Research assignments and the purpose and value of college
By Sarah Morris, Research Coordinator and Instructional Strategist at Hacks/Hackers.
What persistent challenge do your patrons face in their teaching, learning, and researching, that you most wish — if you had a magic wand — you could erase for them? What do you think it might take to get there without that wand?
For those who work in higher education, we seem to spend an inordinate amount of time navigating one crisis after another. There’s the dreaded enrollment cliff, the rising cost of college, the decline of liberal arts majors, and the crisis in writing itself with the arrival of ChatGPT. And I mention all this not to recall the meme of the little dog sitting in a room filled with flames, claiming that everything is fine, but to unpack a question that I feel underlies all these debates: what is the value and the purpose of college? If you pose that question to the different groups and individuals who make up the fabric of a campus community, you will get very different answers.
Sarah Morris, Research Coordinator and Instructional Strategist at Hacks/Hackers
Librarians are also navigating questions around what colleges are (and what they will be in the future) in our instruction and outreach, our interactions with campus partners, and our collections and technology decisions. I feel many librarians see this question around the purpose and value of college play out among our students (especially undergraduates) and faculty via the trusty research assignment. Students might view a research assignment as a distraction from their more important studies or as something to be endured on their way to a degree and a job, rather than a space to develop valuable transferable skills. Faculty, meanwhile, might struggle to get their students to grasp the point, purpose, and overall value of the research assignment.
We can’t wave a magic wand and get faculty and students on the same page as to the value of research assignments, and the value librarians can play in crafting, facilitating, and supporting such assignments. But I believe that librarians can play a vital role in not just bridging these divides and addressing the frustrations that can arise, but in tackling the underlying questions around the purpose and value of college. By addressing these frustrations, sharing research that’s being done into research assignments, and suggesting new ideas, I think we can open the door to new collaborations with faculty and students (a perennial struggle in libraries). For example, librarians can work with faculty to consider ways to not just scaffold assignments to meet students where they are in terms of skills but also in terms of their goals, and address some of the frustrations that faculty might have around research assignments in the process. Some approaches to this could include explicitly highlighting how the skills that students gain during a research assignment can be utilized in a variety of future academic and career paths, sharing examples of how research skills can be used to address serious issues facing us all today, from institutional racism to the climate emergency, and/or utilizing different technologies in research assignments to help students develop additional valuable digital skills.
Librarians have unique insights into the differing viewpoints of our patrons. By working with faculty and students around research assignments, librarians can not only advocate for the valuable work they do, but also help faculty and students overcome the disconnect they might feeling with research assignments but also differing views on the purpose and value of college itself. I think that research skills are some of the most valuable skills someone can have in our current era, and everyone wins when we can better equip students with these increasingly valuable and vital skills.
About
Sarah Morris is a librarian, educator, and curriculum designer whose research and work focuses on critical information, digital, and media literacy, misinformation, civic engagement, and library and information science education. Sarah has been a librarian for ten years and received her Master's in Information Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She held positions at Loyola University Chicago and the University of Texas and served as the Head of Instruction and Engagement at the Emory University Libraries. In addition to her work in libraries, Sarah has worked on curriculum projects with partners that include the Mozilla Foundation and the Carter Center. She currently works as a Research Coordinator and Instructional Strategist on an NSF-grant project on science communication and misinformation, managed by media Hacks/Hackers and the University of Washington.
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This blog post is part of a series from librarian thought leaders sharing personal insights into the challenges and opportunities their profession faces. Read more.