Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/78

Rh 2020 and draw from our experiences collaborating on this assignment. We hope that learning from our successes and failures will inspire those who wish to adapt it for their instruction.

Keywords

Active learning, Wikipedia, Information literacy, Social justice, Gender, Teaching methods, Instruction, Collaboration, Cultural anthropology.

Introduction

How can we empower our learners to share their work in a meaningful way and position our learners’ hard work to make a difference outside of the classroom? In 2017, Jessica (anthropology professor) and Jennifer (academic librarian) set out to address these questions in Jessica’s upper-level anthropology course at Southern Methodist University (SMU), a private research university in Dallas, Texas, United States. We asked learners in our class to contribute to a Wikipedia article as the culminating class assignment. We loved that the assignment motivated learners to deeply engage with information literacy and cultural anthropology because they valued Wikipedia as a public resource and felt responsible for adding accurate content.

Jessica’s course, Gender, Sex, and Sexuality: A Global Perspective, fulfilled an information literacy requirement in the university curriculum, so we pursued and won a stipend funded through the university library. The stipend was created by the SMU Libraries to encourage faculty/librarian partnerships in assignment design and implementation. The faculty member received a one-time stipend of $1,000. While the librarian did not receive a stipend, they enjoyed an enhanced reputation at the library, increased recognition on campus, and opportunities to collaborate with additional faculty members.

In this chapter, we will share our process of collaborating to develop and implement an assignment asking learners to contribute content to a Wikipedia page. We begin by situating our work in the literature on Wikipedia in higher education and on librarian-faculty collaboration. We go on to illustrate why editing Wikipedia provides unique opportunities for