Cook Library Research and Instruction
Permanent URI for this community
Browse
Browsing Cook Library Research and Instruction by Type "application/pdf"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item A Cloud of Witnesses: External Mediation in Frodo’s Journey to Rivendell and Beyond(The Mythopoeic Society, 2018) Olson, Carl; Albert S. Cook LibraryApplies Rene Girard’s mimetic theory to a study of Frodo’s motivations and role models in the early phases of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s incorporation of extensive background material deepens our understanding of his main characters, most of all his central hero, Frodo. Commonly described as “role-models,” external mediators work to pacify relations in a community, and act to endow individuals with meaning, purpose, and direction they otherwise would not have. By the imitation of role-models, Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry become real to Tolkien’s readers by comparison and contrast to Bilbo Baggins, Gildor and his high elves, Tom Bombadil and ultimately, the long-lost Eärendil. Tolkien arrived at similar insights to Girard by drawing upon his legacy of classical and Catholic education.Item Intentional failure and Rhianna's tattoo as pedagogy(Elsevier, 2022-07-05) Sinnott, Bria; Albert S. Cook LibraryAcademic teaching librarians are often classroom visitors, with limited time to build relationships with students and teach them something useful. To maximize impact, librarians commonly deploy a canned search to demonstrate information seeking strategies. Demonstrating instant perfection is a detriment to student learning that reinforces classroom power inequities and portrays an unrealistic expectation of reallife searching and research. This column invites teaching librarians to instead demonstrate failure in classroom instruction as a way to bolster student confidence, experiential learning and mutual trust.Item Review of Loose parts 3: Inspiring culturally sustainable environments(Library Journals LLC, 2018-09) DesHarnais, Miriam; Towson University. Albert S. Cook Library. Research & InstructionItem The power of solidarity: The effects of professor-librarian collaboration on students’ self-awareness of skill acquisition, pre-print and surveys(2024-03-22) Gibson, Christina Taylor; Massey, Elizabeth Diane; Towson Univeristy. Albert S. Cook Library. Research & InstructionThe Association of College and Research Libraries’ adoption of the Framework for Information Literacy in 2016 formalized a sea change in information literacy instruction. It asks librarians to instill students with the skills needed for navigating the contemporary information landscape. One way to give students sufficient practice with these skills is for librarians to encourage faculty to cover them during normal instructional time, but this has its pitfalls due to power imbalances within the academy (Franklin, 2013; Julien & Given, 2002; Lechtenberg & Donovan, 2022; Perez-Stable et al., 2022). The co-authors of this article—one a Librarian and the other an Adjunct Professor —overcame such obstacles and collaborated productively on information literacy instruction. We explore the reasons behind our success, detail the hidden labor underlying this work, describe course objectives and the structure constructed to satisfy those objectives, analyze students’ accounts of their affective journey through the course, and offer suggestions for those wishing to cultivate a similar classroom environment. Our experience indicates that instructor-librarian collaboration forged around shared histories and structured by codeveloped objectives positively influences students’ receptivity to information literacy concepts. As demonstrated by surveys of those enrolled in the course, students’ self-awareness of their own mastery increased as they applied threshold skills learned in class. Although data do not allow us to correlate academic achievement to students’ survey responses, aggregate results in both academic work and survey responses suggest that for many students these insights led to greater independence.