Assignment-design consultations with librarians can be an easy sell for faculty members who have struggled to get the results they want out of student research assignments. But how do you convince first-time instructors to collaborate with librarians on research-based writing assignments before they’ve tested the waters on their own? In my university’s college writing program, graduate teaching assistants develop their own syllabi and assignments rather than teaching from a standardized syllabus. However, new GTAs are typically first-time instructors of college writing with limited experience in designing, teaching, and assessing research assignments for first-year students. While some new GTAs design appropriate assignments for novice researchers, others create assignments that are inadvertently designed in a way that sets students up for failure in meeting the instructor's expectations. In these situations, it is difficult to figure out how we as librarians can help students be as successful as possible in satisfying misaligned assignment parameters while also encouraging them to engage in critical information literacy concepts, all in a single one-shot session.
With these concerns in mind, I surveyed new GTAs at our institution as well as in other institutions’ college writing programs about their experiences with “teaching research” for the first time. Survey results were collected at the end of the Fall 2017, and GTAs were invited to participate in follow-up interviews in Spring 2018. In this session, I will share the preliminary results of my research and discuss how I am using what we learned about new GTAs’ experiences as first-time instructors to redesign a library instruction orientation session for new graduate teaching assistants in the Fall 2018 semester.
