Field Experience: Deliverables

Deliverables

There are four deliverables that you must produce during your field experience:  

• the Field Experience Agreement form
• a work log
• a reflective paper
• an evaluation form

The Field Experience Agreement

Every field experience is unique and guided by the student's learning objectives, as negotiated with the site supervisor and faculty supervisor. The fieldwork agreement is a learning contract, and as such all parties agree to certain responsibilities to assist the student to achieve his or her learning objectives.  The Field Experience Agreement is available on our Forms page.

What is a learning contract? It is an agreement between a student and an instructor, in which the student articulates his or her educational goals, and how he or she will meet those goals. A learning contract provides a vehicle to make the planning of learning experiences a mutual undertaking between the learner and the instructor(s). By participating in the process of determining educational needs, formulating objectives, choosing strategies, and evaluating accomplishments, the learner develops a sense of ownership of and commitment to the plan.

What does a learning contract contain? According to Knowles¹:

A learning contract typically specifies (1) the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values to be acquired by the learner (learning objectives), (2) how these objectives are to be accomplished (learning resources and strategies), (3) the target date for their accomplishment, (4) what evidence will be presented to demonstrate that the objectives have been accomplished, and (5) how this evidence will be judged or validated.

How to develop a learning contract:

Knowles suggests that there are four questions that a learning contract should address:

1. What are you going to learn? (Objectives)
2. How are you going to learn it? (Resources and strategies)
3. How are you going to know that you learned it? (Evidence)
4. How are you going to prove that you learned it? (Verification)

Choose a site for your field experience that will enable you to fulfill your learning objectives. A site at which you will perform tasks like the job you plan to seek upon graduation may be desirable, but is not necessary: much information work is generalizable across contexts. For example, one can learn preservation-related skills in special collections, archives, museums, etc. One can learn user education-related skills in almost any information organization. Resources that will help you accomplish your learning objectives of course include your site itself, and your site supervisor. But resources may also include your colleagues on the site, the materials you will be working with, professional and social networks you will be part of, the professional literature that you read, etc. Strategies for fulfilling your learning objectives may include the tasks you will be performing, meetings you may attend and committees you may serve on, feedback from your site supervisor and the actions you take based on that feedback, etc. For certain types of learning objectives -- those that are more skill-based, in particular -- strategies may involve apprentice-like interactions with your site supervisor and other colleagues at your site, and legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice.² Part of the function of the work log is to provide a vehicle for you to discuss the resources and strategies that you are using to accomplish your learning objectives.

In ordinary courses, the instructor develops course objectives, assignments for assessing if students have accomplished those objectives, and grading rubrics according to which individual students' work on those assignments is evaluated. Exams and papers provide the instructor with evidence that a student has or has not learned certain material, and the instructor weighs this evidence against some set of criteria to gauge the quality of the performance. What evidence will you collect to demonstrate that you have accomplished your learning objectives? And, further, according to what criteria should that evidence be evaluated? If you are staffing a reference desk, what constitutes good service, and how will you demonstrate that you are providing it? If you are repairing pages and bindings of books, what how will you demonstrate that your repairs are sound? Since a field experience is an individualized learning experience, no one but you can evaluate whether you have accomplished your learning objectives. However, because a field experience is situated in the context of your site and some segment of the profession, your site supervisor is uniquely qualified to assist you to identify appropriate evaluation criteria. The criteria according to which your accomplishment of your learning objectives should be evaluated may be derived from from the skills and competencies required to do the job, may be documented in the professional literature, or may live implicitly in your site supervisor's and colleagues' heads, or some combination. The evidence that you should collect to assess your performance may be derived from these criteria, or may be developed by you, or some combination. Part of the function of the work log is to provide a vehicle for you to document your growing understanding of these criteria, and your collection of this evidence. Part of the function of the reflective paper is to provide a vehicle for you to explore the implications of all of the above for you, your course of study in SILS, your professional aspirations, etc.

The following provides an example for a hypothetical learning contract:

Work Log

You must maintain a daily log of your field experience. You should record in this log the activities that you have performed, and the events and projects in which you have participated at your site. You should also record in this log your reflections (thoughts, opinions, questions, comments, etc.) on your activities and participation.

Submit your log to your faculty supervisor after you have completed approximately 60 hours on site (about midway through the experience). The log will trigger your faculty supervisor to arrange a site visit (or telephone conference call) to meet with you and your site supervisor, to review your progress towards your learning objectives.

Some students share their work log with their site supervisor as well. This is not necessary, but may be useful as a mechanism to inform your site supervisor about your progress on tasks, and to provide points of discussion for contextualizing your professional education.

You may stop keeping the log after you submit it to your faculty supervisor, unless its useful to you or your site to keep it up.

Reflective Paper

At the end of the semester, you must write an approximately 6-8 page reflective paper about your field experience. This paper can be a broad-brushstroke overview of your entire field experience, or it can focus in depth on one or a few specific learning outcomes or tasks: this must be negotiated between you and your faculty supervisor.

The reflective paper should be framed in terms of your learning objectives. This paper should answer -- at least implicitly -- the four questions from your learning contract, as well as addressing how that learning intersects or interacts with your other learning in the SILS program. One possible model for the reflective paper is to frame it as a feature article for Library Journal: those are reasonably reflective, about the right length, and generally draw on relevant literature.

The reflective paper should have a brief bibliography, of approximately 6-10 readings. However, the reflective paper should not be original research. Rather, your reflections should be grounded in the professional literature. When writing about what you learned, the criteria for evaluating that learning, how that learning fits in with your course of study and career aspirations, etc., you should refer to the professional literature about the aspects of the practice that you are involved in: skills and competencies required to do that job, best practices, how the job may be changing, etc.

The due date for the reflective paper at the end of the semester must be negotiated between you and your faculty supervisor. However, here is a suggestion for setting this due date: see the Registrar's Exam Schedules for exam dates, and note the date on which exams are scheduled for courses "not otherwise provided for on this schedule." Since the field experience does not have a regular class meeting time, this date makes a sensible due date for the reflective paper. However, you must discuss this and agree on a due date with your faculty supervisor in advance of the end of the semester.

Evaluation Form

On completion of your field experience, you must complete an evaluation of the experience and the site on the Student Field Experience Evaluation. Give this form to the Field Experience Coordinator.

¹ Knowles, M. S. (1986).  Using Learning Contracts:  Practical Approaches to Individualizing and Structuring Learning.  San Francisco:  Josse-Bass Publishers.

² Lave, J., and Wenger, E.  (1991).  Situated Learning:  Legitimate Peripheral Participation.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.