Finding paths through the information forest

A number of drama academics have been interviewed about how they search for, organise, use and evaluate information for their teaching and research. From this research, interesting themes have emerged about making connections between sources, exploring information, and the serendipitous discovery of information for learning. Drama staff explore, play with sources of information and often collect “interesting” threads of information which they later weave together to create inspiring teaching.

Although drama students seem to approach examining a play with a ludic attitude within a performance or practice space, this playfulness and exploration is missing in their interactions with sources such as books and journal articles. Even within the library space itself, they tend to see one particular sequence of books as “their” library, being reluctant to explore the wider physical or information landscape.

This session will highlight some of the information literacy stories of drama academics, exploring their interactions with the forest of information that is available to them. It will then move to suggestions as to how we can use these “expert” stories to cut paths for students to follow and so improve undergraduate research skills in Arts & Humanities subjects.

Attendees will be asked to reflect on how familiar these stories are and how they can use the examples given to forge new learning stories for their students.