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ACM Information Literacy Project Information Literacy Workshop for Literature Faculty Cornell College, June 16-18, 2004 |
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An Information Literacy Workshop, funded by the ACM Mellon Information Literacy Grant, was held at Cornell College beginning the evening of June 16 and concluding on the afternoon of June 18. At this workshop, faculty members of literature in the humanities -- including English, theater, comparative literature, and literature in a foreign language -- worked together in groups to develop effective assignments. In addition, librarians and instructional technologists joined the groups to participate in the construction of these assignments. The Planning Committee for the workshop included:
The Committee developed five specific focus groups for the workshop. These groups, consisting of faculty, librarians, and instructional technologists, worked together to develop assignments in these specific areas. The focus groups are listed below. The participants received advance readings and discussed current and ongoing Information Literacy activities at the different ACM campuses. In addition, participants informally presented the information literacy assignments that they had used in a literature classroom. |
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Focus groups for the workshop |
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Thanks to developments in film studies, performance studies, and online scholarship, many of us now teach materials that do not lend themselves to a classroom situation where a teacher and students each refer to a copy of a printed text that becomes the basis of a lecture or discussion. How can we use new technologies to help students engage film, drama, digital archives of texts and images, or hypertext literature in ways that preserve what we value about reading texts together in a classroom situation? The participants in this focus group will focus on developing assignments that use the interactive capabilities of the Internet to bridge the gap between live classroom interactions and performed plays, screened films, or digitized texts. |
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Paintbrushes to Powerpoint: Enabling Student Creative Projects Creative projects offer students the opportunity to bring interdisciplinary or even extracurricular interests to bear on specific course material. Whether it's designing a set of action figures for Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, creating a web-based commonplace book, or producing a set of watercolor illustrations for Paradise Lost, students can use creative projects to engage productively with course material. How do we bring these creative projects into the classroom without de-centering the course topic? For example, how do we enable students to construct their own website or illustrate a passage from Paradise Lost without ultimately teaching a computer or art class? How do we define "technology" in constructing these kinds of assignments? What kinds of assignments organically connect the creative projects with the course material? Our intention in this focus group is to design several assignments which enable students to use technologies as a means of engaging creatively with the course material. |
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Mapping the Critical Terrain: Criticism, Theory, and Allusions Most articles published today in the field of literary studies assume a great deal of knowledge about critical theory, an area about which most undergraduates have very little knowledge. The highly specialized language and highly allusive nature of critical theory make it difficult for novice scholars to understand the argument of a given article. When we ask our students to locate, read, and respond to current scholarship, we need to provide tools and resources that will help the students negotiate the disciplinary discourse. By helping our students to map the critical terrain, they will be better able to understand a scholarly argument and their position in relation to it. In this focus groups, we will discuss strategies for efficiently and effectively assisting students to understand the context of critical arguments. |
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Choosing, Understanding, and Writing with Primary Historical Sources Now that undergraduate students at small liberal arts colleges can easily access the digitalized images of rare books in the collections of, say, the University of Pennsylvania, or unedited transcriptions of early texts such as, for example, those included in the Brown University Women Writers Project, or such collections of historical documents as have been made available in the Bedford Shakespeare series, how can we encourage them to engage in original historical research? How do we enable undergraduates to navigate these specialized databases and publications? What assignments can we develop that teach our students the skills of the scholarly editor, or conversely, the art of de-editorializing? Last but not least, how can we preserve the thrill of the "first contact" with a rare text, when that contact more often than not takes place in a digitalized environment? These are some of the questions to be addressed through discussion of selected readings and our teaching experience. Our main goal in this focus group will be to develop assignments that foster archival sleuthing skills and new analytical habits of our students. |
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Incorporating innovative technologies into the classroom can develop new literacies, in addition to those already privileged in the literature classroom, as students learn what tools are available to help them-first, to find information and, second, to present it in a variety of different forms. Both students and professors are on a constantly shifting terrain, and they frequently work together to incorporate these new technologies into the literature classroom. There needs to be a number of delicate balances maintained-how to incorporate the new technologies without erasing the old ones, how to teach the new technologies without overemphasizing mechanical skills, and how to take full advantage of the power of these new technologies. These juggling acts, along with a number of others, will be discussed in this focus group, with the participants sharing their experience and their expertise. During the workshop, this focus group will work together to develop new assignments and revise former ones that incorporate a variety of new technologies. |
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