Category: Class visit

When Laura Pombonyo was arranging to bring her Social Work class to SBU Libraries as part of our grant program, she had a specific focus in mind. Attending our retreat over the summer had left her with a lot of research-related ideas and concepts that she thought would be of value to her students. But what she landed on for their January visit was the concept of misinformation and disinformation. She wanted to give the students a deeper understanding of where news and information comes from and how it can be manipulated, presented for specific purposes, or flat-out wrong for a variety of reasons.

In planning the lesson, I found The News Literacy Project to be of great help. In particular, I used parts of their “Easiest Quiz of All Time” to get students thinking about facts, fact checking, and how you know something to be true. In real time they were allowed to use any resource to answer questions like filling in the blank for Darth Vader’s famous line: “______, I am your father.” There was some consternation when many of their preconceived notions turned out to be false, but the exercise reinforced how false information is easily disseminated and how it stubbornly persists in the general consciousness.

We moved on to a discussion of lateral reading and the value of looking for context and other information outside of the source itself. Another great planning resource, the Stanford History Education Group’s Civic Online Reasoning site provided an easy-to-understand video introduction to lateral reading. After that we dove into a number of pre-chosen scenarios taken from recent headlines and the students looked for sources to help confirm, deny, or find the latest information on a given story.

Another interesting layer I was able to introduce was that of deep fakes – videos and images manipulated so seamlessly that the damaging or absurd events they depict seem authentic. Examples from current news stories were not hard to find and while you always wish you had more time, I was able to introduce the concept and get some discussion going on not believing everything that you see online.

Serendipitously, Chat-GPT had just become a topic of debate in the world as I was planning for this class. Together, we looked at some of the early reactions to Chat-GPT and its potential impact on writing and education. Showing the students a Twitter thread from an academic who had found that the software would produce authentic looking yet fictitious article citations gave us a good segue into practicing looking up citations (some of which I faked) in library databases to find corroborating full text.

In the end, this turned out to be an engaging experience all around. The students got to grapple with some concepts that are not always covered in the high school curriculum (at least not yet!). The use of real world, current examples – some of which incorporated parody accounts as well – helped make the presentation more engaging and fun. And the fact that Laura had a clear subject matter in mind yet allowed us to design the day without binding it to a specific classroom assignment provided an opportunity to try a fresh approach on a current and vital issue.

We had fun with Tracy Kohl’s 12th grade AP English Literature class on Wednesday, January 18! They are working on a project that involves choosing a well-known fairy tale, such as Cinderella or The Little Mermaid, and analyzing it by considering a variety of theoretical perspectives. Students used SBU’s databases that index scholarly articles on literary analysis, which was challenging! It was easy to find sources about the fairy tales themselves, but it became tricky when students wanted to find sources applying a particular / exact theoretical framework to the fairy tale they were interested in. They used some new searching techniques to give them more control over their search results. Students also learned that they might not find the “perfect” article, but they can learn from specific paragraphs or sections of partially relevant articles to help them better understand their topic, and also to find new sources and new perspectives. 

Here are some student thoughts on what they took away from the experience:

“Though I was familiar with the databases that our school provides us, I was very intimidated about having to work with a University’s database. I came in feeling as if this would be too overwhelming to understand but realized that it really isn’t hard, especially if you have an expert there to help you.  I enjoyed Christine’s encouragement to always ask for help and feel better prepared for the day I have to do my own research.”

“On the SBU trip I enjoyed learning about the different databases that were used. There was so many and they were fun to explore and mess around with to see what I was able to find. I also loved how the campus looked and it felt really nice to get a feel of how college will be like.”

“After SBU’s trip I felt like I was more informed about how to use a database, and the techniques and tricks to get the best results. Although I struggled in the beginning trying to get the results I desired, when I asked for help they were eager to assist. Now I’m aware of how influential an asterisk can be!”

As part of our Ready for Success project, we had Brentwood High School classes visit the SBU Libraries over our Winter Session for some on-site activities. Not every class was the same, though. Some had specific research projects to tackle while others were more open-ended and focused on exposing the students to research in general. An added bonus was giving them a chance to observe and experience a college campus first hand.

The open-ended classes tended to be more fun but presented an interesting challenge in the planning stage. How do you engage students for an hour and a half outside of their regular classrooms? One example was Kristi Muller’s English class. For these students, we incorporated a series of activities built around a breakout box game. We have a set of locks and boxes and various do-dads from Breakout.edu that we’ve used in various settings at SBU Libraries.

With the Brentwood class, we broke them up into groups of four, each team given a research scenario to work through. Some were given a campus map and challenged to map out a virtual itinerary featuring people and academic departments. Some had to decipher clues left in a study room in order to track down academic research in a specific subject area. And some had to assemble puzzles made out of the movable tables in our main event space.

In the end, this was a fun and engaging activity that got the students up and moving. They were able to apply research and critical thinking skills in a practical yet low-stakes setting. The feedbback we received was overwhelming positive and by planning this class, we actually picked up some ideas that we can use with our undergraduate population.

On January 11, Kimberly Williams brought her Black Culture & Society class to SBU. The students had chosen a Black historical figure to research, with the goal of creating a presentation. When they came to SBU, they were able to explore a plethora of primary sources using databases such as video interviews with prominent twentieth and twenty-first century African Americans using the database, HistoryMakers, historical newspaper articles from the database, African American Newspapers, and historical collections of newspapers such as The New York Times and Chicago Tribune.

Before searching for content, they had to think carefully about the time period in which their historical figure lived, so that they could make sure they were searching in a database that covers that same time period. They thought about what relevant search terms, besides the person’s name, might be valuable, and how to find obituaries from a variety of different newspapers and historical eras.

On Wednesday, January 4, two of Patricia Orechovsky’s tenth grade honors English classes came to SBU for an exploratory journey through both the open web and the SBU’s databases. They were searching for content related to Elie Wiesel’s Night, which they will be studying and writing about for several weeks. They found so much! Students found video interviews and podcasts with Wiesel out on the open web, and they found book reviews about Wiesel’s books, and Op-Eds by him in SBU’s historical newspaper databases. They learned about the diverse and complicated information landscape, and how searching with different methods and different tools leads to very different results.

Many students from Orechovsky’s class wrote to us afterwards, and here are some experiences they found valuable, and thoughts about what they learned, in their own words:

“It has taught me to never be afraid to ask for help, especially if you have no idea how to start off with researching or just finding stuff online that may interest you.”

“Research can be more fun than you think.”

“You taught us about how to navigate our way into making the process of research easier and taught us about how it’s a journey. I learned we could use certain websites to research our topic.”

“I learned that help is anywhere you look, and that you are not alone. Not sure if I would like to get into writing books, or architecture, or where I am going to go to college. But that trip motivated me. It moved me to focus and think that this is not as impossible as others might put it as.”

“I found it to be very educational to attend this trip because if someone was to explain this skill to me through words I would have stressed over it or not have understood it. Now I feel relieved that it wasn’t very hard to learn to conduct research because I was able to experience it in person with the aid of you guys who dedicate your time to help us students learn valuable skills.”

“Something I’m grateful for about this opportunity is not only learning about research and what goes into it, but the overall sliver of college experience in general. This has been a mindopening experience considering that I have had second thoughts on putting off college but, I loved this experience and it certainly isn’t one I will forget.”

When we were designing the proposal for the Ready for Success grant, we were driven by a number of goals. While one of the main objectives was to reinforce the importance of research skills at all levels of a student’s education, another was to emphasize the fact that research skills are not just for completing classroom assignments. These are skills that will be useful in life – from researching job and career opportunities to looking for places to live, locating reliable health information, and more.

We also tried from the start, when reaching out to Brentwood High School, to work with teachers from as wide a variety of disciplines as we could attract. There can be a perception that research is just for English class or for a specific assignment in a specific grade, not to be reintroduced or reinforced down the line in other classes or subject areas.

All of which is by way of saying we were so grateful we met Jake Mulderig. He teaches in the technology department at Brentwood and, after attending our summer retreat, decided to bring his Principles of Engineering class to SBU Libraries in December of 2022.

Jake had a good existing relationship with his school librarians, and we were able to build on that. He had been working with school media specialist Diane Longo on a research project. Students were researching different engineering and technical fields with an eye towards possible career paths. They were being directed to find things like required certifications, salary ranges, training programs: a well-thought-out and robust assignment.

At Stony Brook, we reinforced what they were working on with a series of activities. We pre-selected a number of articles regarding engineering projects in which experts were quoted. Students had to take the quoted engineer – and any relevant details from the rest of the article – and complete an informational profile on them. They had to find their professional information, education, details on their field of expertise, and additional articles from library databases. In terms of sources, students had free reign to consult online sources – which we reviewed together.

As with all classes during this project, we incorporated the use of library databases. We made a point throughout to emphasize the role of licensed databases as sources – and the role that libraries play in providing them. This included talking through Stony Brook’s databases as well as Brentwood High School’s Virtual Reference Collection (VRC), their local public library, and even the fact that, as New York State residents, they’re eligible for New York Public Library cards.

Another aspect of Jake’s class that we loved – and something that we saw throughout the other visits – was that the students were just as curious about being on a college campus as about the in-class activities. (And lunch – they were all curious about lunch.) As time permitted, we took classes on a tour of the library. This group of future engineers got to check out our science and technology sections along with some of our study spaces. Curiosity satisfied, it was then off to lunch.

On Thursday, December 15, 2022, SBU Libraries hosted the first of several BHS student visits. We welcomed two AP Seminar classes to campus, along with their teacher Sydney Bryan and BHS librarians Diane Longo and Maureen Ryan. In the library’s computer classrooms, the students learned about what information is available using academic library resources, practiced some database search strategies, and spent some time finding sources for their research papers. We were endlessly impressed with the originality of their research topics, as they searched for sources on a wide variety of subject areas such as literature written during the American Civil War and the effect of microplastics on mollusks. Once they gathered enough sources, some students did some extra exploring by digging through the historical newspaper databases just for fun, including Historical New York Times and African American Newspapers.

After their hard work, they enjoyed choosing from the food options at the Student Activities Center and eating lunch together before catching their bus to head back to BHS. It was a fun and productive day for everyone!