Ideas to Action 2019: Back to High School, Cardinal Stritch University

Our financial strength means we can turn ideas into reality. Investing in our members drives innovation and collaboration that, in turn, fuels other libraries to take projects further. This series, written by award recipients, highlights projects and outcomes of the 2019 WiLS Ideas to Action Fund. If you’d like your project considered for the 2020 award period, visit our Ideas to Action website or email us at .

As college librarians, we often see students who are not prepared or are under-prepared for the rigor of college research. Our idea was to develop an information literacy curriculum that could be used in high school, using BadgerLink and other resources. However, in order to effectively bridge the high school to college gap, we needed input from all the stakeholders: high school and college faculty and high school and college librarians.

WiLS funding enabled us to create this unique talent pool of individuals. We drew these individuals from a literature course and a religion course that are taught in the high school as part of Cardinal Stritch University’s concurrent enrollment program. This gave us shared disciplinary courses to work with, as well as shared knowledge of the basic curriculum. Thus far, our group has met four times to plan information literacy lessons that will guide students through the research process, from selecting a topic, doing background research, narrowing their focus, finding keywords, and selecting databases. In the literature course, students will also be introduced to archival research.

We chose this idea of a research plan to address what we all agreed was the biggest problem with student research: students’ unwillingness or inability to engage with their topics beyond the most basic of sources. Our focus on engaging students in research took us away from the skill-based lessons that we may have initially envisioned, yet surprisingly, our final lessons evolved into ones that incorporate both engagement and basic skills. Our lessons are currently being “field-tested” in the literature course and our plan is to test them out in the religion course as well.

Many thanks to WiLS for turning our idea into action. We are looking forward to seeing what happens.