JOHN HORRIGAN: We have a very enthusiastic group to talk about research and practice.
My name is John Horrigan. I'm with the Pew Research Center, and it's my pleasure to be
the moderator of this panel today. What I'm going to do is just introduce our panelists.
They will be speaking in the order in which I will introduce them. So without further
ado, let's get down to talking about research and what we can learn from it, what research
can do to improve practice. We'll be led off with Jill Castek. She is
is that the order? Were you first? Oh. So we're going to start out with Dr. Mega
Subramaniam, who is very shortly to be a fully tenured associate professor at the University
of Maryland. She's a recent grantee for IMLS, and she will be leading us off, followed by
Gail Dickinson, who is the associate dean of the Darden College of Education at Old
Dominion University. Gail is saying that she and her colleagues have gotten her number
over the years so she'll be talking about some of that work. Next will be Alison Head.
She is at the University of Washington, where she is founder and director of project information
literacy, so we will be hearing about some of that work.
And then finally, Jill Castek, director of the literacy language and technology research
group at portland State University in Oregon. Her research explores library and community
programs for economically vulnerable individuals, socially excluded populations, and others
lacking in digital literacy skills. So without further ado, Mega is going to lead off.
>> MEGA SUBRAMANIAM: Thanks, John, for the introduction, and we've been hearing a lot
about we need research, so I tweeted that today. So my research work is primarily with
young people, specifically how school libraries and public libraries who fill the needs of
digital youth. So I primarily work within that area.
Like John mentioned, I'm quite an odd ball on this panel. My colleagues from this panel
are very far more experienced and have received multiple IMLS grant. I categorize myself as
the new blood in the IMLS grantee group, so hopefully I will be able to contribute something.
But be mindful that what I'm highlighting and proposing will be based on the challenges
that I have experienced personally, and observations that I have made in the recent past.
So in alignment with the team of this panel, elaborating research to inform practice, I'm
going to share with you two immediate needs that I believe will ensure highquality research
proposals continue to be submitted and funded, especially in the focus area of learning and
libraries. As I present, you will also hear me providing
recommendations to IMLS, hopefully to fulfill these needs. So a little bit of context. So
I'm very, very excited to begin this shiny, brand new IMLS continuing education project
in the next two weeks. It's going to start with my collaborator, Dr. Katie Davis, from
the University of Washington. She's a learning scientist, so I'm obviously the person who's
coming from the library side of things, and also we have three fabulous public library
partners, Seattle Public Library, Providence Public Library, and Kitsap Regional Library,
so a library partner serving urban, suburb and rural libraries.
Together, and I really mean together, we will develop a suite of professional development
resources aimed at building teams librarians capacity to collaborate digital media and
connecting learning principles. I heard earlier about connected learning so we are hoping
to help teen librarians to learn all this principle to promote 21st century skills among
the young adults that they serve. So now to the need. First need, I think it's
really important to be able to include researchers in practice, and simile, inclusion of practitioners
in research. So while researchers like all of us who are sitting here today, can develop
professional development resources for librarian, based on best practices, based on indepth
literature review, surveys, interviews, but having actual public librarians and also school
librarians, and all types of librarians who are, you know, really on the ground, be design
partners with us in the development of this resource is priceless, because it incorporates
the dynamic nature of the profession, and also we are able to include actual patrons
in the development of such studies. And this is exactly what Katie and I are doing in this
new IMLS grant that we just got. So really, I think practitioners or librarians
in the field also face the same problem, finding researchers who can work with them site by
site in the pursuit of innovation in the libraries is also really difficult so my recommendation,
researchers and librarians cannot be developing learning environments, innovations, continuing
education programs in isolation, or separation from each other. But should collaboratively
develop proposal, and not just collaboratively developing proposal, but I would like to propose
a focus on participatory design methods to encourage researchers and librarians to work
together more closely. So I like to propose to IMLS and also its the reviewers of IMLS,
whoever that selects the reviewers, be open to the use of research methods that allow
researchers and librarians to work hand in hand, such as the design base implementation
research. So moving beyond sort of the traditional ILS research methods that we use to get actual
practitioners' input. So for those of you who are not familiar with the design base
implementation research, goes by another acronym, DBIR, is often used in the learning sciences,
so DBIR entails researchers and educators such as librarians actively collaborating
in designing and implementing learning programs and relevant technologies. So it's actually
termed design based because data collections and the insight that are gained are continuously
used to inform the subsequent design of the learning program and technology. So the process
is really iterated and the goal is continuously to refine and develop the learning program
or technology. This is perfect because the researcher actually
feeds their finding directly to the librarian and then they make changes immediately to
the learning environment, and then most importantly, the young adults, the children, the patrons
who are participating, get to see the effect of the research almost instantaneously, and
do not have to wait till the end of the intervention. So it's sort of a winwin to every party that's
involved. So then second thing that I want to highlight is the inclusion of researchers
from other vital areas of learning, and I think we sort of heard that in the earlier
panels, so with the evolving nature of libraries, in communities, ILS researchers need to collaborate
with researchers from other areas and not to restrict themselves to collaborating with
only other LIS faculty or researchers. So the college of learning is actually massive.
It is so many variables that come to place to create successful learning environments
in libraries, without the expertise of researchers from areas that are critical for learning,
such as public policy, learning sciences, English as second language, digital media.
We are merely touching the surface in investigating learning that happens in libraries.
So my recommendation is to encourage collaboration with researchers from other areas, the areas
that I just mentioned before, in the request for proposal itself, with the potentially
with the library and information science faculty, or a practitioner being a lead in the proposal.
Such collaboration not only benefit the library community overall, but it also brings light
to the work that libraries and librarians are doing to scholars and practitioners in
this other areas. What librarians do and the learning that happens in libraries are actually
the bestkept secret, right? We do it very well, but we don't really tell anyone. There
are researchers from other fields that can't really comprehend that learning actually happens
in libraries. We are really good in telling our own people that we are really good and
how awesome we are, but others outside our clan don't really know, and this is the way
that we can only do this is to involve researchers from other areas. Thank you very much, everyone.
[Applause] >> GAIL DICKINSON: I'm Gayl Dickinson. I'm
the associated dean for graduation studies and research in the Darden College of education
in Old Dominion University and I'm also a professor in the program that's housed in
the college of education, and I've changed what I'm going to say as I've a better way
to say this. I've been informed by the previous panel presentations, and I think Mega called
me old. Did [Laughter]
Because we've had we've been fortunate at Old Dominion University to receive several
IMLS grants over the years, and so I've also seen the maturity of the IMLS funding program
back in the days when basically it was it was putting masters programs online and moving
that world into the online learning environment in a very strong way, to now with a focus
on knowledge and learning in libraries, and I think that's just an amazing way to do that.
We have had several masters preparation grants, including one now, where we've incorporated
service learning in to school library preparation. We have a next wave doctoral grant, which
is an innovative program of forming a school library cognate area for doctoral students
interested in school librarianship because we realize that there is no advanced preparation
in school librarianship. Most librarians are proposed at the master's level so because
there's not enough school librarians to have a cognate area, we now have librarian have
people, students from three different four different universities working in doctoral
study with a consortium of professors, which is really interesting, and focusing them on
the school library research agenda and teaching that class. It's really it forces a different
look at our own research, and that's probably made me cantankerous when I was asked this
question. I was also honored to be at the table with
ASL when we developed a national leadership forum grant, bringing together a community
of scholars to investigate the launch in to causality research impacting school libraries,
which is moving us away from the previous very strong correlational research, and in
to causality, which is a new, unproven ground, and a very one at best. And we've also had
a research we've had a research grant on national Board Certified teachers and a grant on multicultural
resources with students. But when I was first asked this question about
it, could you please be on the panel talking about how research leverages better practice,
I think my first question was I'm not sure that it does. I'm not sure that the reverse
is true, that the research is coming from better practice, that practice is what's driving
the research question, that the research questions asked and answered aren't informing the practice
as much as we are looking at good practice and forming research questions around that.
And that is a chicken and egg I can't even figure out what is the chicken and what is
the egg. I don't know and I guess it doesn't matter, but to me, it does. I think it refers
back to the flat world that we heard earlier, and I forget which presentation, because if,
in fact, as Mega said, that research versus practice world is becoming truly flat, then
we are merging that in a very different way as we develop both strong practice proposals
and strong research proposals. That also, though, has a negative, which worries
me, and which we struggled when we prepared and I'm looking at Marsha Martis as well,
who is working on the causality proposal with ASL. The institutional isomorphism, I guess,
philosophy, theory, applies to research grants as well. If we move too far away from what
is commonly believed to be practice, then are we moving outside the range of what can
be funded? You know, bicycle seats, apparently, are bicycle seats because the only model was
the saddle on a horse. Should the isomorphistic principle have been
an easy chair, we would all be more comfortable bike riders than what we currently are. So
can we provide the research questions that we truly need to to bring back to practice,
and I'm going to talk about the early childhood today really did that. If, with the early
childhood, as they looked at the research between the world of the twoyearold and how
babies interact in the home environment with their parents, that research informed what
librarians were doing in public libraries. That is truly, to me, a case of how good research
was leveraging best practice in libraries, and we rarely see that because that research
has to come from such a far place outside of practice to come back.
The Nap School Library Project back in the 1960s occurred at the very cusp of audiovisual
material in libraries and that established six demonstration libraries so that at demonstration
libraries for basically the world to come and look at what a school library was supposed
to be. But Peggy Sullivan in an article on American libraries pointed out that when those
were developed, they had a choice. It was a fork in the road. Were they going to use
this for research or were they going to make them demonstration? And that they made the
choice to be demonstration, not research, would it have changed which impact would have
been better? I don't know. We talked we started out the day with about
knowledge and learning in libraries. We did not talk about knowledge and learning with
librarians. And I think that does make a difference, and I'm not sure if it's selfserving or survival.
You know, if an operating room nurse sees the carpal tunnel surgery being performed,
you know, a hundred times a day, at some point could that operating room nurse do the surgery
without the person there? So is a library without a librarian able to look at the best
practice research and make spaces or a school without a school librarian, and implement
what we know about maker spaces, or would it be subtly different? Because the librarian
is not there. And how can the research get us to that point where we have that best practice
truly informed by research, but not off so far divorced from it that we cannot neither
improve the profession or get our research funded. Thank you.
[Applause] >> ALISON HEAD: Hi. I'm Alison Head. I'm having
a horribly hard time following all the different discussions and all the different ideas occurring.
[Inaudible]. I would have had to leave. So usually I am really organized, and I always
have PowerPoint, and I hold fort because I taught for 25 years as a professor. But this
today, the conversation that has gone on, because that's really what it's been, instead
of just panels and presenting, has been so illuminating, and so interesting that you've
turned me on my head, and so I thank you for that. And what I want to talk about today,
I've been thinking about it during the process, and then luckily, Gail and I dovetailed in
the phone conversation that we had in planning this, as well as the other members, and I
knew I had to follow Gail, because I'm really on the kind of the tail end of what you're
talking about, which is this whole question of research informing practice and leveraging
research for better practice, for what you do every day in the trenches and how you change
people's lives. It's a really important relationship. And what I wanted to talk about is from my
perspective what I see that role as, and I think what's important is what research is
trying to do, we're not just trying to get funds and stay employed. We're always trying
to work closely with practitioners and develop ways to continue those discussions, and I
think that's why today has been so meaningful for me, because it's a whole bunch of practitioners,
and there's so many public librarians in the room, and often I work with academic librarians,
not that there's anything wrong with them, but it's great to hear the other side as well.
But I think really the goal of what we're trying to do through research is to recognize
gaps as researchers so often like to sum up research proposals and what they do, and what
our job is to be able to come up with data that helps identify the gaps, as well as close
them in meaningful ways, and so we spent a lot of time thinking and trying to recognize
what different gaps exist through conversations. But what I'll reflect back to you, and what
I heard today was some gaps that I had recognized as well as some new things through panels,
every single one of them, really exceptional. I think the first gap is no matter where you
are in the country, somebody brought up Portland, a very white city, but no matter where you
are in the country, there is this gap with libraries as somebody said, a middle class
white institution, meeting the needs of an incredibly demographically erupting society
that's going on now. If you have any doubts, many of you flew in, look around the airport
and you'll realize this is a very different place than, probably, it was five years ago.
And those are your potential patrons. Think of it that way.
I think the other thing that's happening, and this I am aware of, and something that
really interests me because of my base in academia, is the disruptive change that's
occurring in education. Thank God. Of education being turned on its head. And why is my time
going so quickly? It took me forever to come up with this so I'll move along.
But I think once you get warmed up, you don't want to leave. So the disruptive change in
education that's going on, flipped classrooms, ubiquitous technologies and such, but really,
the change in power structure. I mean, when I got my Ph.D, I was so proud that I was a
good lecturer. That is not really a skill that's in high demand, except for right now,
and I won't abandon the stage here. So I think these are some of the gaps that
we're trying to do meaningful research and to identify ways to study them, as well as
to understand them, to view how practitioners look at them, as well as to come up with recommendations
to close them. So on that note, I think I've changed even
my ordering here. I think originally with this panel, we were asked to comment on the
current state of the field, and I think there has been good research and it's interesting
to hear a number of you talk about that, outcomes research, and I think of the work of Megan
Oakleaf that was funded by IMLS, actually, and the value of libraries. We see this trickling
down to public libraries, to school libraries. It is something that's happening and changing
the profession. I think the other thing is ethnographic methods
and seeing users as a culture and libraries as a social phenomena. I think of the work
out of Rochester and Nancy Fried Foster. What I try to do in my research, I lead a national
study, and I study college students, and in one minute, I'll tell you. I study college
students and how they find and use information. Most recently, this will be something that
will interest you. I'm doing a study on lifelong learning. Once college students graduate and
leave campus, what happens to them? How do they stay smart once they graduate? And one
of the things, I'll throw out a tease here, that we've come up with in our analysis, and
where data helps inform the process is we found, like Pew, like University of Washington's
Gates Project, that 92% of our sample of 1,651 students that had graduated in the last seven
years were library users. They had used their public library in the last year. And we wanted
to go beyond sorry Pew and Gates and look at the circumstances of why they're using
libraries, and what we found my time's up, you'll have to read the report. No. What we
found was this is really interesting and I'll end on this note, what we found, we did something
called a logistic regression. Sounds kind of like a car part, but it's not. And it allowed
us to look at the likelihood of public library use. And we found that those who used public
libraries were actually five times more likely to ask a librarian a question. That's a huge
win for you. They were four times more likely to use museums. They're museumgoers. They
were three times more likely to use book stores. Starting to get a real persona here. Educational,
twice as likely to use educational sites like YouTube, TED Talks came up a lot, and then
what they weren't likely to be was somebody who believed they could solve anything on
their own. Self efficacy, which really brings the first Jones great panel in the beginning,
and the Maker Fares and why that's so important because you're pulling in the people that
tend not to think that libraries are for them. Thank you.
[Applause] >> JOHN HORRIGAN: As Jill gets up there, I
will say we do logistic regressions at Pew, too.
>> JILL CASTEK: Hi. Thanks so much for the opportunity to be here today. I come at this
discussion from the field of adult education. I'm a researcher in a public University at
Portland State University and as head of a research team that resides not within an eye
school but also within the applied linguistics area. So this research team's mission is to
provide literacy and language pathways to social and economic justice for underserved
and marginalized adult learners, a population that is not often studied. So I'm outside
the library world, but at the same time, I'm really honored to be connected to it as a
cocollaborator, and as my copanelist said, part of this collaboration is really important
to be able to stretch and expand the field. When it comes to funding sources that are
tied to adult education, we look at organizations like the office of career and technical education,
and other federal agencies that tend to fund research that's directly tied to programs
that they operate, which means there isn't much funding out there for basic research
and adult learning and development. One thing is IMLS, I think, has been much
more open in the kinds of research that they fund, and they thus provide more avenues for
examining adult learning in spaces like libraries, but also within the outreach programs in the
community, and I'm really honored to be among the recipients to get grant funds to do that
sort of work. The funding priorities that I look at provide a detailed look at adult
learning processes, programs, learning environments, and allow for new partnerships to form between
libraries and other institutions where adult learning can take place.
So let me offer an example of what this looks like from currently funded IMLS national leadership
grant funded looking at how vulnerable adult learners acquire digital literacy.
This particular grant project followed Portland State's Broadband technologies opportunities
program and its six national partners as they provided digital literacy education programming,
and as these organizations offered self paced tutor facilitated digital literacy instruction
in multiple community contexts. This research project to me was very forwardthinking, not
only because it looked closely at teaching and learning practices and learning environments,
but it also looked at the many different kinds of emerging partnerships that can form between
entities where digital teaching and learning can take place. These spaces included libraries,
as well as community organizations, Catholic charities, workforce development in places
like Goodwill Industries, noncredit bearing adult ed classes offered through community
colleges and K12 educational centers, as well as onestop workforce centers. Low income housing
complexes and reentry programs for incarcerated individuals. As the anchor institution for
this particular grant, we didn't tell all of these collaborators, hey, we know what
works best from research, implement digital literacy learning in this way, instead we
offered a set of suggested guidelines and within that, collaborations grew and flourished
that paved the way to look at innovative spaces for teaching learning and partnership.
All this is to say is that the funding work that IMLS is putting forth is at the frontier
of expanding library services and outreach programs in the community, and it's up to
us to use these funds to build these collaborative partnerships that maximize resources and extend
impact and sustainability. In thinking about how research informs practice, IMLS has funded
innovative work that doesn't simply follow the normal pattern of conducting research
in the form of designing and implementing experimental data, and then using those findings
to inform a set of best practices that get implemented by librarians or other educational
professionals. Like my copanelists have mentioned, our IMLS project was given the space to research
those practices, meaning looking at the teaching practices, looking at learning practices,
looking at literacy practices, as the means of talking about how to better understand
and lay the groundwork for implementation of these practices in a variety of settings.
And this sort of reflexivity is important as practices change over time. So for example,
if we think about the ubiquity of digital devices and the internet as a means of accessing
learning materials, there's a tremendous shift in the field. Examining how learners can best
access these materials and use them in flexible ways, both inside and outside library contexts
makes contributions to the field that really have impact for libraries and many other contexts
that seek to implement blending learning models. In summary, the notion of researching practices
is really quite profound. It involves flipping the equation of research informing practice,
to thinking about researching practice and discussing the implementations and implications
for scaleup as part of dissemination. It's a reciprocal, iterate process of having research
inform the field. So how do we design research that impacts
practice? I think one important point to make comes from thinking about research designed
strategically from the very beginning of designing research studies, and that means thinking
about dissemination at the outset of every project design, not as an afterthought at
the end of the project. So our particular project included a research applications committee
as an advisory group at the very outset of the project, and the role of this research
applications committee was to think about findings and dissemination and to advise the
researchers on how best to achieve uptake in the field at the beginning of the project.
So the one way that the rack, or research advisory sorry, research applications committee
advised our project is about and we sought to prepare the audience for the research in
advance of the findings coming out so that it wasn't just, bam, here is a research article,
please go out and implement this. Instead, it was a context and a conversation which
becomes responsive to how the field needs to frame their understanding before the findings
come out. And so the takeaway about this is to think about design studies that build in
to the design of research, tangible, realizable goals of dissemination, including the participants
of those to whom you are disseminating to as a part of the process. So these touch points
I hope will give us some food for thought as we move forward into the question and answer
period. Thank you. [Applause]
>> JOHN HORRIGAN: Well, that's a terrific set of presentations, I know. I've learned
a lot from my fellow panelists and everybody else who has spoken today. So we have now
time to turn to Q & A, and we have microphones coming around. We have some hands being raised,
so we will get underway. >> May I I've got the mic, and I heard Alison
had said to me today that she believes in cutting to the chase, so may I ask a question.
>> You know, thinking of the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, the funding has
been cut in the last few years, we got rid of research category for a year and then brought
it back. We've gotten rid of the preprofessional programs category. We have doctoral, masters,
continuing education, early career development, building capacity. What are we calling it?
Sorry. I've forgotten the name of it. But are these appropriate categories right now?
And I open this up to everybody, like should we get rid of them all and start from scratch?
>> JOHN HORRIGAN: We're going to let each panelist have a crack at this before opening
it up. Gail? >> GAIL DICKINSON: I really think the early
career development which really is probably I mean, it's early career research grant really
is what it is. It's not early career development, is for that beginning researcher really having
a chance, I think that is just really crucial for institutions like mine that we require,
we send our new professors a very scary letter saying six figure grants within the first
year or two, you must apply, you must have a grant or you must be applying for one, and
we'll see you at third year review, and we hope that you have one in your pocket and
that gives that person really a nice leg up on that, so that early career of all of those,
I just really think is crucial, but it's early career research, really.
>> I hope that I haven't looked recently but I certainly hope that we haven't at IMLS done
away with the spark innovation grants. >> I'm just talking Laura Bush.
>> Oh, okay. >> Education and recruitment.
>> Clarify the comment, Mary Alice. Are you talking about all the research grants, or
were you just talking about Laura Bush? >> Just Laura Bush. Not National Leadership
Grant Program or sparks. >> Pass.
>> MEGA SUBRAMANIAM: So I believe it depends on what type of proposal, quality of proposals
that you get in each category. Do you get really good continuing education grants? Then
it might be worth it to keep it. That's one consideration. The second consideration is
I think is to look at what the needs are, because clearly I think from morning, I've
been hearing that there is definitely a need for research to support practice and similarly,
practice supporting research so it might be worthwhile to enhance the research categories
in the Laura Bush call. >> I do have a comment. I think it's important.
Tim and I were talking about it at one of the breaks, actually. I think what's useful
for researchers, kind of on my heels of the gap comment is to have access to program officers
to be able to talk about needs, and to have program officers know what those needs are,
and not necessarily to tip you off to what to apply for, but what IMLS's interests are,
and what they're interested in finding more out about, I find that's probably one of the
most difficult parts in any of these categories. You come up with a great idea. You talk to
practitioners, you really feel like you have a grounded need, and so that access to program
officers is so, so important, as well as the webinars that you do, because people ask really
good questions in the webinars, other researchers, so those are things that you do well. Just
overall during the process. >> This is Chrystie from OCLC, and the question
about the idea of bringing practitioners into the research prose up front, as I think about
just for example the work that we've done with the views 2 team to bring super charged
story time up to scale, multistate program, there's a little bit of a culture clash. And
maybe that's overstatement, but we learned we could say proof, evidence, research base,
but don't ever say the word validated. Don't and I'm like well, it's valid, right?
So we have had this just, you know, funny experience of trying to get research to practice
very, very quickly, and I would imagine that if you bring practitioners into that process
very early on, when you haven't got things kind of figured out yet, then it may create
confusion and a disjointment, like that hinders getting the research to practice quickly.
So I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about maybe some of your experiences along
those lines, and how we can actually do that so that the process is smoother, the process
is faster, and it's more usable, more quickly. >> JILL CASTEK: I think my response to that
is engaging in a community of practice model that I think we all as a profession really
tend to gravitate towards. It's an apprenticeship into an approach in which a shared set of
languages and practices are codified among a group of individuals who have common goals.
And I'm not saying it's an easy process, and that it's not one that doesn't have its rocky
fits and starts, but that community of practice will grow due to the multitude of voices that
are involved in engaging and looking at the practice together so it's one of those stick
with it things that's worth the effort. >> GAIL DICKINSON: I'll jump in here. Something
that I am >> ALISON HEAD: I'll jump in here. Something
that I am increasingly doing on grants, and it's something that IMLS suggested for my
lifelong learning study, and at first I thought, oh, I don't know, I'm not sure what will happen
with it, but it's turned out to be a great thing, and that is to use an advisory board
in the beginning. Even at the point of writing. In fact, I'm putting together an advisory
board today for a different grant project elsewhere. And for them to see the proposal
and to have an idea and have input to have an idea and contribute on some sort of level
and perhaps something you've missed, or another way to look at something, but to get the buyin
early on through that kind of advisory board, the lifelong learning advisory board, we have
Mike Eisenberg, who really is retired, but kind of, he'll never retire, is actually the
head of our lifelong learning advisory board and we put together this great team that people
wanted to be on. We drew from public librarians, academic librarians, some school librarians,
but also beyond that, you don't think people will do it, but we actually were able to get
Ken Bayne, the educator, who's written a lot about college education, and really about
deeper learning, and is really associated with that term. So, you know, to pull together
those like minds in the beginning of the process and carry it through, I think is one way,
Chrystie, to begin that process with practitioners. >> GAIL DICKINSON: I'm going to take a little
bit of a different view of that and say that we have to be careful that researchbased practice
does not become practicebased research entirely, that at times there is a need for strong research
studies that in the strength of the research studies, it's methodology, and evaluated by
researchers who can interpret methodology, and maybe it's something that is not linked
to current practice. We all know X, so if we propose that perhaps Y may be important,
it will be we will spend time trying to understand we love X, we're not saying that we're not
moving away from here. We just want to look at this for a little bit, and maybe sometimes
you need a pure research study to work on theory building for the library of sciences,
and to move in that direction. And maybe that's another category of IMLS grant that's simply
pure research that really moves the field light years away from where we are, and sets
another puts us on another planet that will eventually inform best practice, but is not
I hate to say, it's not linked as directly as other research studies.
>> MEGA SUBRAMANIAM: So Chrystie, my experience has been a little bit different than yours,
I think, because I think primarily my research has always been ethnographic in nature so
I sit in libraries, I hang out with young adults, and the librarian is there as well,
and the patrons, the young adults, the librarian know that we are doing research. They know
that they are doing research, but they don't really feel like they are being involved directly.
It's not that they are collecting the data or I'm asking them for data, so it's very
seamless, which is why I suggested earlier during my fiveminute spiel, that the method
that I use is designbased implementation research methods, where what they see is the results
of my research being cycled back again in to the implementation of programming almost
immediately. We do a debriefing after each afterschool sessions that I've run, after,
you know, sessions that we have in the libraries, and we talk about what can we do next better?
What can we how can we improve some of their hangingout activities that we are doing so
that the young adults that are coming are able to learn the new media literacy skills
that we want, right? So they don't really feel that they are in the research, but they
are. >> You know, just to maybe bridge what Gail
is talking about and what Mega was just mentioning is this notion that if you're going to do
this sort of practicebased research, when you're done with it, well, what are the new
hypotheses that come from this that might take you to that different planet, and if
you have that kind of iterative process going and if IMLS is willing to entertain funding
those planetary change research based on the hypotheses coming out of current practicebased
research, then it might be really moving the field forward. We had a question back here?
>> Yeah. Mary Stansbury, University of Denver. And two comments here. I've been onion how
many IMLS on I don't know how many IMLS proposals, since before Kevin Cherry was on the staff
so that's how long ago I go back. And I've noticed a common situation in the room when
those proposals are being evaluated, and that is this distance that many of the practitioners
in the room put between themselves and back and it goes the other way, too, researchers
put between practice and their own expertise. And so we have practitioners saying well,
I don't understand correlations, so I'm going to leave that up to the researchers in the
room to tell me if this is a good proposal or not. And likewise, researchers saying well,
I guess that's an important question for practice but it doesn't have correlation in it so I'm
not interested in that kind of thing. And that gap I think is a problem. But in part
because our practice, our field doesn't expect each one of us to continue to conduct research
throughout our professional career other than in academic libraries. So if somebody does
happen to take a research methods course in their masters program, that might be it. So
I'm kind of also segueing to the panel at the end of the day, setting that one up, so
just that distancing between research and practice I see actually manifest and the review
of proposals themselves. And then to address Mary Alice's question
about should are these the right funding categories. For whatever reasons, our field doesn't have
a coordinated collaboratively generated research agenda across all of the dimensions of the
field. We have funding priorities, but we don't have a research agenda, and in many
professions that are based on research or informed by research, there is a guiding force,
maybe it would be in our case ALA, I don't know, that's just an idea, that says these
are the questions that the field needs to be asking, whether IMLS funds that research
or not. Or funds that investigation into practice or not. And maybe we're too diverse a field.
I don't think we are, though. The other piece, I understand that NIH is embarking upon an
approach to taking some time away, or some funding away from new research and looking
at what's the aggregation of research on different topics, and that's something we don't do very
well, which is interesting that we haven't gone back. We might base our research on previous
research, but what are the aggregated results tell us? So those are just some ideas.
>> ALISON HEAD: The review process, it came up in the phone call that we had last week
as well. As somebody that is a researcher, a social science researcher, I am concerned
by comments I get back, whether I'm funded or not, you know, quite honestly. And so is
my institution, University of Washington, and the research services, the people that
I work with that care deeply about what we do and the way that proposals are submitted.
So, you know, my concern about the reviewers' comments are there's no recourse, there never
is with any comments at any agency, which is frustrating in itself, but so afternoon
there is a mismatch, and somebody does bring up something from a methods class that they
had that has no bearing on your methodology. And you get a 2. And then somebody gets it
and says, oh, this is transformative, and you get a 5. But you don't get funded. And
this just happened to me. With a lot of discussion at the I school, actually. So, you know, IMLS,
from a research point of view, is, in a lot of ways, the work is important, but those
reviewers and what they say about your proposed ideas, and it's not even what they say. Research
is based in criticism, and you kind of welcome it, and you certainly welcome the debate.
It's more an understanding and a grasp of what research is. It would be like the young
the children's presentation. If I was on if they said could you fill in, Alison, I would
say pass, pass, pass. I have no expertise in that area, and I feel the same way about
research. I wish there was a better pairing. That is something that I think I would say
IMLS should work towards is a better pairing of the people that are reviewing the applications
that take you about four months to write. And I just don't feel it's a fair shake.
>> David, I just want to make a quick and pragmatic statement which is if we want to
have our profession marked by a master's degree, that's going to involve having faculty that
can teach them, which means that they should, if they're going to be functioning at high
level universities, need Ph.Ds, and if you want to have Ph.Ds working in your field at
high level universities, there must be research funding available, period, enough said, or
else, frankly, I know all the people in here, we'll do fine over the National Science Foundation
after a year of retooling and we'll spend lots of time on usability studies. I think
there's a passion here, but as a pragmatic question to your cut through it. We've seen
in school librarianship, looking at my wonderful colleague, one of the issues with the continuation
of school librarianship, we often talk about are there enough positions, are there enough
jobs, are there enough people doing research in this field to prepare the next generation
of school librarians who then become the next generation of faculty? That is something that
IMLS has done. I have a great, great passion for what IMLS has done. To me, funding research
in the field of school librarianship is an activist move because we believe it is an
important thing to do, not a marketdriven move. And I think that so my answer to you
is yes, we need research, and part of the reason we need research is if we are going
to believe that we have this continuing cycle, from a profession to a student to education
to professionals, that research is an essential part of that wheel.
>> Okay. Catherine. There are a couple of things that I want to reflect back on that
Mary brought up, and kind of interject into this, which start and end, really, with two
big points, and they were the exact same points that you were making, Mary, and I just want
to drive them home. So on the one hand, we do have a lot of research
right now. We have a whole lot of research right now and it may not be at the Ph.D level,
but we have a whole lot of research right now and it is being funded in lots of different
directions and none of us know what it is, because it is so sprawling, and it is so mismatched,
and it's so uneven, and until we cure that, until we understand the state of the field
that we're in and the state of the research that we have, I don't know how we can move
forward, and so one of the things that I've gotten really concerned about, particularly
over the last couple of years, is I'm finding myself repeatedly, as I'm starting to think,
okay, yeah, it would be great to do a project on X, I go, nope, I don't know enough. Need
to establish the state of the field first. And I would just encourage, you know, coming
back to Mary Alice's question, I would encourage some attention to figuring out how to synthesize
research and how to, you know, really channel and move forward the good findings and the
you know, the things that are meaningful, and help to figure out how to push those out
where they can be used in practice, so that they can inform practice and vice versa. I
think that reciprocal relationship that both Gail and Jill pointed to is absolutely right
on as well. The second thing is one of the most effective
mechanisms that I've seen, and it was within a very small sub section of research, but
the End It Program from the library of congress, the national digital program, one of the things
that it did right and did extremely right is they made research cohorts, so you couldn't
just get a huge grant on digital preservation and then go your merry way and do your thing.
You were forced to engage with the community that was doing research alongside you. And
I'd really encourage IMLS to think about what role that kind of research cohort model could
play and how that Mike used to help transform some of the disjointed and illused, frankly,
results that we're getting today, as well as some of the things even Alison that you're
pointing to. People don't know enough about the field, about what's out here, about what's
been done, and there's nowhere to go to get that information right now because it's sprawling
and it's messy. The other thing that I'll mention there is that the center for the future
of museums, which I know IMLS has seated, may give us a couple of inspirations and some
directions that at least start to push out some of the findings that are relevant from
other fields, which is the other place where we fall down repeatedly. There is so much
going on in nonprofit management, in sections like in ten and all these other meetings that
are right outside of our borders, and that we're not taking those research findings and
applying them in our own environments, and that's problematic, too. So lots of comments.
Not really a question. Apologize for that, but I'll shut up now.
>> I'll come back to another theme. I think what we have here is a failure to communicate
and it relates partly to what Chrystie said. When we were talking about and we had our
advisory board and we had the researchers there and we were using the terms "Valid"
and "Reliable." And people were like no, no, no. You can't use that reliable. People have
to be trained in reliability and so forth and on, and Project Views has two aspects.
It has the practitioner's piece of it, which is the super charged story times, and he also
wanted a portal for researchers, a protected portal, where the research could be replicated,
but the person who used that had to be trained on reliability, so that's one aspect where
I think we need to learn the lingo, where if people are evaluated proposals, we all
need to understand what the language means and not judge it on some superficial basis.
The other thing is if a project can generate another byproduct, project views gave birth
to so many wonderful things that, you know, we barely mentioned them today. But one thing
that happened is that Dr. Drewsing designed a twoquarter course called researcher action,
where the students were actually trained in reliability, trained how to collect raw data,
and yeah, it was this vast army of people that if it weren't for them, we wouldn't have
been able to do the study either. So having librarians trained, and not the usual statistics
course where you got your textbook, and it's dry as dust, but where they get their hands
dirty, they're out there, they're in the library, they're observing, and understanding in their
souls what research means. I think that could change things, too.
>> Hi. Marsha from Florida State. Well [Laughter]
>> So three things. But first I want to give a shoutout to the IES and NSF Common Guidelines
For Educational Research. I think it's a really good place for us to us to start thinking
about how to generate a theory that a research base out of the emerging areas in our field,
like maker spaces and how to, like, look at that, and have the practice of that kind of
evolve into a theory. So if you haven't seen that document, it's definitely worth checking
out. It's free. So the other thing I wanted to say, and I'm
definitely much more on the commenting end of things, but I had made a whole bunch of
a list of a whole bunch of comments as everybody was speaking here and I was amazed at how
many of them were actually already picked up by other questioners and commenters, so
that just shows me that you guys really were very effective at sending a very unified message.
But I want to also talk about the three unloved pieces of a grant proposal. You know, those
pieces that when you come to writing them, you're just like oh, God, okay, this is just
boiler plate, boiler plate, boiler plate. I think that what we're experiencing now is
the result of many years of boiler plate, and some key areas of grant proposals. And
maybe it's time to start thinking beyond those. The first one being dissemination, which for
some reason has become a very narrow oneway street. And I would argue that dissemination
needs to be more of a conversation, that it's not just going to your conference, yeah, okay,
I'll send you my slides and having that be the end of the dialogue, but being ready for
those dangerous discussions like you might meet somebody who hates your study, and maybe
you need to talk to that person about why they feel so strongly and you can learn something
from them. But also, I think that's a great way to engage with ancillary groups, really
kind of plug in to what's happening in related fields.
But more than that, I think that we need to report negative results. I think that we need
to pub more fail studies, and we need to educate peer reviewers at journals, that it's okay
if you design a beautiful study, and it produces nothing. That doesn't mean that there's something
wrong with you, that you're a bad researcher, it just may mean that that phenomenon that
we all think with our you know, the hair on the back of our neck or our heart is fa no,
ma'am no, ma'am really might not be a phenomenon, and I would say that being a person who's
not only, you know, encouraging more school librarian faculty to exist, but also, you
know, that's a really dangerous piece of the LIS food chain to be on, too. So, you know,
it is it's a subversive move, no matter how you stack it, but also school librarianship
suffers from the ability of not asking questions it wants the answers to. And so I don't have
expertise in other areas, but those of you who do might be worth thinking about what
those are, and maybe let's just see if a fail study or two might start shedding some light
on that. The next piece is sustainability. Mary Alice asked about the grant areas, if
there's one place that sustainability just gets the text that has got some miles on it,
it's probably one of the areas next to dissemination. But I would say that sustainability for a
research proposal is not optional, and it needs to be well articulated in sustainability
isn't about how you're going to get your next grant. It's about either your broader impact
or your intellectual merit. Do you understand what that is as a researcher and do you understand
how to communicate that and make that happen, and so that's a piece that I think should
be a requirement of every research proposal because I had noticed it's become optional
in some, and I always put it in there anyway, and mine isn't boiler plate.
The last piece, and this is something that I think we are in a time now where all of
this talk about sharing data, making data sets articulate with one another, getting
that epidemiological approach to a lot of our problem solving, I think that we've gotten
administration in power now that gets it. And with data.gov and lots of other requirements
for your data products, when it comes to that piece of how you're going to share your data
sets and make them publicly available, please don't make it so that somebody that to figure
out who you are, find you and beg your permission to see your data set. Be more willing to share,
and other people will do the same. And I think in that way, we can, when we have those middle
of the night inspirations for something we want to research, something we want to track
down, we don't have to have basically a full scale mission to find out who that person
is. So when you prepare that piece for your IMLS
proposal, just be thinking about that, too. And so that was really, I just love all the
pieces of your grant proposal, and then maybe oh, and the last thing is I wonder if maybe,
in a way to deal with the issue with, you know, that Rand Doe you get on your panel
every once in a while who may not have expertise in your area yet feels as though they do,
if there's some way of maybe averaging the scores, how about dropping a high and low
and maybe looking at what's in the middle. >> Or looking at inconsistency.
>> Yeah. >> As a flag.
>> As social scientists, we have many different ways we can look at these things.
>> Okay. I'm moving the mic over here. >> Hi, I'm
>> One second, please. >> So I have a lot of comments to what Marsha
said. But I'm just going to highlight one. So I think it's really interesting, Marsha
pointed out that we should be publishing research that failed, right? So I would also, then,
reach out to the editors of journals to see if they would actually publish those research.
So I want all of you to think about that, though.
>> Or a new journal. The Failed Study. . >> JOHN HORRIGAN: We have a question over
here. >> Yes. Very interesting conversation here.
Two points. First, we need to question the power and the meanings associated with the
research, and I think IMLS is doing that very well, recognizing the positive what we understand
as knowledge, research, what methods need to be what are accepted as relevant and valid
in telling a particular story, exploring the phenomena to be explored, and how we do it.
So the stepbrotherly treatment that qualitative researchers have had, I think we sometimes
internalize that further, and I think in some ways, IMLS has done a great job in recognizing
the quality of their approaches, but now, if one needs to look forward in terms of action
research, we might need to acknowledge a more even more broader understanding of the research,
who is the researcher and the participant. As you all know, we have the concept of community
action researchers, where the researcher and the participant are bringing their own realities
into the situation, and so they are bringing their own expertise into that.
So I think taking our understanding of research and the meaning of research, that's where
we find sort of this between the research and practice because we got stuck in the traditional
definitions of those terms, and what we understand as a part of that process.
The second aspect is looking at when one was in telling our own stories, we internalize
those preconceived historical notions about research, and so we should be but of course
it is important to be able to document what we might have done and how we did it so that
others realize what we are doing and how we got there. And I sometimes feel that people
have had a resistance in being able to indicate it that way because they are controlling their
own experiences and the stories in terms of what the social constructs of traditional
research has been. And so I think we need to be able to then acknowledge that and move
forward from there. Thanks. >> But I would also just point out that I
wonder and this is a question for IMLS to ponder could an as soundly constructed action
research project as you describe, and a theoretical research theorybuilding research study be
evaluated by these same panel reviewers, and I think that is a really good question. Sorry.
I think you should ponder that. I don't know the answer.
>> So I have a question. This is Cindy Gibbon. I am pondering the concept of failed research.
What in the heck is failed research? Is that when you fail to prove your hypothesis, when
what you thought was going to happen doesn't? >> GAIL DICKINSON: It's when you try to prove
that reading makes a difference in kids' lives and you find out that with your group of kids,
for some reason, their test scores went down. >> That's not failed research. In my mind.
At all. That is when what we thought doesn't turn out to be true.
>> GAIL DICKINSON: That's a failed research. >> And truthfully, it would inform our field
a whole lot more if we saw a whole lot more of those results.
>> I would agree. I would agree. >> JOHN HORRIGAN: I'm going to take the chair's
prerogative just to make an observation as we draw down on time. We talked a good bit
about dissemination, the phrase I hear, and this was from the head of a major foundation,
and I'll add that it's not the Pew Research Center who said this, you know, the notion
of here's my research proposal, here's what my dissemination plan is kind of glazes over
the eyes of a lot of people these days, and the phrase they use instead is, "What's the
pathway to influence in your research that you propose from it" so that you are not just
saying I'm going to publish here or go to these conferences, it's a strategy for getting
that research somewhere where it's going to make a difference to a set of decision makers
that you define. And maybe that's a way to think about dissemination in a somewhat different
way than often has been the case. We have I think time for one more brief question,
and then response, and if not, we are going to thank this panel for a wonderful discussion
and thank you all for the questions. So thank you.
[Applause]