Organizational Communication 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 …