Treading New Paths: How Creative Collaboration Transformed Teaching the Research Process to USC Upstate’s First-Year Students

What are the special needs of first-year students in learning the research process? How will they come to see research as a process and not a set of discrete skills? How do we as librarians make sure that our instruction session fits organically into the course of which it is ostensibly a part? These have become guiding questions for our First-Year Information Literacy Program at the University of South Carolina Upstate, a collaborative effort of the library with the Center for Student Success, which runs the University 101 freshman seminar, and the Freshman Composition sequence comprising the courses English 101 and 102. We have grappled with these questions on several levels, both practical and philosophical, and our story is one of continuing change, creative experiments, and an ever-deepening relationship between librarians and the teaching faculty.