Joining the SoTL CommunityFrom Instruction Librarian to Teaching Fellow:

After Immersion: What next?

Working with Teaching Faculty

Joining the Campus-Wide Conversation

A New Area for Research

• SoTL and Information Literacy – a perfect

match: Immersion positions teaching and learning at

the heart of information literacy, opening the door for

research in this area. My Lilly project focused on creating

a rubric for assessing students’ inquiry-based approach

to sources in their research projects, providing a

foundation for structuring information literacy sessions.

• Articulating Value: Through exposure to both

individual professors’ classroom strategies and wider

teaching and learning efforts across campus, this

program gave me the chance to strategically position the

libraries’ information literacy efforts within the teaching

mission of our University. MSU’s Library Instruction Unit

has since been able to restructure our goals and

objectives to align with university learning outcomes.

Since the Lilly Fellows program is well respected and

highly visible on campus, my participation has also

helped to raise the profile of the library, librarians as

faculty, and information literacy among disciplinary

faculty. I also discovered further opportunities for

collaborative research through presenting my work to

professors, deans, and administrators.

• Application for Lilly Teaching Fellows

program: The Lilly Teaching Fellows program is a

year-long intensive seminar on the scholarship of

teaching and learning (SoTL) for early career faculty at

MSU. Sponsored and led by the Office of Faculty and

Organizational Development, it features a competitive

application process and involves monthly seminar-style

meetings and working with a faculty mentor to design,

carry out, and present a project on SoTL in your field.

• Tie-in with Immersion: The seminar portion of the

program fit seamlessly with and expanded on the

concepts learned at the Immersion Teacher Track:

learning theory, pedagogy, and practice. The project

portion gave me the opportunity to put these concepts

to work in an information literacy setting.

• A Non-Librarian Mentor: Having the chance to work

closely with a faculty mentor outside of the Libraries– in

my case, MSU’s director of First Year Writing – was

extremely beneficial. She brought an entirely new

perspective to my teaching and challenged me far beyond

my typical scholarly work to jump into doing more

research and authentic assessment. The Libraries’

information literacy partnership with First Year Writing has

also been considerably strengthened.

• Personal connections and networking on

campus: As a result of befriending professors from a

wide range of disciplines, I was able to help promote the

subject expertise of liaison librarians and also gain insight

into the professors’ previous experiences with library and

information literacy instruction. These insights have

helped me develop better instructional consultation with

MSU liaison librarians and share pedagogical tools,

instructional resources, and best practices. I was also able

to meet and interact with our HR Provost and several

deans, highlighting the Libraries’ teaching work.

Sara D. Miller – Michigan State University

• Information Literacy In The Disciplines: Learning

together with teaching faculty opened doors for

conversations about what information literacy and inquiry

look like within various disciplines. I learned a great deal

about how these professors approach information needs in

the context of student learning as well as in their personal

research.

The First

Librarian Lilly

Fellow at

MSU

Ireland!

PosterPresentation

Monthly

workshop

MSU Lilly

Teaching Fellows

2009-2010

Photo courtesy of Cindi Young, Michigan State University Office of Faculty and Organizational Development

• Publishing and Presenting

Internationally: The Lilly

Fellows program provided

supplemental funding for research,

release time, and travel. This

funding enabled me to attend

additional

Photo courtesy of Cindi Young, Michigan State University Office of Faculty and Organizational Development

Photo courtesy of Cindi Young, Michigan State University Office of Faculty and

Organizational Development

conferences, including the Annual Conference on

Students in Transition in Salt Lake City and the

Librarian’s Information Literacy Annual Conference

(LILAC) in Limerick, Ireland where Dr. DeJoy and I

presented on our Lilly project.