T.S. McMillin,
Department of English,
Oberlin College
I hereby apply for a Mellon Information Literacy Grant to develop a 200-level course on Early American Literature, which course would be centered around research materials and methods that have resulted from the proliferation of resources in recent years. In other words, the course would focus on methodology in general and matters of Information Literacy in specific, while offering students an introductory survey of the foundational period of American literature as an area in which to practice the research and information technology skills they would be acquiring.
Description
English majors take three 200-level courses before advancing to upper-level offerings. Non-majors also do most of their work in English at this level. A 200-level course would thus provide an excellent opportunity to serve a large population of students. These courses vary widely in subject matter (from historical to thematic to genre-based orientations) but share an emphasis on methodology. For example, the version that I am currently teaching on Transcendentalism approaches methodological issues from a philosophical and political perspective. The proposed course would be centered around Information Literacy and framed by American literature from 1600-1800. An explosion of available materials and means of access has more than addressed what used to be a problem for this period: namely, resources. The problem now is more along the lines of an excess of resources. A 200-level course (currently 30 students per offering) would acquaint students with the range of materials that are available, instruct them in the different methods of gaining access to these materials, and enable them to develop methods of making use of these resources.
The course would be based on (and eventually would replace) a 300-level course I will teach this spring: English 351. This will be only the second time I have taught the course, which premiered the fall semester of 1998 (see attached syllabus). Designing this 300-level course represented a significant departure from my area of expertise. The American Literature group of the English Department agreed, however, that it was an area we needed to cover in order to better serve students of American culture, literature, and history. In its first appearance, the course stressed a literary and historical research component; Jessica Grim introduced students (and me) to available sources in the library collection and to some of the search-methods then accessible on the Internet.
Thanks largely to Jessica, the course worked well; but because of the unprecedented growth in resources, because of my belief in the necessity of improving students' information literacy, and because this period provides a special opportunity for developing that literacy, I propose to improve the course by bringing research methods even more prominently into the picture-and doing so at an earlier stage in students' career, hence the change from 300- to 200-level status. The biggest obstacle to this change is, I confess, me. Since the course is somewhat out of my usual field and since I am yet unhappily unfamiliar with the latest in technology and available resources, I am requesting release time this coming semester from another course in order to collaborate with a librarian-Megan Mitchell, perhaps-to create the new course. I have proposed the release to David Walker, English Department Chair; he supported my proposal with enthusiasm and would be willing to write a letter to that effect.
Time Line
While teaching English 351 for the second time during spring semester 2001, I would be working closely with a librarian to re-make the advanced course into an intermediate methods course. The old course will roughly follow the syllabus attached to my proposal. The new course that the librarian and I would develop would be focused on cultivating Information Literacy: letting students know what's out there, how to get to it, and what to do with it once they've got it. I envision presenting students with weekly research instruction and problems to which that instruction can be applied. This marks a significant shift in the nature of the course, from one that is content-driven to one that is Information Literacy-driven. Thus the questions my collaborator and I would face in the coming semester revolve around this one: How can this most modern technology help us to make sense of a period now quite foreign to our sensibilities but clearly significant in regard to the roots of those sensibilities? We will meet regularly throughout the semester (2-3 times per week) to discuss the unfolding 300-level course, changes to content (what to discard, what to keep, what to add) made necessary by the proposed shift to the 200-level, and especially Information Literacy matters (e.g., resource materials, research methods, and the potential use of Smart Classroom technology in instructing students on these matters).
The new course would be developed throughout spring semester 2001 in collaboration with a librarian, fine-tuned over the summer, and first offered to students 2001-2002. My long-term goals are three-fold: with frequent offerings of the course, I hope to greatly improve Oberlin students' Information Literacy (especially in the Humanities), to generate interest in an important period in American literary history, and to develop future offerings at the advanced level that would allow students to further improve their Information Literacy and further explore early American literature.