For many years, I took my sophomores to our local university library during their research unit. They entered, awed at the four stories of books available to them as they begin their academic writing careers. By the time they finished their instruction session and research scavenger hunt, they became intimate with databases, the electronic card catalog, academic journals, and Boolean searches. True, occasionally, I found a student weeping in the stacks on Third Floor, East, hopelessly confused about how to locate a particular title; others I saw stumble down the steps looking dazed, their eyes unfocused and their voices not quite coherent. Overall, they’d seen firsthand the rigor and expectation of the post-secondary education world – as well as the hundreds of college-age hotties they failed to impress, which properly put these high schoolers back into their place in the pecking order of academia.
Most told me later— sometimes years later— that this field trip was one of the best they ever took. As college students, or adults, they often reported that they hadn’t been encouraged to create a unique argument in their high school classes, and later most were not even trained to use their university libraries.
In their research projects, students were challenged to find what academics had written about their research topics and use that information to create and support their own arguments. Often paired with a literature unit, some students researched and wrote about birth order to explicate finer points of Antigone. Others attempted to prove the validity of the historical figure King Arthur. Sometimes, they researched contemporary world problems and how they might solve them using principles of Multi-Track Diplomacy.
Regardless of their topic, they all wrote academic research papers and gave live, formal slideshow presentations to their peers… and sometimes to school board members and administrators. It was a different kind of high-stakes assessment from today’s. One that was often interactive as the audience asked questions.
When the students finished their research, they’d conquered sifting through the various types of scholarly media that a university offers and supports. They’d used legitimate research to support their claims. They had used principles of rhetoric and visual literacy to support their claims and evidence to convince their audiences of their stances. And they had created and supported their own unique claims.
Sadly, as computer technology has removed textbooks and substituted digital access to some academic sources like Google Scholar, this kind of field trip has dwindled from including all my sophomores to only a few advanced students. Administrators often don’t see the need for such outings. I saw the number of my students being exposed to this academic world decreasing from two buses filled with eager students of all backgrounds and capabilities to only the few high ability students who had hung in there for the second semester of a challenging course to finally none. Only the students who were taking dual credit courses had access to the partnering university’s data bases. And those universities were too remote from our location to make a visit practical.
Our emphasis on high stakes testing has meant that it’s become more and more difficult to take students out of their classes for field trips. Other teachers complain. The students are missing content! And, after all, their students’ tests results often impact their teacher performance reviews. And then there’re fuel costs and driver accessibility and permission slips and chaperones. I get it.
But if all students truly must be college and career ready, they all should be given the chance to see what college expects of them. Shouldn’t the students who claim in their writer’s notebooks that they want to be doctors and lawyers, nurses and physical therapists, teachers and computer designers, video game designers and vets see what will be expected of them if they choose to pursue these paths? And shouldn’t they have the opportunity to interact physically with ORIGINAL sources, like books and journals and artifacts? Not a collection of information that a computer has compiled and composed for them based on an algorithm?
Isn’t that research and thinking a large part of making students college and career ready?
What a shame that “academic success” is now more frequently becoming created by sitting in a classroom, memorizing facts, and working practice sets to pass a standardized test, instead of experiencing the challenges of conquering higher level inquiry.
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