SOURCE
Vol. 15
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No. 3
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11
August 2018
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Using Pop Music as a Springboard for Inquiry-Based Informational Literacy Instruction Higher education institutions struggle to find ways to adequately inform and prepare first-year students for the rigors of college research and writing. Adding to the challenge, today’s students enter college with vastly different academic backgrounds. Some have completed “college prep” courses that required scholarly research and focused on writing skills, while others simply have basic research skills and some composition/ writing experience. Still others have had little to no formal practice with evidenced based writing—finding sources, determining their credibility and relevance, or selecting and incorporating them into their writing. Therefore, colleges must be creative and flexible in their approach to helping first-year students acquire and use these skills—both in their first-year courses and throughout their academic and professional careers. Marshall University, as a means to assist all first-year students, has identified three broad learning goals for our first-year seminar (FYS): integrative learning, metacognitive thinking, and information literacy. Specifically, students are asked to locate credible and relevant scholarly work, to cite such sources appropriately, to incorporate this information into written form, and to do so in a way that the reader understands the thesis statement and the resulting paper. Students’ abilities in these areas determine their success in subsequent coursework; if they cannot learn these skills early on, their performance in major-related and general education classes will suffer, not to mention their ability to enter and progress in professional or graduate programs. Faculty design their own courses, identifying a topic or passion that can be correlated with the FYS learning goals. Through training, faculty learn how their courses can support those university-wide goals in ways that facilitate greater student learning.
FYE Course in Practice One example of this creative approach is the course I developed focusing on the prevalence of social justice issues in popular music. Specifically, the course focuses on three board units/topics and their treatment in song lyrics: (a) racism and discrimination, (b) poverty and classism, and (c) war and international conflict. Parallels between the social justice issues highlighted in 1960s music and those in contemporary music are used as a springboard for students to discuss issues that affect them. I encouraged students to submit contemporary songs to include in the discussion. Their submissions made the course more personally relevant for them, which helped them connect with the outcomes for the assignment. To assess students’ ability to demonstrate the information literacy learning outcomes for the FYS, I designed an essay assignment that required listening to music from one of the three units, developing a research question based on that unit’s theme, and researching the answer to their question. Specific learning outcomes focused on students’ ability to (a) find credible and relevant scholarly work, (b) cite such sources appropriately,
Erin Ruth Brumbaugh Assistant Professor Marshall University
“Parallels between the social justice issues highlighted in 1960s music and those in contemporary music are used as a springboard for students to discuss issues that affect
”
them.
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