2024-06-13 –, Charleswood A
Language: English
Introduction: Academic health librarians regularly teach students evidence synthesis (ES) search skills through research consultations and group sessions. Increasing demand to support student projects can challenge boundaries regarding librarians’ role in ES methods and provoke decisions about how and what to teach. We know little about librarian teaching practices during remote instruction of ES methods so I aimed to untangle the organizational, technological, pedagogical, and methodological aspects of online teaching practices regarding ES methods and make visible the diverse strategies for engaging learners.
Methods: In this digital ethnography using sociomaterial theories, 11 Canadian health librarians participated in two focus groups, eight observations of online research consultations, and five interviews. Analysis focused on tracing actions and disruptions to build relational understandings of the human, non-human, material, and immaterial entanglements in online teaching practices.
Results: Digital learning objects, such as video tutorials and library guides, along with ES methods guidance and review-related technologies mediated librarians’ online teaching practices. In response to methodological expectations and learners’ demonstrated abilities, librarians calibrated their teaching to balance technical and conceptual learning objectives related to the interconnected steps of ES methods. Librarians teach searching, question formulation, and more using the affordances of various technologies, both to deliver the training and in conducting steps of the review.
Discussion: I propose a model to frame decisions about how technologies, techniques, methods, content, and format influences online ES methods instruction, depending on the audience, setting, and context. This framework can help make explicit the often invisible labour of teaching ES methods.
Robin Parker, MLIS PhD candidate, works at the WK Kellogg Health Sciences Library as a liaison librarian for Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Medicine, and supports learners, faculty, and staff in undergraduate, postgraduate, and graduate Medicine programs. She also supports students and researchers across Dalhousie with evidence synthesis projects and is cross-appointed as an adjunct research associate with CHE. Currently an Interdisciplinary PhD candidate finishing her dissertation, Robin’s research explores academic health librarians’ contributions to teaching systematic review and other evidence synthesis methods. Robin lives in Kespukwitk, a district of Mi'kma'ki along the Bay of Fundy. She is grateful to live in the rural community where she was born on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people. In consideration of the Treaties of Peace and Friendship signed in Mi’kma’ki and our collective continual efforts to decolonize and seek reconciliation for the harms of our educational and health systems, Robin is committed to learning about Indigenous ways of knowing and research methodologies. She encourages researchers to incorporate disparate voices and types of knowledge into evidence syntheses and to include those impacted by the issues we research in the entire research process.