Often times, searching is more akin to a loop, or a twisting, turning, squiggly line. As new information is found we must sometimes circle back to where we began and follow a different route. In this way the process also becomes iterative or repetitive and must be applied again and again in different variations. Multiple searches that utilize different keywords or different search tools provides a wide variety of options and results.
Searching as Strategic Exploration
The act of searching often begins with a question that directs the act of finding needed information. Encompassing inquiry, discovery, and serendipity, searching identifies both possible relevant sources as well as the means to access those sources. Experts realize that information searching is a contextualized, complex experience that affects, and is affected by, the cognitive, affective, and social dimensions of the searcher. Novice learners may search a limited set of resources, while experts may search more broadly and deeply to determine the most appropriate information within the project scope. Likewise, novice learners tend to use few search strategies, while experts select from various search strategies, depending on the sources, scope, and context of the information need.
Learners who are developing their information literate abilities
Learners who are developing their information literate abilities
Optional Readings
Video: From Question to Keyword.mp4 Download From Question to Keyword.mp4
Video courtesy of University Libraries, University of North Carolina Greensboro (Links to an external site.).
Guiding research question or statement?
5 Ws redux - Who, What, Where, When, Why?
SAC Library Search Plan 7_3 Download SAC Library Search Plan 7_3
LibGuide - REA: Searching as Strategic Exploration (Links to an external site.)
Readers and writers have an easier time creating and navigating a document when they know more about how that document genre is typically organized. Each discipline employs its own document genres to shape and share knowledge and to sustain important conversations. As our students get better at thinking about audience and purpose, it is helpful for them to also think about the typical form and content of a document genre to better orient themselves as readers and writers. Today we will look at how we can scaffold some genre analysis activities into the reading and writing portions of our curriculum.
Consider the strategies we've been working with:
All woven together within the information literacy frameworks of Scholarship as Conversation / Research as Inquiry.
Wow.
Really consider all the steps you would need to take in order to get our integrated reading/writing/research strategies from our REA world and into your classroom. The worksheet is your action plan. If you need to review specifics of each strategy, review the Canvas Modules with our overview, activities, and homework.
Our Fearless Learning goal is not to completely change what you're already doing but to just tilt it a little. Just enough to enhance your good work and assignments with pedagogy designed for integrated reading/writing/research.
Outcomes:
Let's look at specific ways we can implement our integrated reading, writing, and research strategies with an eye towards audience and purpose.
Outcomes:
1. Explore lesson plans - what are you doing now? how can we make subtle but impactful changes? how would you explain a particular strategy?
2. Identify and evaluate key components of a transparent assignment
Links:
Transparent Assignment Design (Links to an external site.) - Mary-Ann Winkelmas, Instructional Development & Research Coordinator, UNLV
Transparency in Teaching: Faculty Share Data and Improve Students' Learning (Links to an external site.) - Mary-Ann Winkelmas, AACU publication
Transparent Assignments Enhance Students' Success (Links to an external site.) - Mary-Ann Winkelmas, UNLV
1. Lesson plans - What have you done in the past? What can you do in the future?
2. Transparent assignments - What do you notice? What do you wonder?
Sample Assignment 1
Find a media report about a court case in which the defendant and their lawyer(s) successfully used the insanity defense as it was defined in today’s lecture. Using your own words, write ONE paragraph explaining how the court case fits the definition of insanity. Your explanation will include that part of the definition that applies and your explanation will include the evidence you need to prove that your example fits the definition. Any evidence you present will not use any words contained in the definition – use synonyms.
Don't sweat this! You got this! As long as you give us an idea of how you WERE doing a lesson plan/assignment v. what you'd like to do NOW by tilting towards Fearless strategies, we are cool and you'll be check-check complete. And yep, put the old and new lesson plan in one file and old and new assignment in one file for us to easily review and offer feedback on your lesson plan changes and your assignment changes. You do not have to use the templates. No, you do not. Only if you want to! Promise.
Templates:
For Librarian, Tutors, and Faculty: Lesson Plan Old v New example/template Download Lesson Plan Old v New example/template
For Faculty only: Transparent Assignment Template Download Transparent Assignment Template
p.s. We'd like to offer a gentle reminder on the assignment revisions regarding audience and purpose. Who besides yourself and your students will be negotiating meaning with your text?