Advising on a Classroom Assignment for Undergraduates

Scenario Description

A faculty member from the sociology department approaches you to ask for advice about an assignment they are planning for an upper-level undergraduate course next semester. They would like to have the students, either as a class or in groups, create a digital map with pinpoints of different kinds of data: locations of police killings of unarmed civilians, locations where those civilians lived, and potentially other kinds of data—they’re not sure yet.

The faculty member doesn’t have any familiarity with digital mapping tools and while they’ve identified at least one dataset, you haven’t seen it yet so you’re not sure what format the data will be in and to what extent it will need to be cleaned up. Additionally, they have extensive questions about how to integrate the assignment into the broader curriculum of the class. As you prepare to work with this faculty member, you realize you’ll need to skill up in several areas: cleaning datasets, understanding digital mapping tools, and instructional design best practices.

Discussion Questions

  1. The patron’s context
    • Their prior knowledge is:
    • Their motivation is:
  2. Your context
    • Your prior knowledge is:
    • Your motivation is:
  3. How might you approach your consultation with this faculty member? Are there colleague(s) you could see yourself asking to join?
  4. What follow up questions would you ask the faculty member to learn more?
  5. How might you approach identifying and learning the skills you need to succeed in supporting this faculty member? What resources could you explore?
  6. Are there any referrals you could make (inside or outside the library)?