York librarians work regularly with their faculty colleagues, in a variety of pedagogical settings, to improve students’ understanding of library research strategies across a range of disciplines and fields.

In one such example, faculty/librarian collaboration is tightly integrated into course objectives and structure.  Scott McLaren (Humanities and Religious Studies Librarian) co-directs AS/WRIT 2300 A Writer’s Introduction to Research with Professor Janet Webber (Division of Humanities and Centre for Academic Writing, Faculty of Arts). This course, required as part of Faculty of Arts' Professional Writing program, aims to give students a solid grounding in research skills during their early years of study.

AS/WRIT 2300 provides a practical introduction to strategies for using library online resources and explores the structural differences between various academic disciplines and their related literatures. The course was designed and is taught collaboratively. Janet focuses on developing students’ writing skills and rhetorical approaches, and Scott emphasizes research strategies and methodologies.

Recognizing that professional writers need to do research across a wide range of sources and disciplines, AS/WRIT 2300 lectures give an overview of a particular discipline coupled with a specific example, project or case study. Guest lecturers – librarians and archivists representing a variety of subject areas – are regular participants who describe how the literature is structured in the disciplines where they specialize, and how new findings are disseminated in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The importance of the editorial process, peer review, and the relationship between a writer’s ethical integrity and the use of credible resources are pervasive themes.

Tutorials take place in hands-on labs that focus on the development of actual research strategies. Assignments emphasize the collection and critical evaluation of evidence to support arguments based on hypothetical writing projects. Students are required to grapple with a range of resources in compiling annotated bibliographies, and they experience first hand how their research process is affected by the ways in which disciplines structure and disseminate their literatures.

AS/WRIT 2300 culminates in a piece of writing for a particular publication (a newspaper, trade journal, magazine or other resource) selected by the student in consultation with the instructors. In this final assignment students do not produce a scholarly footnoted piece, but one that conforms to the rhetorical norms practiced in the publication they have chosen. Scott observes that “professional writers often function as interpreters between specialists and lay persons. Because universities are centers for creation of new knowledge writers often find important information sources here -- we are trying to highlight the importance of using scholarly sources for credibility, but also stress that they may need to explain and interpret that information for their particular audience.”

The process works: Scott notes that several his former students have been successful in subsequently publishing their final papers in the very publications they were hypothetically written for.

As an instructor, Scott aims to cultivate in his students a sense that academic literature is a dialogue in which they can participate more fully as they gain facility with methodologies and literatures. He sees AS/WRIT 2300 as an important way of fostering information literacy. “The online landscape changes almost daily, and in a course of this nature relying so heavily on electronic resources, students want (and need) to use the web.  Instructors need to be familiar with the electronic landscape, and they can rely on librarians, whose literature is geared to the changing information environment, for assistance.  Librarians bring a strong interdisciplinary perspective to their work – they have expertise in particular subject areas, but they are also called upon to help students formulate research strategies and execute research plans across a wide range of disciplines. Librarians have an overview of how the tools and databases within disciplines are structured and the variances from one discipline to another.” Scott would like to see more collaborations of this sort, and he encourages faculty to enlist the help of their liaison librarian to assist in the work of turning students into good researchers. If you are interested in collaborating with a librarian to integrate an information literary component into an existing or a new course, please contact your liaison librarian.

Librarian Scott McLaren