What a week. Our communities are reeling from the emotional and overwhelming weeks-long trial for the murder of George Floyd. Trying to pick up the pieces and resume some sense of a normal school or work week is a challenge for many. Thankfully, university professors and mental health professionals are fully aware of this challenge, and are lending space for discussion, healing time, and support to our students. Still, I hold out hope for our communities to keep going and continue to demand equality in a system riddled with years of racism. Together we can work toward this, as it will be a lifelong journey.
In a journey of hope and hard work, we meet students where they are. How we give them a lift to the next stage of higher level thinking and research is made up of tiny steps and a lot of practice along the way. I'm a big advocate of finding the facts in an information era. This is perhaps the biggest and most important decade in information science we have seen yet; there are so many different ways to get news - too many if you ask me. It can be overwhelming and we all experience information overload on some level. How do we get our facts? What are peer reviewed articles? How do we begin to do research? All good questions in order to put one foot forward and sift through the sea of information. On Thursday last week, I was able to shadow Alexander Bellairs, a librarian at UWB/CC who has worked alongside professors at UWB/CC to help students become familiarized with the research process within the campus library's databases. It is a vast and complicated list of resources, and surely overwhelming to students who may be new to research. It was a great learning opportunity for me to see the librarian engaging with approximately 25 students in a 100 level writing class. Students were engaged in an activity and some even asked good clarifying questions related to search terms and key words. They all contributed to an online electronic shared document so that we could follow along and understand how the material was meeting them.
It was evident during the library research workshop that the mood may have been slightly altered due to the unusual circumstances related to a week full of emotion and hardship. Students kept to themselves for the most part, opting not turn their cameras on -- completely understandable. As we move forward together in this uncertain time, we can remember to lean in and ask for support, give support, and find the best ways to meet the students where they are so that they can keep growing in positive and meaningful ways.
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