An Alternative to the One-Shot: Training the Trainer

In an article advocating for the WAW movement, Elizabeth Wardle (2009)^[1] told the story of Karen, a well-meaning first year composition instructor who decided to teach a group of first-year biology majors to learn to write the genres popular in the biology academic community. Unfortunately, Wardle explained, after a year of trial and error, Karen decided she’d failed. This failure was not because of Karen’s lack of pedagogical prowess, but instead was due to her outsider status in the biology discipline and the fact that biology writing requires biology research, something first year students were not yet able to accomplish.

Karen’s ultimate failure at teaching a skill for which she was an expert, in a genre to which she was not privy, is somewhat at odds with Simmons’ (2005)^[2] argument that librarians’ interdisciplinary knowledge makes us the ideal candidates to teach students about genres, particularly when the genres live outside of our discourse familiarity. So, what can we do?

All is not lost according to librarian and scholar Joel Burkholder (2019)^[3]. In his approach, he proposed to remove the librarian from the one-shot classroom and into the faculty workshop in order to teach genre awareness. To do this well, librarians must vocally dismiss the perception that research skills can be taught as standard and universal. This, of course, is in line with the arguments made through critical information literacy but remains a difficult task because this concept is the foundation by which many of us form the significance of our role on our campuses.

The next step is for librarians to hold discussions with disciplinary faculty to help them become more reflective of their own teaching practices. Specifically, Burkholder commented, “acting as outsiders, librarians can ask questions that sensitize faculty to the privileged nature of participation in their disciplines. The resulting discussions can foreground the need to design classroom experiences that provide students opportunities to experiment with interpretive conventions” (p. 309). Although this approach will be contested by those on both sides of the discussion, but it may very well be the only way forward in the contemporary arena of higher education.