This past weekend, I spent a large amount of time at my dining room table, reading Collecting Qualitative Data: A Field Manual for Applied Research by Greg Guest, Emily E. Namey, and Marilyn L. Mitchell. And I was enjoying it.
Now granted, this wasn’t a book I just happened to pick up as a fun weekend read. This book, along with a few others, are part of the curriculum for the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL). I’m a proud member of their sixth cohort. IRDL is an IMLS grant that aims to bring together an enthusiastic and motivated bunch of librarians that want to conduct research but need a little extra training and help. Early this year, I submitted an application, where I proposed my research project, included a one page cover letter about what I hoped to gain from this experience, and provided a letter from my institution that they would support me if I was accepted into the cohort. Once I received the good news, I booked a flight to Loyola Marymount University for early June, where a weeklong in-person workshop will take place. The workshop is the jumping off point for our project; beyond that week, we will meet virtually throughout the next year and talk to our assigned mentor, who is there to make sure our project stays on track. All of these support mechanisms are to ensure we get our project completed and to help each other along the way. Now that my spring semester is over, it’s finally sinking I’m less than a month away from our in-person workshop. My pre-workshop preparation has stepped up!
Beyond the training and getting to know a cohort of enthusiastic librarians who want to conduct research, I am excited to spend the next year on a meaningful and complex research project. Those that know my position know that I have spent almost two years building relationships, getting library colleagues to define student engagement in a similar way, and understanding how students at Penn State navigate student engagement. I think I’m finally at a point where I’m ready to learn more while also thinking about ways to make an impact and influence future directions. That’s where my IRDL project comes in.
The quick sound bite of my project: I’ll be using journey mapping techniques to have students at Penn State chart their student engagement journeys. What I want to know is how our students actually experience student engagement during their undergraduate careers and who are the people, units, resources, and opportunities they discover along the way. Of course, through this all, I’m also curious about how the library has or has not played a role in their student engagement journey. Ultimately, I want to get a more nuanced picture of what our students experience and begin to identify common points where the library could get more involved. While I understand that each student engagement journey will be unique to the student, I assume there will be some trends that emerge from these maps that can inform the work of both the libraries and Penn State’s Student Engagement Network. At times, the project seems daunting, but the more I read in preparation for IRDL, the more I begin to feel ready to take on this project. I know I’ll be learning a lot as I go, and also get more opportunities to meet students at Penn State, which I am all about.
Well, my qualitative research book is calling to me, got to get back to reading! But I will definitely be documenting my time at IRDL and my student engagement journey mapping research in a variety of online spaces: on this blog, on my personal blog, on Twitter, and on LibParlor. So, more soon!
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