For most of the classes I’ve taught this year, I made handouts for my students. Since English is their second language, I have to ensure that the language I used was simple. They are also not accustomed to do a lot of reading so I had to use a lot of images and make the handouts colourful and attractive.  I learned that I really enjoy making handouts.  I hope the students found them useful.

For the last three weeks or so, I’ve been doing a lot of marking.  I should explain the assignment before I go any further- this assignment is called the “Final bibliography” in which the students have to evaluate five sources and create a bibliography.  This is only one component of their final grade for the course.  The other part is a group, oral presentation.  The students are to present their findings to their classmates based on their research.   It is my responsibility to teach the girls how to access, evaluate and cite the information.  The “final bibliography” assignment is suppose to demonstrate their ability to find what they need and to evaluate whether or not it’s good information.  Furthermore, this assignment is also suppose to reflect their understanding of APA citation. 

I had marked this assignment in the past when I first started working at Zayed University.  This time around, I am marking the assignments of my own students and I feel that the performance of the students reflected on MY teaching.  For the most part, I believe my students did quite well, but I like to reflect on some of the things I noticed.

Most girls performed poorly in some areas, and I find that those are the classes I was unable to teach.  For instance, I couldn’t teach the final class, which is a class on finding websites and evaluating them.  As a result, I find that they don’t know how to cite websites properly, and do they understand the difference between a website and an on-linenewspaper article.  To resolve this issue, I’ve decided to go to class one more time, bringing examples with me.  Their instructor (my mentor) and I have decided that as a part of their final exam, they are going to make a bibliography.  I am going to talk to them in class one more time, and show to differentiate an newspaper article and a website article. 

Another thing I noticed this term is that the students can’t seem to find the title of a periodical.  Once or twice, I had some students in my office asking for my help creating a bibliography.  They would bring all the materials they are citing.  They usually print off a record from a database like Academic Search Complete, and would show me what they have so far for the bibliography.  The title of the periodical is always missing, and I would tell them that.  They would ask me where it is, and I would say, it’s on the page, why don’t you try to find it?  There is usually a ‘source’ section in these records and they would be staring at it…  but they can’t seem to comprehend that the title of the periodical (journal or magazine) is usually in the “source” section.  I find that they have similar problem with identifying the title of website as well.  Maybe that’s something I should focus on next term. 

I was fortunate enough to attend the class presentations.  I was actually very impressed with most of them.  Many of them had excellent slides- simple and clear.  A group had used bad colours for their slides, but other than that, the slides were quite well done.  They seem to understand that they shouldn’t put too many words on a slide.  They also used graphics, charts and tables appropriately.  Most of the girls spoke well- some were of course more nervous than others.  For the most part, I was very pleased with their work. 

I believe that my first teaching experience was very very positive.  I was so very lucky to have good mentors, Patricia and Karen.  I was also very fortunate that most girls in my class are well-mannered, sweet and keen.  Yes, they get distracted easily, but most of them were interested in what I have to say for the most part.  I really wish I could have spent more time with them though.  I wish I could have had them for the whole semester, even for only 1 hour a week.  I think I could have taught them a lot more things and enforced the important concepts if only I could have them longer.

At Zayed University library, we have a information literacy ‘program’ called InfoOasis.  The information literacy curriculum is based on the workshops in this program.  It’s a little old and outdated, but there are some very useful material in there.  Before the session, I looked at the material, which is in a section called “understanding your research question”.  The goal of this session is to have the students understand their research topic and to be able to brainstorm keywords as well as to put their research question together.  Prior to teaching the class, I looked at the material and put together a lesson plan.  However, after I shadowed my supervior Karen while she taught her class, I threw out my lesson plan and created another.  The class had not gone as I had imagined!  It was completely different!!  I was panicking a bit- I only had an hour lunch break between the class I observed and the class I would be teaching.   During this hour, I frantically put together a lesson plan, trying to remember all the things Karen had done in class.

When it was my turn to teach, and the Dean was sitting in the back corner observing me, I started to teach according to the lesson plan.  The thing is, even though this was only my second class, I was already very comfortable with the girls.  I did my song and dance- threw in some individual activities with handouts, some large group discussions, some small group activities… the girls seemed engaged.  I was pleased… until I realized that I had forgotten one task… and when I looked up at the clock, I realized that there was way too much time left over… I would run out of things to do… in my head, I was frantically trying to figure out what I should do.  I turned to my mentor, who was the instructor of the class, and I told her my dilemma.  What she said I think is worth noting:  Just pretend that you did it on purpose!  I had forgotten to tell them to do one activity before doing another, but she said to stop the girls from doing that one activity, and say, “I notice that you are all struggling with coming up with keywords for your research question.  This activity will help you…”  Saved.

I also teach a class called COL 150. This is another foundation course that they all need to take. However, I only get them for an hour a semester. In this class, the students have to each choose a country and they have to write a report on this country and present it to the class at the end of the semester. Basically, I go in and show them the Internet resources they can use for this assignment.  Of course, all the resources I am showing them are all authoritative and there is a huge anti-Google emphasis.

I also get random courses thrown at me every so often. I am the liaison librarian for math/stats, communication and information technology on the Dubai campus. If an instructor wants me to go in and show his/her student some library resources, I go in and do that. Since we don’t have an education liaison librarian, I also had to teach an education course. For these classes, I usually try to get as much information about what the assignments are before hand. Sometimes it’s hard to do so because they show up in my office the day before the class, and I would be like ‘gulp, you want me to do what?’

So far, I think I’ve survived all my classes.   The databases (or the university network) was down on one of the days I was teaching.  The girls were impatient and the class was a bit of a chaos. Having said that, in general, the girls are very sweet and attentive, although easily distracted. For both COL 120 and COL 150, the girls are younger and much more manageable. The one time I lost control of the class was that one class where the databases weren’t working.  I had asked the students to brainstorm concepts for their assignments in groups. Instead, they were searching in the databases. I went around the room and I told them, “No, I don’t want you to be searching in the databases. I want you to brainstorm as many concepts related to your research question so you can search them in the databases later.” Most of them didn’t listen, unfortunately. They were obviously missing my point- I wanted them to have lots of concepts and ideas to search with, rather than doing a couple searches and calling “miss, miss, I can’t find anything on my topic.” This is what I find the most annoying part of my job really. They don’t brainstorm, they try to get out of their tasks as quickly and don’t put in as much effort as they should. After a couple of searches and if they can’t find something (because they didn’t follow directions or try very hard), they come flocking into my office, demanding answers. And I would say, “Well, you are doing an assignment about teenagers in the United Arab Emirates, did you try to use other keywords such as “teens”? They look at me blankly. So I have to go through the whole brainstorming process with them, when they can easily to it themselves.

The maturity levels of these students are definitely lower than those in Canada. However, I love my students. They are extremely sweet and when they do pay attention and try hard, they are very capable. I have a lot of hopes for these girls… I try to encourage them. A lot of times, they are exploring topics in which there is no research available that is specific to the UAE. For instance, there is virtually no research about teenagers in the UAE, their developmental process and things like that. I told these students to look for studies done in other countries and use the ideas and apply them in the local context. And I always add a remark like, ‘you know, there isn’t a whole lot of studies done in the UAE, maybe you would finish at Zayed and become a researcher?’ Oh, I really hope some of them will genuinely develop an interest in research and start producing research for their country.

This is my first reflection of teaching. It’s been kind of nerve wrecking but fun. I will be better at it eventually, I am sure. I hope I never lose faith in these girls- some days it is easy to do because they are just so different and they have such different expectations. It’s frustrating working with these girls at times because some of them are very needy and some just don’t care. I constantly need to remind myself that these girls are the first generation of women who have been educated in their country. Their mothers before them are not educated. When they have kids, they are going to be the first generation of mothers who are university educated- that’s GOT TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE, right? I know that they still have a long way to go and as a Canadian educated librarian, I have to cultivate patience and foster an environment that will make them more keen to learn.

I find these assignments difficult to mark- not because they are full of grammatical errors and such, but I am just not all that sure the students understand the point of the assignment. Students often contradict themselves. While they say that the source is ‘very one-sided’ in the ‘bias’ field, they don’t explain how it’s one-sided in the annotation section and will say things like ‘this is a very helpful source’. I also find that students are not very good at picking out the authority of websites. They’ve evaluated government websites (published by the European Commission or the Australian government), and in the authority field, they will select “not sure”. Furthermore, in the annotation, they will say things like ‘I am not going to use this source for my topic because it doesn’t list any authors”. They don’t realize that it is a government publication, and that the government is the creator of the information. They also don’t understand that although we read government information with a grain of salt, information published by the government is usually pretty reliable.

I just realize that there are so much I know that I take for granted. At a glance, I can tell (even as an undergraduate student), the difference between a newspaper article and a academic journal article. The students here would evaluate a newspaper article and decide in the annotation section that they are not going to use it because ‘there is no bibliography’. I don’t think they understand what kind of sources to use for what purpose. Most of us would know that there usually isn’t a bibliography for a newspaper article. Furthermore, I can tell by scanning through a website whether or not it’s a government, commercial, non-profit or personal website. I understand how each of these sources can be used. I really hope that I can teach students these skills.

This is the final assignment for the information literacy portion of this course. It’s suppose to demonstrate that they are able to find, select and evaluate the sources. For the most part, I don’t feel that they really understand, based on the assignments I have marked. Having said that, I am glad I got to do a little bit of marking before teaching, because I get a better sense of what areas I can emphasize on when I am teaching.

Although I get frustrated about living in Dubai a lot, I do think my job is important. It’s the only thing that’s keeping me here right now. Information literacy is my passion, as I think it is my job to teach these young women how to be critical. I understand that they had been ‘programmed’ not question anything told to them, as I had been ‘programmed’ to always ask ‘why?’ They are raised in such a different environment, but in order to be a successful person living in the world today, one must be informed and critical. Whether or not they are looking for a job, raising their children or looking for information for any other personal or professional reasons, it is important to know how to find what’s needed and whether or not the information is reliable. I think this is going to be a very interesting challenge. I wonder how much impact I can actually make on these students’ lives.

The first category I’ve created is “housekeeping”.  This category will include  administrative posts about maintaining or improving the blog.  For instance, if someone is to suggest a new title or category for the blog, it will go into this section.

I don’t want to restrict people from posting, so I don’t want to set up too many categories.  But I think it’s important to separate the administrative stuff from the cool and fun stuff.   Also, I think we can have very general categories so people can find relevant posts quickly.  WordPress allows a post to have multiple categories, which is nice.  Some categories I’ve been thinking about are  ‘planning’, ‘classroom management’ and  ‘civilized ranting’…  What do you think?   If you have any suggestions for categories, and how we should go about assigning them, please do share!

The reason I started this blog is to document my experience as a new instruction librarian, as well as to learn from other people who have had experiences in teaching.  Furthermore, I would also like to share our teaching experiences in the Gulf region with the rest of the library world.

I would like this blog to be a collaborative effort.  I also want this blog to be  an informal (but professional) dialogue between people.  Please don’t hesitate to post anything that is relevant, and please share this blog with your colleagues as well.

By the way… the first thing that needs to be dealt with for this blog is the title.  I couldn’t think of anything interesting, so I just put down the first thing I thought of.  Can anybody think of something clever and still get the point across? Here are some other ones that I came up with…

- The Quest of Information Literacy in the Gulf Region

- Teaching, Searching and Learning- Information Literacy in the Gulf Region

I don’t know… they all sound kind of lame.  What do you think?