To introduce this resource, I want to tell you a story about its creation. This is the practical culmination by me, an academic librarian, of a master’s in teaching (MAT) program at Bemidji State University. I started my research on this topic by reviewing the literature, searching library databases and web search engines to locate scholarly information. As I read through my first collection of materials,  I was able to refine my topic and gather a more complete set of related works and write the review subsequently evaluated by a faculty committee, made up of two professional education professors, an English professor, and a fellow librarian. Only after reviewing the literature and writing a literature review did I feel the confidence to begin transforming what I learned into this practical resource.

There was never a moment during the creation of either material, from choosing the appropriate sources during my research, to presenting what I found in suitable formats, that I wasn’t influenced by this context. This context includes the various purposes of my creations (both completing an MAT and creating a resource for my colleagues), the nature of my topic (a literature review using academic language and this teaching resource using a more conversational tone), the diverse audience members I needed to please (including my fellow librarians and my faculty committee), and my own knowledge grown from both my library community of practice and the community of education professionals from which I am still gaining proficiency. My education and my lived experience made me intimately aware of my context, helping me to choose the genres of communication I used and allowed me to be comfortable navigating these various roles. Despite this awareness, I found I regularly had to ask myself if my writing and content work for my ultimate audience.

Now I’d like you to consider a similar situation for an undergraduate student. Their context similarly influences their research work, yet it is unlikely many students have received the training or the tools to explore their situational awareness to improve their research work.

This resource is concerned with ways we, as librarians, can help to build students’ awareness of their and others’ contexts in order to grow their information navigation skills. In my interactions with students, I notice that they haven’t had the chance to learn the right language or academic norms to make sense of required citation styles, peer reviewed resource requirements, or database search techniques. Often these requirements are seen as hoops to jump through rather than the academic community initiation as intended.

Using the foundations of rhetorical genre theory (RGT), I have examined the current ways students are (or are not) welcomed into their newly chosen disciplines. RGT has been used by rhetoric and composition teachers for over twenty years and I propose that the elements of the theory are just as effective for the library classroom. In this resource, I use genre pedagogies, the pedagogical arm of RGT, to describe several methods of teaching students how to perform research.

Continue reading to find an overview of RGT, a look at the pedagogies available, and a few methods you can use to teach which incorporate these pedagogies.