Professors Annie de Saussure (FLL), Christopher Lee (history), and Han Luo (FLL) have been awarded Information Literacy Grants for spring 2019.
For her French 424: 20th Century French Culture course, Professor Annie de Saussure has designed several projects through which students will consider the implications of understanding history as a human construct and explore alternative histories relevant to the 20th century Francophone world using digital archives alongside literary texts and film. Throughout the semester, students will collectively locate digital materials and create a digital archive of the alternative histories on various topics. Students will identify a historical document of their own and (re)imagine its history through creative, fictional story-telling in French. For their end of the semester project, students will conduct scholarly research on one particular historical theme and discuss how their historical research supports or calls into question the ways in which history is reflected in literature and/or film. Students will document their own exploration of history by keeping a personal research journal. Benjamin Jahre and Angela Perkins will collaborate with Annie.
To help students uncover the perspective of victims of settler colonialism, Professor Christopher Lee plans to assign five information literacy projects in his History 217: Settler Colonialism in World History course. Students will be required to locate films and analyze what perspective is favored in the portrayal of settler colonialism. They will then find present-day maps and statistics about Native American reservations in the U.S. and discuss the public availability of this information and how it challenges or reinforces views on Native American life and U.S. history. Students will research a particular global case study, build two bibliographies, one relying on the library and the other using databases and digital sources, and discuss the similarities and differences of these two approaches as well as the challenges of finding indigenous perspectives. Students will also find and analyze images that portray settler and indigenous perspectives. Terese Heidenwolf will partner with Chris on his class.
In her FLL/PSYC 210: Second Language Acquisition course, Professor Han Luo would like to expand the information literacy work that she and Lijuan Xu have been doing and make information literacy more explicit. Students will engage in a research design project with three components: an introduction, a literature review, and their proposed study. After submitting their research topics, students will conduct literature research, during which they will not only synthesize sources but also look up the authors’ background, analyze similarities and/or differences among their claims and methods, and examine causes of disagreement. Students will participate in class discussions on why use sources and how to integrate sources and develop a better understanding of how citations are a dialogue among many voices on a given topic. The end of the semester presentations will focus on the state of the current research and the significance of their proposed study and will be graded on these criteria accordingly. Students will also write an exploratory essay in which they will reflect on their research process and trace the evolution of their thinking and projects.
In conjunction with the Provost’s Office, the Libraries sponsor Information Literacy Grants each spring semester to encourage faculty to develop more classes in which students have opportunities to develop information literacy skills.