Faculty: Jeffrey A. Bowman, Assistant Professor, History
Librarian: Megan Fitch, Librarian and Technology Consultant
Course: HIST 237, The History of Spain, Pliny to the Guggenheim
BRIEF NARRATIVE:
With the support of a Mellon Information Literacy Grant, I hope to strengthen the research skills of history students by incorporating Information Literacy components into a course entitled The History of Spain: Pliny to the Guggenheim. The course surveys two thousand years in the history of the Iberian peninsula, paying close attention to the intimate and always-shifting relations (political, economic, and cultural) between the peninsula and other parts of the world (Europe, north Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Americas). We move from Spain's place in the Roman Empire to the recent opening of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. Along the way, we examine the interaction of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Middles Ages; Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the Americas, Africa, and Asia; the art of El Greco, Goya, and Vel?zquez; Catalan and Basque separatism; the Spanish Civil War, and the films of Pedro Almod?var.
I first taught the class in the Fall 2001. An area of student need became especially apparent in one assignment, a collaborative research project. In small groups, students were instructed to research a topic and to prepare 20-minute presentations for their classmates. Topics included bullfighting, Cervantes, Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Africa, and women and work in modern Spain. There were shining moments here and there, but the research was often curiously incomplete and the presentations were, on the whole, disappointing, both to me and to the class as a whole.
The disappointing outcomes here were in many instances due to deficient Information Literacy. Most groups had trouble determining how to focus their presentations, even once they had established topics. They did not, in other words, know how much they needed to know. Some students were reluctant to use OhioLINK. Many students were unfamiliar with or ill-at-ease using on-line databases. Most groups had not even considered that the many sources they consulted were created with very different levels of proficiency, very different objectives, and very different audiences in mind. In other words, when it came to bullfights, they treated an on-line family vacation journal the same way they treated a scholarly monograph published by a university press. Both are, of course, possibly useful, but they are not the same. In short, they were unaware of many important resources related to their research, they gave undue attention to some other resources, and, perhaps worst of all, the abundance and variety of available material seemed to disorient and demoralize, rather than to inspire and inform.
I want to reshape this and other assignments to help students develop Information Literacy skills while they increase their knowledge of Iberian history. In the revised course, exercises related to information literacy will be integral to each of four assignments. An early assignment might, for example, ask students to locate one primary source related to a particular period (e.g. Roman Spain) in Consort's collection and five scholarly articles related to the primary source and available on JSTOR. Over the course of the semester, other resources would be introduced (reference works, on-line databases, etc.) and the complexity of skills required would grow. In the research presentations, delivered during the second half of the semester, I will expect students to exploit a wide range of resources and ask them to evaluate their respective merits. Well before the presentation date, each group might be asked to identify five websites related to their topic, and to evaluate critically those five websites by posing a number of questions about how the information was created and by whom: Is the website sponsored by a particular group or organization? Who created the material? How might these considerations and others like them affect the site's content? The basic objective over the course of the semester will be to build both basic competencies (e.g., the ability to critically evaluate information for usefulness) and advanced competencies related to the course and discipline (e.g., knowledge of indexes, databases, and reference works especially useful to historians or those interested in Spanish culture). Each of these assignments will involve the in-class participation of the History Department's LBIS liaison, Megan Fitch, with whom I will jointly describe the contours of the particular resources we are introducing.
Because of its chronological and thematic range and because it attracts students from many disciplines, The History of Spain is especially well-suited for teaching these lessons, but the restructuring of this course will bear fruit in other contexts as well. In other classes I have encountered the same gaps in Information Literacy I described above. These experiences have led to a growing realization that we must start building students (especially History majors) research skills well before the senior exercise. We should, in other words, make Information Literacy a more integral part of the curriculum so that by the time they reach their senior year, students will have the investigative tools necessary to find relevant information and the critical tools necessary to assess that information.
The work described above will take place between October 1 2002 and January 15, 2003. The course will be taught during Spring 2003. I have already discussed this proposal with Megan Fitch. In October, Ms. Fitch and I will jointly develop a list of resources (books, databases, websites, videos) that are especially relevant to this course. In November, I will rewrite the course syllabus, including revised assignments and class days devoted to helping students navigate resources. In November, December, and early January, we will build the course website.
The Mellon Information Literacy grant will be the unique source of financial support for this project.