Andrea Terrones Anderson

The Efficient Team-Driven Quality Scholarship (ETQS) Model is a research and writing system, providing strategies for librarians and other faculty to complete scholarly research within a set time frame. ETQS includes a team-driven, collaborative approach, predetermined timelines, built-in quality controls, and concurrent research processes. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the ETQS Model to overcome common research obstacles and promote research success factors. Using the process evaluation method, the authors use the research and writing of this article to assess the ETQS Model. Team member reflections of the process are analyzed and ETQS strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) are evaluated and ameliorated. ETQS, in this case study, is effective in fostering scholarly productivity, promoting success factors, and overcoming obstacles. Utilization of this model could strengthen other collaborative research efforts.

Media literacy is a critical skill, a subset of information literacy, that at this point in history is more important than ever. Students entering higher education generally receive information literacy instruction at the lower division level. However, the skills taught at this level are rudimentary and geared toward introducing students to scholarly and peer-reviewed sources. Conversely, students have relied upon more popular resources in K-12 education and may not have the evaluative skills to more responsibly consume, and ethically use, popular, news, and social media content. Current instruction methods silo instruction between scholarly and peer-review sources for academic use separately from media consumption in everyday life. This separation is problematic as students may achieve academic information literacy and still fall prey to misinformation, they find online and in social situations. While the Association of College and Research Libraries Framework addresses the need for a set of information literacy abilities, the National Association for Media Literacy Education takes this further with their core principles. At California State University, Bakersfield, media literacy is integrated into several information literacy opportunities. However, it is in full-term information literacy instruction, where we most fully develop the concepts and techniques specific to media literacy.

In the technologically enhanced learning environment of today, discussions of truth are greatly impacted by the way student interactions are aligned with how information is found using online sources. Starting points for discussions on truth begin with a greater understanding of the information students interact with and the ways that they seek, find, and evaluate information. Educators must strategically employ discussions of 'objectivity' from their own subjective positions in the classroom and seek ways to actively assist and equip students to become more 'critical consumers of the information they receive online. An understanding of 'information versus knowledge' can assist students as they interact with different types of information on multiple social media sites. These challenges are critically explored as faculty and students alike are confronted by contemporary versions of false information in online sources of information. In a culture of alternative facts and multiple truths, how can faculty equip students to seek and find what is truth?

With the opening of Mexico’s northern border in the late 1820s, many foreign emigrants left their homelands for the wild Texan frontier. The offer of land and opportunity was especially appealing to many Irishmen. Consequently, a great many Irishwomen soon found themselves alongside their husbands and children struggling to survive in an unknown land. Rosalie Hart Priour and Annie Fagan Teal both accompanied their families into Texas in the early 1830s with the dream of owning land. Their experiences during the initial overseas journey, colonization, and through the Texas Revolution reveal not only the hardships they endured, but also give insight into the mind-set of frontier women, and a better understanding of what it was that drove them to leave their homelands for a wild, and unknown country. As disease, revolution, and disorder attempted to pull the people from their land, many men and women’s loyalty and even identity changed in order to maintain a hold on the land first given to them by Mexico.