amycooper | (no subject)

This one faculty member has an assignment for her government class where she tells the students they need to go out and change a campus policy and it's miserable, absolutely miserable, for all involved. They're in groups, given little to no guidance, and are under the impression that they will fail the assignment if they fail to change the policy they chose.

Last year was miserable. The students didn't communicate well, so I and campus safety get an email that this random group of students have an "urgent" matter to discuss about the library, which of course got me worried. Then they were just incredible insistent. I had to write a policy justification and have multiple meetings and emails with them before they went on to the Dean. I also know other groups acted similiarly to other departments. So the students are frustrated and upset, the offices affected have all this extra work and, oh yeah, we're also all low staff thanks to the layoffs two years ago so we're all functioning with less staff for several years now.

And this faculty member doesn't even send out a curtsy email, let alone ask if we'd like to be involved in this project.

AGH!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Boy did this bring back annoying memories. It's so completely inconsiderate to do an assignment like this which the kids are often uninvested in and which produces more work for campus staff. And as you point out, it's also done without any kind of coordination or training.

Back when I was an academic librarian there was one faculty member who had an assignment each semester that basically had their students do a kind of scavenger hunt in the library. Done properly, this could be a fun approach to learning how to find resources. But as you might guess, it was not. They were given no training or preparation and just sent to the library where, of course, the onus was on whoever was at the reference desk when they came in to do what amounted to an hour's workshop.

Other faculty did it better -- we did in-class presentations, or they came down to the library to do a session geared specifically to the types of resources that group of students would need to be familiar with. Or they accompanied their students in a group and did a lot of the instruction themselves. At the very least some also pointed out particular resources for students to use for an assignment and gave them the handouts we created as guides.

But not this faculty member. Ideally a student with any sense of motivation or curiosity would use the assignment to learn how the library worked. It was certainly something they could do with a question or two, the handouts, and some willingness to learn. However that describes very few students and in fairness to really learn about the resources they'd need would take hours across several days.

Instead they were frustrated, angry, and more intimidated than ever in using a facility that was often very different from any library they'd used before, assuming they'd ever done so. The only good thing is that the students and library staff both loathed the assignment and could share the frustration.

Oh my goodness how incredibly irresponsible of that faculty member. And bad for the students.