Minority high school students in a university setting
The University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL) held its second annual SPICE (Summer Pre-College Instruction and Career Experience) in June 1989. The week-long program, coordinated by the university's Multi-Cultural Affairs Office, is designed to promote the value of higher education to tenth- and eleventh-grade racial minority students in Nebraska by giving them a sense of what a college education involves. It is also designed to provide information about career opportunities in the various disciplines. This year the libraries joined with eight other colleges, four departments, and two vice-chancellors' offices at UNL to provide programs and workshops for the students. In 1988 students who would be entering the tenth grade attended the SPICE program. In 1989, these same students were invited along with a new group of tenth graders. The sixty-one students were divided into two groups by grade. Each group included an equal mix of racial minorities, as well as an equal number of males and females. These Nebraska students came from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some were from Omaha and Lincoln, while others were from rural areas. They also had different levels of academic achievement and school involvement.
Planning for the program began in February 1989. Campus-wide SPICE meetings were held monthly with the representatives of each college involved in the program. Each college or department could choose to conduct either a three-hour program or a six-hour event, and could choose to work with the new students, the returning eleventh graders, or both groups. We presented our ideas at the meetings and gave each other feedback on the plans. We were given information about the students and about the variety of recreational and educational activities scheduled for the week's events. Schedules were carefully synchronized as the students were busy from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. each day.
The libraries chose to present a three-hour workshop for the returning eleventh-grade students. We felt that these students would be more interested in using the library and might have more of a need to do library research in their school work. Since this was our first year of designing a program for minority high school students, and because we wanted to include library instruction in our program, we conducted a literature search to discover information on library instruction for racial minority students. The results were surprising to us. Overwhelmingly, the articles were on foreign students in the United States.
Since there was very little written about library instruction geared to domestic racial minorities, particularly for high school students using a univeristy library, we decided to try modifying our basic bibliographic instruction program for freshmen. We also chose to divide the students into groups of seven and to not conduct a formal bibliographic instruction session for them. We wanted a program that was informal, and included hands-on activities for the students. We began with the research strategy flow chart and self-paced workbook that we use for many freshmen instruction classes. We put together four different worksbooks with a generic flowchart, a topic-specific flowchart, maps, glossary of library terms, and explanations of the Library of Congress subject headings. We chose four topics pertaining to different cultures (Afro-American, Hispanic, Native America, and Asian-American) and inserted these into the flow chart. We included questions that required the students to use the Library of Congress Subject Headings, card catalog, Wilson indexes, PAIS, and the government documents CD-ROM index to find information on these topics. We ;did not expect the students to read all of the materials while they were at the library but hoped they would use the workbooks as resources when they returned to their high schools.
The final plans included a brief tour of the library, the exercise of doing research using the workbook, and a wrap-up session to discuss the research process. We also made up packets for the students which included handouts on finding scholarship information and facts about library careers.
Volunteers were recruited from all of the library staff to serve as group leaders. Public and technical services faculty and staff volunteered. We decided to use six volunteers so that we could have four group leaders and two staff to help with the CD-ROM machines. The volunteers were to give the students any help they needed while doing the workbooks or working on the CD-ROMs. The volunteers had one three-hour training session and one last-minute discussion session. Some of the volunteers had not used perioedical indexes, so our training session included basic library instruction as well as tips and ideas on working with the students. Follow-up memos were sent to the volunteers to keep them apprised of schedules and to give presentation hints we thought might be useful. We also held an All-Staff meeting to introduce the SPICE program to the library staff and to help raise their consciousness about the University's programs for racial minority students. Vaughn Robertson, coordinator for the SPICE program, addressed the staff, providing them with information about the program and helping to explain how the campus was involved in recruiting racial minority students. His talk set a positive tone for the program and helped prepare staff for the onslaught of the high school students. Now, we felt we were ready for the students.
When the students arrived at 8:15 on Thursday morning, they were quite sleepy from a late movie the night before and were functioning on about five hours of sleep. They were also worn out from the previous four days of activities. These problems made it dificult for us to keep their attention. At first they did not want to walk around for the tour but, once they got started, they found the automated circulation system, the microforms area, and the maps intriguing. When they started to work on their workbooks in their groups they seemed reluctant to do anything. As the exercise progressed, some of the students got very involved and it was easy to see they thought it was interesting. The favorite part for everyone was using the CD-ROM machines.
We asked the students to fill out an evaluation form at the end of the program and, given the adverse conditions of working with very tired students, we were reasonably pleased with the results. As was seen in the overall positive evaluation the students gave to the SPICE program, most of the students felt the information we gave them will be useful and they said that most of the information we presented was new to them. although the students did not want to discuss their experience in using the library they did suggest that we change the topics for the research. They wanted us to use topics of more interest to them such as drugs or alcohol abuse. They also suggested we spend more time expalining what goes on in a library and less time actually using the collections.
We are now incorporating the students' comments and our own ideas into planning ways to improve the program for next year. We will scale down the research and have the students answer only one question per index rather than several questions. We will also use more library staff as volunteers. More help was needed while the students were doing the workbooks. Groups of three or four would have been easier to manage. Since the students are interested in computers we may add some time in technical services so they can see how we use computers in our work.
The idea of preparing promising students for what lies ahead of them in college is quite exciting. We hope that these young people liked what they saw on the campus as a whole and will apply to the university. We especially hope that the students took home some things that will help them survive in high school and will prepare them for college. We also enjoyed the opportunity to work with other university faculty and staff in providing a service program. SPICE was obviously a team effort. We became better acquainted with our colleagues and learned more about each others' recruiting programs. We foresee that the libraries' participation in SPICE will be a regular summer event.