Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Culture Matters: Three Initiatives To Understand International Students’ Academic Needs And Expectations, Wendy C. Doucette

ETSU Faculty Works

This paper describes three initiatives to target our library's outreach efforts through better understanding the challenges faced by our international students. We first convened a research advisory focus group of international graduate students to hear first-hand the type of specific support students were seeking in their programs. The majority of our graduate students are African, a group severely underrepresented in library literature regarding instruction and services. Letting students speak in their own words and tell their own stories reveals not only their preconceptions about academic success in the United States but their experiential ability to identify the gaps which present …

Teaching Motivation That Works: Structuring Graduate-Level Research Support Workshops To Foster Centered, Focused Self-Sufficient Learners, Wendy C. Doucette

ETSU Faculty Works

All too frequently, instruction librarians’ only opportunity to teach students distills down to the fifty-minute, one-shot, make-or-break experience. We disseminate the essential information as requested—how to use the library, how to search the databases, and so on—with little time to explain why all the pieces fit together and why they are important. Worse, well-intentioned librarians often strive to cover as much as possible in these sessions, oversaturating and frustrating their student audience.

Even in settings of brief duration with no follow-up, another approach is possible. Rather than attempting to demonstrate everything at once, we can interject effective, real-life motivational tactics …

Not A Challenge But An Opportunity: Harnessing The Acrl Framework To Situate Graduate Students As Active Members Of The Academic Community, Wendy C. Doucette

ETSU Faculty Works

There is NO more traditional library function for instruction librarians than teaching information literacy. Without sacrificing expected librarian services such as demonstrating searching and citation management, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education allows us to orient students with a high-level, integrated view of how the seemingly disparate pieces and requirements of graduate research form an integrated whole.

Why Our Financial Literacy Programming Died (And How Yours Can Succeed), Wendy C. Doucette

ETSU Faculty Works

This is the story of a financial literacy endeavor that sputtered, surged, and then died. While it did not succeed at my institution, I share the story and the resources in the hope that its successes and failures might be of use to others.

Although I had already been a professional librarian for seven years when I took my new position as Graduate Research and Instruction Librarian at East Tennessee State University near the beginning of fall semester 2014, I had never worked in public services. Fortunately, I had been a teacher, received professional training in pedagogy, and was comfortable …