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With funding from the CSU Information Competence Initiative, this proposal is in the process of developing and implementing a series of workshops with 17 feeder high schools in the San Fernando Valley and 8 nearby Community Colleges. We are collaborating and exchanging ideas with CSU Dominguez Hills and CSU San Marcos, who are engaged in similar projects. We began by writing letters to the schools introducing the objectives of the grant proposal, and then visiting and initiating a dialog with the schools in order to find out what information resources they had in their libraries, and what their current program included for library instruction. We discovered that the initial letter sent to the schools in May 1997 met with some skepticism, or in a few cases resistance, and learned from this experience that the end of the school year is not a good time to propose new ideas to overworked librarians! The personal visits, however, helped to establish contacts and to build a better understanding of the objectives of the workshop.
FIRST WORKSHOPIn consultation with the LAUSD district office, we set a date for an all day workshop at CSUN, and held the workshop on November 7th. This workshop examined Information Competency lists developed from a variety of sources: the CSU, LAUSD, and the Information Competence Workshop held at CSU Dominguez Hills. The participants, with the help of a facilitator, brought to these lists their own focus and perspective, refined and selected a list of five competencies which they considered as most important, and suggested exercises and methods for achieving these competencies. The grant allowed for hiring a facilitator, which kept the discussion on track very well, and produced a printed record of the workshop to hand to participants as they left. We were also able to pay for substitutes for a number of the high school librarians, which was necessary for their attendance.
SECOND WORKSHOP Two-hour smaller group workshops are now being planned for May, to target various competencies and write specific lessons for achieving them. We will also present hands-on training sessions on electronic library resources and the Internet. Teachers and administrators will also be invited, and we will discuss various ways to increase the involvement of high school and community college teachers in this effort, leading to the focus of our second grant proposal.
HANDBOOK As part of the proposal, we will begin to develop a handbook which will eventually be available to all the schools involved in the grant project, as well as other feeder schools in the Los Angeles area. This handbook will include specific lesson plans developed in the workshops, a list of the competencies, a list of contact persons, and a bibliography, to include relevant web sites.
This proposal will focus on the involvement of high school and community college teachers and administrators in workshops, and on planning for implementing Information Competency standards. We will also be working with faculty from our own campus to develop ideas for integrating these concepts into the teacher training process. We will be working with California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, which has a grant for developing an online assessment tool. We plan to administer a written Information Competence assessment to a group of entering Freshman at CSUN in Fall 1998. Once the Online Assessment Tool is completed, we plan to administer it to graduating seniors in area high schools. The results of the assessments, and the text of the final online assessment tool will be incorporated into the Handbook described in Grant Proposal I, and the handbook will be published and distributed.
One of the results of the November 1997 workshop was the instigation of a trial period for CSUN borrowing privileges for students taking AP classes in the 17 high schools participating in the grant project . We had been reluctant in the past to expand borrowing privileges because of our position as the only large academic library in the San Fernando Valley, with a population of over one million. Recent budget cuts have eroded our book buying power, and we feared that the additional drain on our resources would adversely affect our own students access to materials. It became clear, however, in dialog with the High School librarians, that AP borrowing privileges at CSUN would be of tremendous help in fostering relations with the local high schools, and in encouraging high achieving students to attend CSUN. We thus developed a policy for CIRCULATION OF BOOKS TO AP HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : TRIAL PERIOD and will be monitoring the success of the trial over the next year.
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18 August 2004
E-Mail : Ann Perkins
fixed 1/11/07 EAA