Shared Notes for this Session:
https://goo.gl/eLx1GFSecondary sources – easily discoverable, easily accessible, and ubiquitous – are the most cited materials in undergraduate music research papers, projects, and presentations. Yet secondary sources are also the materials that undergraduates tend to use most inappropriately. Students often seem inexorably drawn to the most unsuitable materials – or else use “good” sources in the most unsuitable ways. The professional literature has tended to address this challenge by focusing on assessment, emphasizing that “Authority is Constructed and Contextual” (ACRL 2016). Yet students still struggle to define such authority, the criteria for its construction, the context in which it becomes meaningful, and its relevance to their own work.
This presentation proposes an alternative emphasis, based on Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say (2014). While assessment remains a critical part of the research process, the Graff and Birkenstein methodology focuses on the interaction between student and secondary source. This methodology has been examined in terms of general information literacy (cf. Deitering and Jameson 2008) but this presentation, illustrated by case studies from a music librarian’s work with a range of undergraduate courses, reveals why the approach is so uniquely consonant with music research. By de-centering the research process, this model prompts students towards robust, participatory engagement with secondary sources. Such engagement, in turn, can produce more diverse, compelling research
