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Student Alienation in the Information Age
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Most student research is mediocre:
- Sources are few and not terribly relevant
- Research project = regurgitation of sources
- No clear statement of goal
- Lack of understanding of the research conventions of the discipline
- Bibliographic style is sketchy at best.
With our need to cover content, we might view poor student research as something we simply must live with. There is scarcely any time to work on the problem if we are going to cover the material in the course.
We have made some effort to fix it remedially but with very limited
success.
Student Alienation in the Information Age
Students are baffled. They don't understand how our disciplines work or what is expected of them academically.
"Most students lack a seminal understanding about what conducting
research means as a form of intellectual inquiry and discovery..."
Head and Eisenberg, Assigning Inquiry (Project Information Literacy)
http://projectinfolit.org/images/pdfs/pil_handout_study_finalvjuly_2010.pdf
Mere content without
context is of little value.
In a world in which content is cheap, we need to invite our students into our academic cultures to learn to do the work of the discipline rather than just learning about the content of the discipline.
Method
The ways in which the discipline does its work to advance knowledge.
"We do it this way because...
We are talking about alienation. Our students are outsiders looking in.
Essentially, they don't understand the cultures of our disciplines. They don't have a grasp of how our disciplines function.
Metanarrative
The discipline's belief system. The discipline's story about what defines it.
"We do this work because..."
What is a disciplinary culture?
It is composed of three elements:
- Epistemology
- Metanarrative
- Method
Epistemology:
The types of information sources the discipline values and the reasons why such sources are valued.
"We trust this information because..."