Week 6: Book Clubs, Socratic Seminars & a Bit More Transfer

In this week’s installment of 643, we discussed transfer some more, along with a few other topical items (gaming, blogs, book clubs). After having talked further about Dr. McGonigal’s TED Talk, I thought more about how her presentation related to what we were learning about transfer. Her main point seemed to be that two seemingly unrelated tasks (playing video games and saving the world) are actually connected. That is, gamers can transfer skills from the video game arena to the real-life, world-saving arena.  Still, it seems unlikely that many gamers are going to give up World of Warcraft or Call of Duty to play games that deal with a looming oil shortage or a finite water supply. In other words, I think for transfer to really be effective, there has to be a more obvious connection between the contexts. 

What was interesting to learn was the apparent divide between classmates who thought transfer was crucial to librarianship and others who felt transfer and librarianship had little overlap. I didn’t discuss it too much in my blog from last week, but I guess I sort of assumed that librarians (especially those who focus on instruction) need to know about transfer. After all, librarians are probably going to be responsible for teaching patrons a host of skills—searching for texts, analyzing resources, using technology—that are going to be useful beyond the library environment. 

The readings this week highlight some of the ways librarians can better engage patrons with what they are reading/learning. Hoffert’s article offered a survey of some of the new methods that are transforming the book club landscape. Probably my favorite one of her ideas was to loosen up the traditional book club convention of having a bunch of people read the same title and then discuss. Instead, Hoffert notes, more book clubs are encouraging thematic discussions in which different readers choose different titles that all fall under a common topic—e.g., magical realism or America in the 1930s. I almost joined a book club at a former workplace, only to find that many of the required readings were not to my liking and so decided to forego the experience. 

I think that if this book club had operated under the theme model, I would probably have stuck it out.

Meanwhile, Metzger and Tredway focus on a concept known as the Socratic Seminar, a method for proactively engaging students with what they are reading. Tredway argues this way of teaching allows students to relate their personal experiences to the material they are reading. Her point suggests that Socratic Seminars might be positive in promoting transfer. If students have a forum for connecting what they learned in a reading with what they’ve learned in another context, then the overall potential for learning has increased.

I preferred Tredway’s article to Metzger’s because of her clear explanation of what is involved in the seminar—reading some text (or watching a film clip or looking at a piece of art, etc.), posing a hook question, and then asking/discussing/clarifying issues from the text—along with her reasoning behind the seminar model (because students must engage with the text more fully, they will also absorb more of the content). I did, however, find Metzger’s discussion of reading comprehension techniques compelling. Her article certainly had some valuable points for encouraging active reading and effective note taking by students. Finally, it seemed neither article really dealt with the issue of nonparticipation by students who are not comfortable speaking up in these types of forums, and I think this is an important issue that needs to be addressed.