This trimester, I\u2019m teaching an upper-level research seminar on Reproductive Justice in the U.S. Since 1973. It\u2019s required me to engage in some creative thinking on the fly \u2013 something I did not anticipate ahead of time. But I quickly realized that a chronological dive into reproductive justice issues wasn\u2019t going to work for my students given that many of them were taking the class as a cross-listed Gender and Women\u2019s Studies elective, and hadn\u2019t taken a History methods course before. Beyond that consideration, many students were educated at high schools with under-resourced libraries (there is one librarian in my town\u2019s K-12 school district, for example, and that\u2019s not unusual), and the workings of our library were something of a mystery to them.<\/p>\n
I needed to teach my students how to identify and find a whole range of sources from multiple locations, because many of them had never had the opportunity to search beyond Google before. Through no fault of their own, some of my students didn\u2019t know what a call number was, and didn\u2019t know how to use the call number to track down a physical book. They\u2019d never experienced the joy of a serendipitous discovery while scanning a bookshelf. They weren\u2019t sure how history-specific databases worked, and didn\u2019t know Google scholar existed. I had to get them from this point to writing a fifteen-page original research paper in ten weeks. (We\u2019re presently on week five.)<\/p>\n
I decided that on Tuesdays we\u2019d focus on content \u2013 on excellent books and articles that could demonstrate the enormous range of issues connected to reproductive justice \u2013 and that on Thursdays we\u2019d focus on skills. The first order of business for skill day was to decamp to the library.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t simply tell students how to research. Instead, I designed a worksheet with a series of challenges on it, ranging from using the library catalog to find a book and pulling it off the shelf, to finding primary sources and learning how to cite them in Chicago style. There were lots of steps in between. I had the invaluable help of my department\u2019s library liaison, Laurie Sauer, who worked alongside me to trouble-shoot, check work, and frequently walk people to the stacks to show them how to find what they were looking for.<\/p>\n
Here’s the work sheet (all links are specific to the Knox system, but here\u2019s the Chicago Quick Citation Guide<\/a>, from which you can navigate to the full guide within your own library system):<\/p>\n