KNOW YOUR STUDENTS

摘要

On a cold Monday afternoon in December, undergraduates study silently in the ornate reading room of a mid-sized university library. One floor down in the reference area, groups of four or five students work together, speaking in muffled voices. The reference librarian seated near the center of the room glances around, noting that students seem more intent as the end of the semester approaches. Such a scene might occur on any late fall day at the University of Rochester's Rush Rhees Library, NY. But this year, something atypical was happening just down the hall. In a conference room, the library's lead anthropologist, Nancy Fried Foster, sat interviewing a first-year student who, pen in hand, answered questions and sketched a visual representation of her responses. The anthropologist, assisted by a librarian holding a video camera, was not asking questions about the library, not yet anyway. Instead, she asked the student to describe from start to finish, step by step, how she wrote her research paper for her first-year writing class that semester.