Resourcing the enterprise
Abstract:
We must address the question of resourcing such a change in educational emphasis. In this case it is best first to recognize that dedication of resources to any enterprise is a matter of establishing priorities. Here the challenge is to overcome the ongoing lack of appreciation that student inability to handle information well is a pressing problem. We need to realign the tasks of academic librarians, who have been at the forefront of advocating the teaching of research processes. Their roles as consultants and team teachers must be enhanced. Further, a grassroots approach, supported by professorial autobiography, evidence-based results, a clear statement of vision and the seeking of commitments from departments and universities, is the path forward. There must, as well, be buy-in at the top in order to legitimize the teaching of research processes and facilitate both its initiation and sustainability. We already have the financial and personnel resources needed. We now need to devote them to the task.
There have been a multitude of educational theories and “solutions” over the years that have died almost as soon as they were uttered. Higher education is slow to change and is generally resistant to programmatic new initiatives. This is understandable, given the investment in time and money required simply to maintain even regular programming in universities and colleges. “If it ain’t broke (and many would deny it is, despite overwhelming evidence that academia is in trouble), why fix it?”
Added to the lack of desire to make the enormous effort to change, higher education is beset by traditions that once preserved it and are now increasingly simply presenting barriers to sustainability. We need only think of the past success of the lecture (making it thus a best practice), the restrictions of peer review (a good idea but needing re-evaluation) and, dare I say it, the laws of tenure that work against listening to innovators. Newer voices, especially those that speak energetically in favor of dramatic change, sound like dogs nipping at the heels of an already challenged system. Academia asks in turn, “How do we know your new idea will work? Who is going to do it and with what motivation? How are we going to resource it?”
Let me make a few suggestions.
The question of priorities
In the midst of the economic downturns of the past numbers of years, there have been many questions about how societies and families will survive. Draconian measures have often been required to balance budgets or at least limit deficits. One truth that such activity has taught us is that we fund our priorities and cut everything that is not deemed essential. While it is instructive to look at how budgets reflect priorities (eliminating school librarians but buying fighter jets), economic downturns bring to light the reality that we can resource anything we are determined to resource. It’s all a matter of what is deemed to be the highest priority.
When a system comes under sufficient pressure, there is an initial search for a simple solution to solve the problem. In higher education we have had the “give them technology” movement that assumed that providing students with the right technological tools would transform them into learners. Technology by itself, however, as is becoming obvious to most learners, offers little unless students can optimize its use. They cannot do this without significant education. We have tried making students the sole authors of their own forms of active learning, to the extent of letting them set their own curricula and learning methods. This was less than successful because students need guidance from disciplinary experts.
At times, as I consider academia today, I am frustrated. The world is changing at warp speed, information technology is taking over in every aspect of our lives, and we seem helpless to make the changes needed to turn higher education into the relevant enterprise it needs to be (Badke, 2009b). We spend money on initiatives that don’t work, and we miss the point that the information age is about information – how we handle it effectively to solve problems and advance knowledge. It’s a process problem, and we are missing the boat.
Case in point: Head and Eisenberg (2011) published a newspaper story in which they summarized years of research with thousands of college students, the majority of whom had overwhelming difficulty starting research projects, determining what was expected of them, dealing with the abundance of information tools and content available, and managing their resources in order to write projects and make conclusions. The pointed out that inadequate information literacy is a significant problem for both students and society. These researchers have done many studies on many campuses with many students, and one would think that their results would be virtually unassailable.
Yet, the responses to this article from readers revealed an enormous gap in understanding of and empathy with their findings. Comments included calls to return to the study of the great books, to turn off the technology, to stop griping about professors, to stop believing that searching for information is difficult when it is not, and to recognize that students simply need to apply themselves more. Not one comment in the first ten showed even a remote understanding of the problem.
I made the eleventh comment as follows:
I wasn’t going to weigh in, really, but I am so frustrated that I feel I must. As an academic reference librarian with 25 years experience working with undergraduate and graduate students, and as someone who has followed Head and Eisenberg’s work for several years, I have to say this: It is time for all of us to pay attention. Our students, the majority of our students, have only a dim understanding of the information base they must work with in their studies. They are dealing with an insurmountable variety of information sources, complex search tools, and a lack of understanding of the research processes demanded of them. I call this the biggest blind spot in higher education, and I see that blind spot every day in otherwise bright and well-motivated students who simply do not know how to handle the information they are called upon to deal with. Their professors may “get” information, but their students don’t. Let’s start paying attention. Head and Eisenberg are doing good research that confirms what any experienced academic librarian sees every day. We are failing our students. They are motivated, but we are not educating them in the information and research processes they need to understand.
Resourcing the teaching of research processes is going to take, first, a recognition of priorities. Neglect of such teaching has come from a lack of recognition that there is a problem. My conclusion, based on many research studies and my own years of experience, is that the problem is both significant and pressing. If we come to believe the same, we will readjust our priorities to make the teaching of research processes fundamental to education, on a par with the teaching of content. So, what resources are required? Surprisingly, most needed resources may already be in place, though they have not been prioritized.
Realigning academic librarians
The heroes and heroines of the teaching of research processes over the past few decades have surely been the academic librarians. They were among the first to see the problem because they are the most likely educational practitioners to encounter students struggling to perform research tasks that they neither understand nor have the skills to complete. Thus librarians took the initiative to offer their services in shortterm instruction and, when allowed, credit courses in research processes. They supplemented their teaching with their own research and writing, resulting in a significant information literacy literature base that, sadly, is confined to library publications, an overblown example of preaching to the converted.
Academic librarians are spread very thinly. Many do dozens of one-shot sessions in a variety of classes. Those who teach modules or full courses in research processes may well do this as overload while maintaining roles as reference librarians. If we were to have them take on all of the sorts of work actually required to produce skilled student researchers, we would need to multiply their numbers, something that no university administer would begin to contemplate.
I would like to suggest that many of the real talents of academic librarians are not being optimized. When one’s time is occupied doing remedial library instruction at the rate of one hour per student per university program, there is little opportunity to enlist librarians’ more advanced knowledge and skills. Academic librarians are research processes experts. While they may lack all the disciplinary expertise of a specialized professor, they know how information works, and they spend much of their time concentrating on the development of process skills in students.
If we want to resource the teaching of research processes, we are going to need to reconfigure the roles of academic librarians, not so that they become the sole research processes instructors but so that they can spend much more time consulting with teaching faculty:
Substitute online tools for the one-shot. We have a large number of tools available to introduce students to today’s libraries and databases. Many of these can be used by students on their own, with testing to ensure that they are learning what they need to (Badke, 2009c). Academic librarians can thus be freed to use their real talents.
Enhance the consulting role of librarians. Academic librarians are excellent consultants. They are collaborative and generally do not have large egos. In every venue where faculty plan to teach or are actually teaching research processes, academic librarians will likely be able to offer more guidance and critique than any other academics on your campus. They can analyze research assignments to determine what students will and will not understand, they can help develop plans for teaching research processes effectively in the classroom, they can advise on departmental initiatives to establish research processes instruction programs, and they can provide very helpful input for the development of institution-wide principles and practices that lead to the comprehensive teaching of research processes.
Embed your librarians. Many institutions are now “embedding” librarians, the term having come from Middle East wars in which reporters travel with the troops, experiencing what they do. An embedded librarian can serve as both advisor and co-instructor within a department, making the teaching of research processes the intentional practice that it needs to be. The embedded librarian is able to use his/her abilities to much greater advantage than is possible in a multitude of introductory library instruction sessions.
Give librarians their due. Academia must recognize academic librarians as highly able members of the academic team. They are not minor clerks but research process experts. Wherever they can have a place in the development of methods to meet the information literacy gap, employ their services.
Taking a grassroots approach
We have argued that the creation of a research processes emphasis in a college or university works best when individual professors catch the vision, try it out, and see its success. This does not require a lot of special resourcing, beyond having academic librarians become more deeply engaged in helping develop research processes instruction. The real genius of a grassroots approach is that those most involved in producing skilled student researchers catch the vision first and thus are motivated to enlist the support of their departments and institutions.
Resourcing the enterprise from the grassroots up tends to be much less costly in personnel and finances than does top-down implementation. Administrators often believe that the only way to establish a program is to throw money and people at the problem. Not only is this needlessly costly in additional resources, but it is expensive in the level of resentment it can produce in those who are not yet convinced of its importance. If faculty at the level of teaching can show that such efforts can be resourced without extensive funding and additional personnel, the result will be much more effective and efficient.
Getting others onside is, of course, the challenge. We have seen the approaches advocated by Heath and Heath (2010) for effecting change when change is difficult. To these, may I add the following:
Use the power of autobiography. Those who are convinced of the value of teaching research processes within the foundations of their courses have a story to tell. How did you first discover the idea? What were your initial barriers and misgivings? What convinced you to try it out? How did you implement your plan? What were the initial responses of students and their later views of what you had done? What challenges did you experience? Why are you convinced that you followed the right path? Why should others emulate your activities?
Make it evidence-based. Use pretests and post-tests to measure the degree of involvement with your subject matter found in students who are learning to be researchers. Get permission to post online some of your students’ projects that reveal their growing skills. Never base your “pitch” merely on autobiography, as important as that is. Follow up with data that shows it works.
Express a vision. Avoid simply saying that everyone should do what you are doing. Instead, tap into the deepest aspirations of your colleagues. They want to teach classes full of highly engaged students who are using critical thinking, disciplinary expertise, and the best resources they can find to produce competent research projects. Successful teaching of research processes can produce just such an outcome. Focus on the vision.
Call for decisive action at the department and university level. No salesperson who avoids bringing the client to a point of decision will survive long in business. If you, as a professor, are convinced that we must begin putting the teaching of research processes at the foundation of education, then you have an opportunity to become the engineer of decisions that will bring it into being. Simply to make a pitch and get the response that we should do something about this sometime is to perpetuate what we have, which isn’t working. Someone has to stand up and call for significant, decisive change.
Buy-in at the top
Having been working with these issues for over twenty-five years, I am not naïve enough to assume that department- or campus-wide programs to teach research processes will spring up everywhere simply because I wrote this book. What I have written is a clarion call to professors to take a serious look at the problem, engage resources to address it, and ultimately to win over departments and institutions. This is a realm where the hard slog is more common than paths of ease.
Grassroots efforts do work if those at the grassroots have the will to move them up the ladder. Still, the opposition of an academic administration already hard-pressed to deliver good education can be a significant barrier. Administrators will not move from the status quo if there is any significant risk that a new approach will divert needed resources from the tasks that currently need to be accomplished.
Buy-in at the top is most likely to occur if the grassroots can show that disruption of current resources will be minimal and that costs can be kept within budgetary parameters. At the individual and departmental level, successful teaching of research processes can be accomplished with absolutely minimal financial commitment and little reconfiguration of personnel except for the academic librarians who will welcome the opportunity for a meatier role in academia.
Professors and departments need to demonstrate success first. To propose an untried idea is to risk almost certain murder of that idea by those in charge. To show a track record of success that has actually produced more engaged students and has cost few resources is to warm the heart of administrators who have trained themselves in the cold-heartedness needed to say “no” in order to keep the institution alive and thriving. The challenge is not, I believe, to divert huge resources to yet another bright idea but to show administrators that we can do a better job with, essentially, what we already have.
Why, then, call for administrative buy-in at all? For these reasons:
Administrators can set policy. Here, we are not looking for mandates or decrees from above that will force professors to teach research processes. Rather, we require collaboratively generated statements of vision and practice that serve to redefine the department or administration along the lines of teaching research processes wherever possible. With such statements in place, departments and professors are much better protected from possible criticism and are given an incentive to develop research processes instruction. To say, “We teach research processes here,” is to give everyone in the institution a rallying cry for implementation of plans actually to make that a reality.
Administrators can facilitate short- and long-term practice. With upper level buy-in comes the opportunity to ask for the tools and support needed. This relates not just to starting up the initiatives that will make research processes instruction a reality but to sustaining such instruction in the long term. One of the greatest tragedies related to educational initiatives is that they tend to lose steam over time or vanish completely if their key champions leave the institution. An administration sold on a research processes’ instruction vision can help ensure continued vitality of the work that is being done. A great idea without a plan to perpetuate it (and to modify it as times change) is doomed. Administrators can make sure the idea is sustainable.
Administrators can provide incentives. A challenging fact in most of academia is that research is rewarded but teaching is less rewarded. There are few research grants to further learning and teaching, but many to support work done outside the classroom. Boyer (1990) has provided a pathway forward in this regard by arguing that scholarship is not merely discovery and integration. If members of the higher education community are advancing the cause of application and of teaching, these elements may also be called “scholarship.” A true scholarship of teaching enables teaching professors to study and develop the teaching process itself.
How can an administrator provide resources for innovation in teaching such that faculty are given incentives for developing the teaching of research processes? It can first recognize such innovation as genuine scholarship. Second, it can provide research funding to professors who are willing to develop research processes’ instructional philosophy and method. Third, it can recognize innovation in teaching as a strong factor in making tenure decisions. Fourth, it can encourage faculty (perhaps even financially) to attend conferences and write articles and books on teaching. Fifth, it can establish regularly issued awards to recognize significant innovations in teaching research processes.
What resources do we need?
We have the professors, the administrators, the academic librarians, the libraries, the databases, and all the other resources we require. Ultimately, the challenge is not to find resources but to marshal those resources and put them in a fresh direction. It comes down to priorities – what do we really want to accomplish?
Resourcing the enterprise is not nearly the daunting task that so many current educational initiatives seem to be. We do not need a Gates Foundation to give us ten million dollars, as much as we might appreciate the gift. While we may want to consider hiring a few more librarians and realigning research grants toward the scholarship of teaching, essentially we have most everything and everyone already at hand. Those resources just need to be prioritized in the direction of teaching research processes.