This project will develop a module offered to level 2 Undergraduate students and will seek to develop student’s skills in collaborative working and information literacy while still advancing their discipline knowledge. The subject librarian will be invited to conduct an inquiry-based workshop with the students at the start of the module to prepare them for a literature search activity and will also provide ongoing support for students via discussion boards in the VLE. There are some contentious issues in the discipline that students historically have found problematic to analyse, these topics will be used to provide a stimulus for the literature searching activity and will then form the subject of the class debates in weeks 6 and 7. Students will be required to submit a reflective report on their literature search with an annotated bibliography to demonstrate their assessment of the quality of the resources they have found.
The second half of the module will focus on collaborative inquiry. Groups will negotiate a topic to investigate with the module leader and will be expected to produce a collaborative report detailing their assessment of the topic. In order to foreground the importance of the collaborative working timetabled sessions will be given over to group activity, facilitated by the module leader. The content which had previously been delivered in lecture format will be made available as podcasts on the module VLE. In addition to the group report students will be asked to keep a reflective diary about their experiences of engaging in group work which was also form part of the assessed work for the module.