Silly title but I couldn’t resist.
Yesterday I taught a one-shot research workshop for CRS 431: Entrepreneurship in Apparel, Retailing, & Design. Meanwhile I continue to help teach ENT 300: Ideas to Opportunities: Feasibility Analysis, an Entrepreneurship major and minor capstone class (the required follow-up is ENT 336: Opportunities to Action: Business Plan). CRS 431 and ENT 300 have largely the same research needs, but one class got a one-shot, 75 minute research workshop while the other has an embedded librarian.
I feel a little guilty about my relative lack of attention to the CARS kids, even if I told them a couple of times that they are welcome to visit me with their follow-up research needs. I also told the professor (a new, young, and sharp prof with whom I of course want to establish a good working relationship) that I’m happy to visit the class later in the semester, even if just for a short update. But the contrast between what I could accomplish with the CARS class versus my ongoing involvement with ENT 300 is stark.
But do we have the time to embed in every class with major research needs? Well, heck no, of course not. Embedding as a co-teacher (and most other kinds of embedding) is very time intensive. We have to prioritize classes based on criteria like:
- Typical class size
- Whether the class is required for the major or department
- Openness of the professor to have a co-teaching librarian
Anyway, for CRS 431, we discussed demographic concepts and explored data using census.org and DemographicsNow (also getting into CEX microdata there), and then discussed and explored industry data with NAICS codes using County Business Patterns and BizMiner. We’ll see how much of that teaching stuck.
