I’m a proud member of RAO, or the Reference, Access and Outreach group. Yesterday I participated in the second year of the “Marketplace of Ideas” where there are six stations and participants get 15 minutes at one of four stations during the meeting.
I contributed to the recent survey about archivists’s use of primary sources in the classroom, along with Sherri Burger, Matt Herbison, Elizabeth Wilkinson and Janet Olson. We ran one stall at the marketplace to talk with participants about which of the four key findings from the survey are most important to them. The findings were:
1. Student engagement
2. Faculty buy in
3. Time and resources, or advocacy for outreach programs
4. Assessment
This year the marketplace also had two other stalls that related to our findings. Amy Roberson led a discussion about assessment and shared different approaches that she’s used, including:
Affective, Cognitive and Behavioral assessment. We talked about the importance of partnering with faculty and others in your library to develop strong assessment practices.
The discussions about the survey findings seems to indicate that student engagement is one area where archivists tend to struggle. We talked about different approaches to getting students and their faculty involved and interested in the collections. These methods included open houses, uploading tutorials on course management sites, and developing mini collections to meet the needs of a particular assignment.
What ideas do you have for engaging students?