Tag Archives: information literacy

8th Grade Propaganda Curriculum

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Our 8th grade social studies teacher, Sara Baquero-Garcia, is a font of knowledge when it comes to propaganda. Having been impressed by her students’ Animal Farm projects, and by helping her find resources for another part of the project, I decided to interview her about her overall propaganda coverage with the 8th grade. Her wide-ranging explanations covered many different types of propaganda, how they interlink with each other and with the modern world, some aspects of the projects, and more.

For length, I have divided the post into two, with the first covering project background and types of propaganda. Part two, coming in June, will cover her Animal Farm project, and offer a student’s insights into the project and what she learned.

Now, on to part one!

Project Purpose

Sara’s propaganda project evolved from wanting students to “explore the media around them,” the images and messages they see and hear every day. What do these images and messages mean? What do they omit? “Those things that are not said are often the most important ones,” says Sara. “And if they are said, how are they being said?” Digging deeper, she wants students to consider “how we come to believe what we believe, and how we come to assume the things we assume.” The goal is for students to “become critical thinkers, so that they can make their own conclusions.”

Project Background

Sara has been teaching propaganda for decades, starting at The American School in Japan, in the 1990s. “We were revamping our curriculum at the time, and I had the freedom to do this media literacy project,” she says. In the 1990s, “in Tokyo you could walk anywhere and it was like you were bombarded by Times Square type of visuals,” which at once brought propaganda to mind and inspired the unit. Sara used to teach it as a two-month unit, which she felt was “totally worth it,” but the kids got propaganda-ed out. That prompted her, over time, to “separate the parts of the project” and run different parts “when they are beneficial for whatever we’re talking about.” It’s a “mammoth” project, so a one-block lesson was never going to suffice!

One non-negotiable part of any project Sara does is student choice. “The kid has absolute choice within the resources that we either give them, or that they find in something that they are connected to,” she says. “That is crucial.” While assigning a broad topic, like a big news event, for an initial activity is fine, “it should never be the piece that they have to do” for the main part of the project. Says Sara, “I think it’s really important to give them agency. And as they’re looking for their favorite piece, they’re looking at so much more, and so that’s where the research can be super rewarding for them. …They’re starting to think through the lens of the researcher.” They are doing the analyzing Sara looks for, and focusing on something of interest helps them “really zero in” on not just that topic, but on propaganda in general.

Types of Propaganda

Ideally Sara addresses four types of propaganda: political, commercial, news, and entertainment. While each might have different purposes, they use similar strategies students can recognize in any situation. “I usually use twelve techniques [of propaganda], not because they’re the only techniques, but because they’re ubiquitous,” Sara says. She asks her students to “really reflect” on the common elements inside these techniques. Here is Sara’s general description of the project itself, and, here is the list of the techniques Sara uses with the students.

Political Propaganda

Political propaganda is often the natural starting point. Because of the fall election cycle, Sara tends to start the year with politics. “That’s a great time to explore the topic of political propaganda and the effect that it has on the electorate,” she says. “You’re looking at the campaign process. You’re looking at how people vote. You’re looking at the system of gerrymandering. …There’s so many things to look at when you think of campaigns,” including “how propaganda connects to our understanding of politics.”

For researching this aspect of the project, Sara relies on some resources we post on her class LibGuide, like The Living Room Candidate—”The absolute best source for presidential campaigns.” She also makes use of local advertisements and mail-delivered pamphlets. One year, Sara had her students study major initiatives on the ballot, one initiative per group. They examined pros and cons, viewpoints from either side, etc. By the end, she felt that in addition to having a “blast” doing the project, “these kids knew more about those initiatives than any adult that you would ask out in the street.” Sara liked watching how they came “to the understanding that you don’t need this flashy situation of presidential campaign in order to be engaged within the system of what’s happening in that election.”

Another way she approaches political propaganda is the historical context, which she finds vital because it shows “the power of political propaganda.” She says, “Of course, you can’t do a historical propaganda examination without looking at the Nazi propaganda of World War II, and the campaign[s] against Jews,” Communists, Romani, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, etc. “The intensity of what that meant with the eventual Holocaust.”

For students, Sara wants them to explore questions like, “How could I, a normal every day German citizen, come to believe that it’s OK for [my] Jewish neighbor to just disappear? How does one get to that? How do people get to a place of complacency with the status quo when something like that is happening around you?” She turns facile answers, like “they were evil” or “they were ignorant” or “they didn’t know,” back on the students. “How are we complacent, or how are we ignorant, or how are we unaware, or how are we being brainwashed?”

To help answer these questions, Sara recalls to students the techniques of propaganda, which include fear and scapegoating. “Did the Nazis use fear? Absolutely—they had a whole movie of connecting Jewish citizens with rats,” she reminds students. “And that film made people so afraid of even being touched by a Jewish person, so then it became OK to separate Jewish kids in Jewish schools, and to not have Jewish colleagues at your job, because they were equated by the propaganda as vermin.” “Being told again and again to believe in something can have a powerful effect on the receiver of the information, and if people in power are the ones giving the information, it can be a very powerful tool in convincing people to follow an ideology without thinking critically. That is always a dangerous result and that is a major reason for students to learn how to question what is being told to students through propaganda.”

Commercial Propaganda

Sara tends to do commercial propaganda at a time that coincides with Christmas, “because we have so commercialized that holiday. I want kids to examine what they have, what they want, what they’re asking for, how their behavior as consumers has been shaped by propaganda, by commercials, by trends, by social media.” She calls those messages out for using “the same propaganda techniques” they’ve studied before, “to get us to thinking some way.” Especially Sara pinpoints influencers telling students “what they should look like and what they should buy and what’s cool.” She wants to get the students thinking about the cycle of trends like Stanley Cups, which were cool but now are not. “Every trend requires an expenditure, and every expenditure is benefiting someone,” Sara says, “benefiting some company or some business, and there’s things attached to that.”

If her time is limited for covering commercial propaganda, Sara might have her students look at commercials through the lens of the techniques used by political propaganda. For example, the fear technique used by the Nazis to target Jews gets used by commercials through the threat of being uncool or not accepted if you don’t have, for example, a Stanley Cup. Or the technique of promised happiness as shown by, say, Coca-Cola commercials. “You look at a Coca-Cola commercial and…everything is glittery. You know it’ll be better to be happier with Coca-Cola, right?”

Sara adds, “a commercial needs to do two things: it needs to give you what you should want, but it also needs to give you why you should want it and how not having it makes you less happy, less whole, less..something. The goal is to always make you feel less, unless you purchase whatever it is the commercial wants you to have.” When Sara sets the students free to look at commercials, “they can’t believe that the teacher is OK with them looking at commercials; how fun is that?” But through the laughter and sharing, they also start to analyze and think. “So having that fun session where they’re looking at all of these fun things, it’s not a waste of time; it’s actually helping them really zero in, and where they are in that part in that culture.”

Says Sara, “for most kids, what’s really interesting,” after they start studying commercial propaganda, “is that now they have the vocabulary to speak to what is happening to them. What are the influences happening to them?” Once they have the vocabulary, and that “intricate understanding,” students can say something like, “Wow, I did not realize that they were using XYandZ to get to me.” This also gives students the tools to understand what types of propaganda work best on them personally, as well as the understanding that “most successful pieces that use propaganda use more than one technique” for that reason—to appeal to many different people.

A tie-in for this part of the project is Annie Leonard’s video The Story of Stuff, which explores the system that brings us material products. It covers the process from extraction to manufacturing to disposal, including everything and everyone affected at each point along the way. Sara points out that Leonard, being an environmentalist, approaches the topic from a negative point of view—”commercialism can be really bad because it’s killing the environment.”

Then she shows students the other side of the coin through documentaries made by a media executive from the 1960s. These show “how industry is so great for jobs,” the economy, and taxes, “and we’re civilized, and we have all these amazing things, and…everything is looking hunky-dory because we now have skyscrapers.” As Sara shows the students, this media executive shows “the power of propaganda in a very positive way… It gets us to be civilized. It gets us to make the better product. It gets us to be able to choose the better product because now we know about it.” The video is called: Advertisement, What’s it Doing to Your Life” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz_q4PxZFxA

After watching both videos, students must “choose one product that [they] have purchased….and [then] look at six of eight components that are not a part of what the commercial told them.” This work takes the students two to three weeks, because they must really dig into it. Often, “It’s really hard to find information…[for example], you know Nike isn’t going to tell you where the plastic for your shoes came from.” Sara urges the students to think laterally in those cases. “When you have plastic manufacturing, where is it usually done?”

Thus, students learn “to infer from research into industries, research into health scenes, research into…the commercial aspect of it. Research into labor issues with the company or the product or the materials, issues with resources and where they come from.” Sara adds, “There’s a variety of things you can do, and then that’s where I’m really excited about it, because kids are seeing the big picture.” They are seeing, “Oh, every time I purchase something I’m making a choice of what to support, and it’s a minute choice, but I’m not the only one making it.” As Sara says, there are “thousands, perhaps millions of people, making that same choice,” and that’s where the power of commercial propaganda comes in.

News Propaganda

“With news,” Sara teaches, it’s “really important to differentiate between fake news and media bias, because fake news is fake news…it’s not true. But media bias is that much more powerful because it is ‘true,’ but it is also biased.” Think of how someone like [Dan Rather] on CBS would report on the Gulf War differently than someone like Wolf Blitzer on CNN. [Rather] might report, “At such and such time, this happened.” Whereas Blitzer might report “with the visuals, and the drama of the droppings, and…precise hits.” From this, Sara says, the viewer knows “this is terrible,” and now he’s adding “a lot more information that is or isn’t validated, but it’s what CNN is telling you.” She wants students to think, “OK, what in that is factual, and what is interpretation of what’s happening?”

This is the struggle, she says, “with all media right now….There’s so much of a blur between what is…news factual versus interpretation.” And once interpretation is involved, so is bias, “because we’re all interpreting in some way…leaving some things behind and highlighting others.” Sara wants students to explore the question of, “why do we do that?” Also questions like, “Who is behind that interpretation? Is there a company that doesn’t want you to highlight one thing or another? Is there a government telling you to highlight this? Is there a boss that has interest in XYZ and doesn’t want those interests to be harmed by the [news] piece?” She adds, “Or maybe it’s just bad reporting” by people who “have no idea what they’re doing, or maybe it’s an AI bot…the news has become such a mire…” Students getting their news from social media is a case in point. Says Sara, that’s even more biased, and the algorithms set your news on repeat “so you’re totally missing these other parts.”

When Sara addresses media propaganda, students work with the same propaganda techniques, “but now it’s really important to look at different media outlets, and how they’re reporting the same event.” She assigns students to choose a current news story and explore the ways different media outlets report the same story. “What is common and what is different?” One visual she’s appreciated using is the [Fontes] Media Bias Chart, “which is a fantastic visual.” Once students understand how much bias exists in media, they “explore how the reporting of that affected the outcomes politically, and/or, at the moment. So it’s all connected.”

Entertainment Propaganda

Entertainment propaganda, Sara says, may be “the most powerful type when it comes to culture. What kind of culture do we create? What kind of community do we build, and how does that community of that culture get built?” It’s about “why we do the things we do as people.” As an example, she mentions teen slang, like the now-ubiquitous “bro.” “Where did that come from?” she asks. “Who started that?” And why? The same goes for the “67” phenomenon. “Kids went crazy, and nobody knows what it means, but everybody’s having fun…so it becomes a part of that cultural trend.”

As Sara says, we live through trends like the “ice challenge” without ascertaining “how that came to us and why we follow it.” She wants her students to examine past entertainment and trends that derived from books or songs, and now social media. “Where do kids get [the idea] they should… eat Tide Pods?” she asks. “How does a kid get to choose to do that?” The students might say, “Oh, it’s fun,” but “why was it fun? …What made you think that that was fun?” The entertainment realm is particularly prone to people posting and reposting pieces, because they think the pieces are fun or funny, or they “wanted to be part of the fun.”

Moving on from trends, Sara looks at the multiplicity of messages in films and songs, like Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no education…” or the Beatles “Imagine all the people.” What do those songs mean? Or, what is a movie like The Matrix telling us to “think about ourselves, the future, the place of technology, what to fear, what to not fear?” Every song, movie, book, etc. “has a message.” Sara wants kids “to explore critically, what are those messages? How do they affect you?”

Despite its importance, though, Sara often “sadly” lacks the time to cover entertainment propaganda as fully as it deserves.

Librarian’s Note

Our library team has long had the privilege of supporting Sara’s work by helping curate resources for her project LibGuide and collaborating on source evaluation strategies with her students. These kinds of partnerships—between teachers and librarians—strengthen students’ ability to think critically about the information landscape they navigate every day.

Stay tuned in June for information about Sara’s Animal Farm project, and student insights!

Note: I used Flint for light copy-editing, drafting the transition between the two parts, and the conclusion in part two. Everything else is human-written, and it’s all human-edited!

Solutions Journalism: A Happy Habit, A Happy Use-case for Information Literacy

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Please see comments for a stream-of-consciousness update on how the lesson went and my faculty and students’ responses to Solutions Journalism. TBM 01/10/2025

Happy new year!

Fortunately, I am getting to start my new calendar year at school with Global Week, our ever-inspiring intersession. This year, our theme is “Bridging Divides: The Art of Listening, The Journey of Learning.” Overall, this topic means we are learning how to fight polarization.

To my great delight, I was asked to run a class on Solutions Journalism ahead of our final speaker, who works in that field. I’ve long been interested in this style of reporting, and was delighted to have a reason to learn more about the concept. As the child of an old-school journalist, it is exciting to see a movement trying to shift away from “if it bleeds, it leads” (the historical version of clickbait, one might argue) and instead look at news focused on positivity and hope.

It is fascinating to dig into what that premise looks like in practice. A far cry from human interest and hero-worship, I am finding Solutions Journalism to be an approach that allows room and provides methods for difficult discussions, while drawing on the evidence-based standards that I value from growing up discussing my father’s work.

As articulated by the Solutions Journalism Network, the four principles of the approach are:
“1 Response: Focuses on a response to a social problem — and on how that response has worked, or why it hasn’t;
“2 Insight: Shows what can be learned from a response and why it matters to a newsroom’s audience;
“3 Evidence: Provides data or qualitative results that indicate effectiveness (or a lack thereof); and
“4 Limitations: Places responses in context; doesn’t shy away from revealing shortcomings.”

What I like about this framing is that it leaves room for hope. Even when programs go wrong (which the method encourages journalists to write about), the goal is not to assess and place blame, but to analyze what we have learned so we can do better next time.

Even more consistently, the method gets away from all the messiness of the (broadly misunderstood) notion of “objectivity” of media, which carries not only a history of enabling limited perspectives in storytelling that glossed over social ills (like racism) but which also somehow got us to this idea that we have to pick two sides (no more, no fewer) and give them equal weight. It does not call for pro-and-con retellings, but asks journalists to look at a tried solution to a problem and see strengths, admit weaknesses, and embrace nuance.

The mindset is, in and of itself, about bridging divides. The foundational attention to complicating narratives rests, in part, on the notion that accepting common pro/con narratives on a topic are standing in the way of our gaining real understanding of what is going right or wrong. There is a sense of transcending political boundaries to ask larger — perhaps even more real? — questions and get at what can actually be done to improve a situation.

As a research skills educator, I find the ways evidence is defined and used in this type of reporting to be deeply meaningful. The standard is whether evidence helps the reader understand why something happened the way it did, rather than simply, “here is someone saying something angry/happy/tearful about our topic.”

As an educator of growing humans, I am profoundly grateful that there is a way my students can engage with societal problems that focuses hard on the potential for a better world.

If you want to check out some articles, the Solutions Journalism Network has a number of ways for you to approach finding examples, from their annual round-ups of favorite articles, to their international database of examples (warning: short reads are not the same as quality reads in this method), to their collections of examples such as heroes not hero worship and constructively reporting on failures.

OK, so, um. The whole idea of this form of journalism is to write about tried solutions, not ideas. I have read about the method, but am only using it with students for the first time today. If you have worked with Solutions Journalism in your school, would you let me know in the comments or by email?

May this new year bring many positive solutions into your world.

Do you have that pink book about Rosa Parks? On “impossible” questions becoming “possible”

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I was fully looking for something cheerful to post about today, and it turns out that “cheerful” in this instance means finding a use for something about which I have historically felt little enthusiasm: the new-ish top “result” in Google search.

When I worked at Google, one of the realizations I had revolved around questions that we librarians had a tendency to (among ourselves) view as “stupid.” First among those was asking for a book by the color of its cover. Essentially, we felt it was an unreasonable question, because it was one we could not answer. (Also because people remember green books as red and yellow books as blue, but I don’t yet have a solution for that problem.) Sometimes, technology allows us to solve a problem, as I discovered when I went to try to understand of what use color filtering in image searching could really be:



Well, this morning I was grappling with a question and I decided to try using Google AI to answer it, and look what happened:


Asking Google’s AI to tell me in which databases to find The Atlantic and JAMA in full-text

Are these responses complete? Completely correct? Did I burst into flame from typing a long-form question into a search box? The answer to each of these questions may well be “no.”

Nonetheless, I think about all the times that I wished I knew which databases to search to find x source, and I was pleasantly surprised to have this tool to try and help me.

So – hope this brings some joy or at least ease to your week. Take care, and search on!

Unpacking AI and Wikipedia quality

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With gratitude for the collaboration of Amy Pelman (Harker), Robin Gluck (Jewish Community High School of the Bay), Margi Putnam (Burr and Burton Academy), Hillel Gray (Ohio University), Sam Borbas, Cal Phillips, and a special librarian whose name we will not share due to their work.

Thank you so much to Alex for posting to our listserv about an article they read entitled “The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes.” Since our Wikipedia editing group meets Wednesday nights on Zoom, we decided to take a look and see if we could come up with a lesson plan for teaching students to understand when they see AI-generated content in Wikipedia. 

We read, experimented, and chatted for a few hours, trying to figure out what would be most helpful. Ultimately, we did not construct a lesson plan, but we have a set of burgeoning ideas and thoughts about approach. We look forward to collaborating with other members of this community to move forward, as needed.

Overall, while we see that some fallacious AI-generated content is making its way into Wikipedia, like it is in so many sources, we do not yet feel there is evidence that it is currently causing particular danger to information quality within Wikipedia.

 A very quick, vastly informal review of literature investigating the quality of Wikipedia content discovers other themes entirely. Overall content quality checking was common in the late 2000s/early 2010s. At that time, most researchers found that Wikipedia tended to be fairly high quality, often higher than the perception of quality by potential users. Over time, the understanding of “quality” and the research on Wikipedia has moved more into questioning the same issues we question in more traditional research sources: identity-related gatekeeping – who is included, who is excluded, how the identities of editors and the creators of source materials cited impacts the completeness of coverage on a given topic. As from early days, articles that get more traffic tend to measure up well if quality checked (e.g, anatomy), meaning that more obscure articles (and, I would argue, less used by students for schoolwork) have a greater chance of maintaining misinformation and errors. One study that looked closely at hoaxes reminded readers that, as of 2016, Wikipedia editors running “new article patrols” meant that 80% of new articles were checked within an hour of posting, and 95% within 24 hours. 

Thus, a significantly larger issue facing Wikipedia today is the substantial fall-off in the number of editors in recent years, which means that page patrolling and other quality-supporting behaviors are also suffering. This is a very real issue. 

On the bright site, there are many more tools that help editors doing quality-sustaining work to figure out where problems lie. I get notified whenever a page I (or my students) have worked on is edited, and when the changes are malicious the vandalism has usually been corrected in the few minutes it takes me to get to the page to check it. While one of the first lines of defense – the “recent changes” page and its sophisticated, bot-driven advanced search – does not yet have a set of choices for suspected AI-created content, I am guessing that we will see that option before too long. Here is how editors can currently filter the list of recent changes, and from the vandalism training I did I observed that the bigger problems tend to be dealt with extremely quickly:

Ultimately, given that genAI content is showing up in so many places, there is no reason to suspect Wikipedia any more than, say, content in many of our databases. In fact, depending on the type of database, articles may have fewer eyes on the lookout for problematic content than does Wikipedia. Certainly, the high-profile Elsivere case and the growing use of AI in our “trusted” news outlets suggested to our editing group that we do not so much need to warn students off of Wikipedia as we need to teach them about the overall changing information landscape and how to work within it.

Here is our brainstorm of potential topics that we might integrate into our teaching that address the increased use of genAI in all sources and in Wikipedia:

Teach about:

– Critical reading of all potential source materials, including – but not limited to – Wikipedia 

-Recognizing AI-reated content

– Identifying what on Wikipedia is “good information,” or learning when to use and not use Wikipedia

– Understanding that AI may be one of several factor that may add level of inaccuracy to Wikipedia, and is one of many factors editors watch out for with regularity

– Teaching about ethics of academic honesty

– Teaching about ethics of AI

– Teaching about AI and academic honesty

AI more generally:

– How do we recognize AI content?

– Google search has AI generate responses queries; does that make Wikipedia less relevant in our students’ information lives?

Wikipedia:

– Are there patterns on Wikipedia that are repeated with AI-generated content?

–Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup/AI Catchphrases is a wonderful source that records a number of phrases that may appear in AI-generated content, as does the Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup main page

–Category:Articles containing suspected AI-generated texts – Wikipedia

-There have been instances where text has appeared on Wikipedia pages that even our group members who have almost no knowledge of generative AI recognized immediately, such as the (long-ago fixed) page on IChing:

that even gives itself away quite explicitly:

– What are positive uses of AI on Wikipedia? (examples: helping with grammar, helping with sources, flagging possible vandalism)

– Look, as a class, at Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup and follow links to read and discuss the 

various impacts of AI on Wikipedia, and possibly extend that learning to other types of sources as well

– How do Wikipedia reviewers recognize vandalism?

– How quickly is Wikipedia “cleaned up” after an issue is flagged?

– How quickly is AI “cleaned up”?

– Look at recent changes page

– What are Wikipedia’s rules regarding AI-generated content?

– Does AI-created content violate the “No original research” rule? (based on Village Pump article)

So, we apologize that this is kind of a quick-and-dirty set of thoughts without many clear answers. Once more, however, we were all in agreement: Wikipedia appears no more riddled with AI-generated disinformation that other types of information, so learning to assess the quality of whatever you are reading is key.

A new way to record (and share) library statistics

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Of course one can track stats on various elements of library life…but what kind of audience and attention do they actually receive?

In July, I wrote about embracing joy — tracking everyday joyful experiences with a simple quilting, paint, or paper craft project — as imagined and shared by Kitty (@nightquilter), the founder of the Quilt Your Life Crew aspirational data visualization project. In addition to tracking joy, members of the group pick something to track for a period of time (usually a year) and we support each other in designing an effective visualization. They can be simple patterns, or more complicated tangible or abstract designs, as well. A favorite of mine tracked what kinds of tacos a quilter ate over the course of a year.

I tend to track something from my work life. For the 2023-2024 school year, I chose to track the library’s instructional collaborations:

A brief legend of what each square represents. This pattern, “Renew” by @jitterywings, was perfect to convey a very complex data set. To see a lengthier legend, click here.

I worked hard to complete and compile the sixty-nine blocks of the quilt face and also the legend before returning for our new school year. (I have been told to communicate that construction lasted through 10 audiobooks + 7 seasons of the Great British Baking Show + a weekend-long quilting retreat + a live SF Giants game + the summer Olympics.)

In our opening days, before students officially returned to campus, I displayed the front and back of the quilt outside the library.

The work paid off! Many of my colleagues stopped to look it over, to try to identify their block(s), and — in at least two cases — note: “Oh, I did not have you in my class very much, did I?”

And now? I am in their classes on a regular basis this year. I believe that the collaborations here (across all departments and all grades) normalized the idea of having research skills instruction for some colleagues.

Another fun outcome is that the colleague from maintenance who helped me hang the quilt commented that it might be helpful for him to make a visualization of the work orders he undertakes for the school. I offered to help him (though not to make a quilt), and am looking forward to the rather unique collaboration that will spring from that conversation.

Of course, being a librarian, I felt it important to cite my sources, and I think I will try to do this for any quilt using new fabrics in the future! (Most fabrics have an edge, called a “selvedge,” that gives the title, creator, and manufacturer of the fabric.)

The bibliography for the quilt, showing what fabrics and pattern were used in its construction.

Not everyone can — or wants to — spend a gazillion hours making a quilt, but as the Quilt Your Life Summer Joyfest has proven, there are many ways to undertake such a visualization. Pick a medium that works for you! It is, however, helpful to find a nontraditional form of visualization that will engage your colleagues and make them want to stop, look, and engage.

What might you want to track for public consumption? How might you like to construct a data visualization?

“Just teach the databases”: Better responses than eye-rolling?

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A recent conversation with a colleague about that perpetual, one-time-a-year “collaboration” request for “just a quick introduction to databases” made me reflect carefully on why I don’t really get that particular gem of an assignment anymore.

This colleague had just received that same ask and felt saddened – as it did not resonate with what she thought students actually needed.

So, we began discussing what skills her particular students do need to move forward in the word, and then we began plotting a “database lesson” that would deliver one of those skills, instead. The process reminded me of a closely-held principle I’ve had since before entering school librarianship: what we teach is mostly thinking skills; any technical skills will need to be about flexibly adapting to change over time and across tools, in any event.

This is where I began to reflect on strategies I used in the early years at my school when this was a frequent instructional request. Now, I do teach the basic intro in ninth grade (and my colleague in sixth). Otherwise, whenever I was asked to teach databases, I instead taught a skill that was useful in a broad range of research situations. Of course, we used the databases to practice, so I was delivering on my colleague’s desires. These lessons include, but are not limited to:
*How search tools work (I’ve pivoted to using Stephanie Gamble’s lego method, far superior to my prior attempts);
*Mind mapping pre-existing knowledge to expose potential search terms;
*Using stepping stone sources (reading for useful search terms);
*Imagining sources (for example: most newspaper articles on sports do not mention the name of the sport, but tend to mention team names; articles on psychology do not tend to use the word “psychology” – unless it is in the journal title – but instead refer to specific conditions and possibly the subject group tested);
*Close reading of non-fiction to determine POV;
*Accessing multiple perspectives;
and so forth.

I have recently realized that this approach not only delivers more skills to my students that are more flexible across their needs, but it also demonstrated to my colleagues the greater range of what I have to offer and has led to many fewer requests for “just the databases,” and colleagues coming in the door looking for more meaningful and applicable (and less repetitive) engagements.

What I Mean When I Say Information Literacy

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When I arrived at my current school months before Covid, I was told that the only department that had traditionally collaborated with the library was the history department. This was shared in a self-evident way–the history classes were the only ones that did research. My gut reactions were 1) I/the library can collaborate on more than traditional research, 2) surely there is research happening in other classes, and 3) my goal is to start collaborating with more departments. So, I started reaching out to department chairs to come pitch the library in department meetings. Some chairs were happy to let me have some time. Others were friendly but skeptical in the “we don’t do research” kind of way. 

When I said “library” or “information” or variations of that, all anybody could hear was “formal research.”

And then, on this very day in 2020, we started teaching virtually and my goals and priorities were radically altered. Which is how I found myself not fully revisiting my goal of building stronger relationships with all departments until this past fall. With a new chair in our Arts Department I reached out again and heard a similar response–our arts classes are performance/product oriented: the chorus sings, the ensembles play, the theater students act, the photography students take pictures, etc.–so they don’t really need instruction from the library. Of course, my librarian brain could think of loads of ways our arts students use information and need information literacy, but what I realized, in this case and others,is that something kept being stuck in translation. When I said “library” or “information” or variations of that, all anybody could hear was “formal research.”

https://xkcd.com/1576/

To remedy this I’ve taken a two pronged approach. The first step has been to address the semantics challenge. Starting with our Vice Principal for Academic Affairs, I’m working to develop a broader, shared understanding of information literacy (IL) drawing on the ACRL Frameworks. We also discussed how to develop a mutual understanding of IL so that faculty can start to see how they already teach IL within their disciplines and also possibilities for collaboration that they had not considered before. Next, I will be joining a department heads meeting to explain IL, and later in the spring doing a mini-PD at a faculty meeting. When our faculty and I are speaking the same language we will be able to have more productive conversations, and hopefully collaborations.

The second step is a targeted approach of pitching hypothetical IL lessons to teachers and departments who don’t expect to have a need for library instruction. A fruitful example from this fall turned into a two-day collaboration with our Advanced Photography class. I approached the Photo teacher and asked if/to what extent her class discussed ethical use of images, particularly in light of the spread of AI image generators, or how students are copyright holders of the images they take. By offering a idea that I saw as a potential intersection of IL and the work the photo students were doing we were able to design a teaching collaboration. On the first class period I introduced students to copyright, their rights as a copyright holder of the photos they create, Creative Commons licenses and how to include those on works they share online, and how to understand some of the issues in determining the ethical ways of engaging with other peoples images. On our second day we discussed the impact of AI on the authority of photographs in photojournalism and the bias in AI image generators. This collaboration would never have developed if we stayed at the misunderstanding of library=research. 

By recognizing this bottleneck in library outreach, I have been able to take the steps to build a shared understanding among our faculty about the broader possibilities of what the library can mean for them and their students. But, shared understanding is only one step. By offering new ideas of how to build students’ IL skills in their own disciplines, I have helped faculty start to see what that broader definition of “library” can look like own classes. These demonstrations of non-research information skills in action are already starting to spread roots in departments, opening doors to new collaboration opportunities by showing, rather than just telling, what teaching our students IL can really include.

What lessons do you teach outside the traditional research projects? How have you engaged with less obvious (to them) classes or departments?

Bringing Sources into Conversation: Teaching Literature Review to High School Students (Part 2)

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As I mentioned in November, I have become a huge fan of having students read and write literature reviews before heading off to college. Working with students in those upper-level electives that use scholarly sources, I have found that they completely misinterpret what that section of papers is doing and how they are meant to interact with it. More importantly, I find that literature reviews help with basic and highly specific skill-building for which alums express appreciation when they transition to college. In addition, I have several highly collaborative colleagues now (in our AP-equivalent Advanced Topics Statistics, Biology, and History Research and Writing classes) who collaborate on teaching how to build lit reviews, and also invite me to hang around as students work, involve me in draft reading and feedback, as well as assessment.

For my first several years at this school, AP/AT Statistics was the only class that undertook functional literature reviews, and the teacher made time available some years for me to come in and teach students what a lit review was before they wrote it. So, I had several opportunities to experiment. I will admit that, in part, this process has gotten easier as students have had an increasing number of years building relationships with me prior to my appearing for this lesson (in year two, students stared at me stony-faced over a sample lit review about whether dogs feel jealousy and in year three the lit reviews on women and swearing got the same response – in years nine, ten, and eleven, the same lit reviews go over very well among my gender-diverse girls school students, because they are unsurprised that I plumb the Ig Noble award-winning papers for funny, readable, and informative examples).

In any event, over the years I found some methods that worked better than others at teaching students particular skills inherent in lit review writing, but I still found the outcomes of student work quite inconsistent. No matter how I explained the basic building blocks of lit reviews, not all students seemed to get it – or, at least it took more, one-on-one discussion over time to drive the concepts home. So, this year I took on a new approach – and this one seemed to yield much stronger results.

What is a lit review?

This year, I did not tell students what lit reviews are for or how they are organized. Working in pairs or table groups, students read sample lit reviews. Each student would have a different paper. Their task was to compare, discuss, and answer: 

1. What job the lit review was doing? and 

2. What are the building blocks of lit reviews? 

We would then work to synthesize their observations as a class, which gave the classroom teacher and myself opportunities to add observations, clarify details, answer questions, and correct misconceptions. We always pause to look at an example of a sentence that address a single study and one that reflects on several studies that arrive at similar findings.

We do this work on paper — lots of annotating takes place, and we want them focused — so most students had their computers closed. One student took notes for the whole class to refer back to ask they worked (examples). I also gave them Assiya’s (my dedicated Lit Review Research TA) FAQ that I shared back in November, of course!

Creating conversations

In the second round, students looked for signs of “conversation.” How could you tell that authors are bringing sources into conversation with each other? What words did they use to demonstrate a conversation was taking place? Students discovered signal phrases – a concept I learned from The Harker School’s Lauri Vaughan – and transitions in their texts, and I gave them hard copies of the transitions template from They Say, I Say, and a handout on signal phrases with lists of sample verbs. 

(Sidenote: I get these documents into the hands of students every chance I get. They really help students to bring sources into conversation. A former Research TA and I analyzed multiple grade-levels of History writing from the same cohort of students, looking for how they were using evidence and hallmarks of strong skills. We found that precise and varied verb selection was at least highly correlated with good use of evidence. Since then, I encourage those students who do not naturally jive with synthesizing from multiple sources to let verbs lead their way; it is really helpful for them to pull out the list and just ask themselves which fit what they are seeing: are these sources contradicting? building upon? supporting? advocating for? Classroom teachers love that students use more variety than “said….said….said.” I encourage students to keep these docs next to their computers for reference whenever they are working to bring multiple sources into conversation.)

I do not know why I did not try this method years ago. Clearly, having students observe for themselves and puzzle out the “rules” of lit review was so much more effective than telling them.

Organizational schema

The final step of the lesson, which I have used for the last eight years or so, was to give students a set of notecards and have them practice organizing lit reviews based on different prompts. (I have two sets I use, here and here.) For each set of cards, I have three questions, and students work in their groups to pile notecards into the paragraphs they would create to answer each. For dogs, the questions this year were:

  1. Do dogs feel jealousy only over “their person,” or any person?
  2. Do dogs distinguish between social and non-social recipients of their person’s attention?
  3. What method is most effective for testing secondary emotions in dogs?

For each of these questions, most of the studies conveyed on the cards could be used in a lit review. However, for each of these questions, how the sources would be grouped would vary. A lit review might be organized thematically, methodologically, chronologically, etc. This exercise reinforces the idea they discovered earlier in the class that lit reviews are not “serial book reports” (a paragraph going into depth on each source) but synthetic documents.

I’ve come to love working with students on lit reviews, and feel quite passionate about the feelings of agency and accomplishment that they engender. Do you collaborate on any lit review instruction or creation? How do you approach this work?

Lessons with Legos

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One of my favorite teaching tools is a box of Legos. I’ve built several lessons around Legos, and it is a guaranteed way to get my upper school students excited about a library session. The lesson I’m sharing here is one I use with 9th graders. The objective is to have students understand what a controlled vocabulary is, how it works in the context of searching, and how that applies to LOC Subject Headings and subject searches.

The set-up: I pre-sort my Legos into standard bricks and irregular pieces, providing a pile of standard bricks, randomly, to each student (or small groups, depending on the student:Lego ratio). I tell them we are building a database of Legos and get some volunteer input to get a definition of what a database is. I then give students about 4 minutes to decide with a partner/small group how they will categorize their Legos so we can search our database to find the right bricks.

Depending on the space that I have, students may write their categories on the board as they discuss, or share them out after and I will write. Typically they offer categories like color, shape, size. For each, I press a bit further and we get lists like:

  • Color
    • Red, green, blue, white, yellow
  • Shape
    • Square, rectangle
  • Size
    • Number of studs (yes, that’s what the bumps on Legos are called)
    • Stud dimensions (1×2, 2×2, 2×4, etc.) 
    • Short or tall (in Lego lingo this would be plate or brick)

Next, we try “searching” our database. I’ll call out a search and the students will push forward their “results” on their desks. I start easy with things like “red” or “square.” I point out how they can combine things “red AND 2×2” and bam, we get the brick we want. 

But, as librarians we know it’s not so easy to search and get what you want, so I point out that there are, in fact, three different shades of blue in my Lego set and that I may do a search for “turquoise,” which based on what we established as a class, is not an option: zero results. This creates the opportunity to discuss the challenges of controlled vocabularies for searchers–if I don’t know the language used for the colors, my search for turquoise will leave me thinking there are no results for me, when there are a lot of turquoise Legos, they are just called blue. So, do we keep it broad and say I should just search for blue and then I have to sort through all the blue results to find the ones that are turquoise, or do we want our Lego database to specify what our three different shades of blue should be called? And, will that alway help? What if I call the lightest shade turquoise but they call it “light blue” or “sky blue”? And, how would I know what words to use? When we work through it like this, students catch on quickly.  At this point, I let them build a creation from the bricks they have as we plow forward. 

New information gets created all the time, so our database expands– I give them a few more Legos from the bits set aside earlier and we upload this new data into our system. We quickly hit complications. How, for example, am I supposed to search for a wheel when our data structure doesn’t have a way to do that–wheels are not square or rectangular and they don’t have studs. Or how would we find a sloped piece? Or other irregular pieces? My goal here is for them to see that, while imperfect, adding more specific categories titles for our blue issue seemed like a fairly simple fix. If we try to come up with names and categories for all the irregular shapes the vocabulary gets unwieldy and it becomes even more confusing to know what to call things. How we chose to include information, label it, and organize it, impacts how it is used. 

Now I introduce LOC Subject Headings and how that language can be obscure, biased, and difficult to find as a novice searcher. But also, knowing how information is labeled and organized helps you know how you can search for it, as well as how some questions may not be readily answered by the way information is organized. We do exploratory searching in our catalog (we use AccessIt) so I can show them how to find the Subject Headings of results of their searches, that those are clickable links that redo a search, and how to backtrack to the stem if the subject is too specific.

The best part is I get to do a lesson on searching that engages my students without relying on walking them through searches projected on the board and connects to the ACRL Frame, Searching as Strategic Exploration through the knowledge practices: understand how information systems are organized in order to access relevant information; and, use different types of searching language (e.g., controlled vocabulary, keywords, natural language) appropriately.  

Knowing the author of a source matters: Gilmore Girls explains why

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Anna Birman is a (graduated) senior and Research Teaching Assistant at the Castilleja School Library. She has spent the past two years observing and teaching research lessons to understand how middle school students best learn about media literacy, databases, and citations. She has been developing lesson plans such as this one based on those experiences.

From my collaboration with my school librarians, I hear that it is sometimes frustrating when lesson plans are not met with the same enthusiasm my librarians feel about them. Personally, I enjoy drawing connections in class to TV shows. In this presentation, I use a pop culture theory about the popular 2000’s TV show Gilmore Girls to illustrate how an author or narrator’s point of view can affect the way the reader understands the source. Gilmore Girls (2000-2007) follows the everyday lives of the fiercely independent single mom Lorelai and her studious teenage daughter Rory living in the eccentric Connecticut small town Stars Hollow. The theory states that the reason that Lorelai and Rory’s behavior seems so different in the 2016 reboot A Year in the Life is because the original series is narrated by Rory herself, while the reboot is told by an omniscient narrator. Lorelai and Rory did not change; the narrator did, and that made all the difference. Looking at the author in the context of SOAPA–subject, occasion, author, purpose, and audience–can help enhance our understanding of a source because the world view of the author impacts the evidence used and conclusions drawn in the source.