While plagiarism workshops are a staple at UCLA, and are common on university campuses nation-wide, what about foundational approaches to teaching citations? Even when citation workshops are offered, so often it comes in the form of citation management tools that often ignore the communicative aspects of citations in a globally connected network of scholars. In order for learners to have a firm grasp of why citations are important in the first place, these two librarians have used design centered thinking to focus on instructional approaches that strip back digital tools to focus on the mechanisms underlying citations as a form of scholarly communications.
Part of this approach is moving away from assumptions about what a student may already know about citations and towards intentional design that positions students as scholars who are just beginning to gain entry into a discipline. Using the ACRL frame “Scholarship as Conversation”, game-based techniques, and various instructional design cycles, two librarians from different UCLA Library branches will discuss how they teach citations as communication. Additionally, they will discuss what they learned about the perception of students’ role in the academe, overcoming challenges in creating buy-in for iterative approaches to citations, and the role of sociocultural issues in designing for citations.
Ultimately, citations create authority structures within disciplines, and teaching students about the role of citations helps students understand issues around plagiarism. The presenters seek to seed a conversation with the audience about the design process when taking non-punitive approaches to plagiarism.
Session Learning Outcomes
- Learners will think critically about the assumptions librarians make about incoming undergraduate and graduate students prior knowledge about citations;
- Learners will participate in an engaged dialogue about developing new approaches to teaching citations using the ACRL Framework;
- Learners will assess how citations are situated in the greater scholarly communications landscape.
