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.
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