Syllabus

Workshop overview

This online workshop will guide you through resources, activities, and discussion designed to prepare you for your role in research.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

Identify resources and Libraries services to help improve your academic skills
Communicate directly with staff members of the UW Libraries
Discover new strategies and tools for research

Topics covered in this workshop:

Research as conversation
Effective academic research
Developing research questions
UW Libraries databases
Subject librarians
Google Scholar
Mental health resources
Citation styles and tools
Copyright
Research impact
And more…

This course is a safe space for open discussions. We embrace many perspectives and experiences within this course and at the UW Libraries, as long as they are not harmful to one another. We strive to make this a welcoming and supportive environment to allow each of you to thrive creatively as a researcher.

Participation

GSRI is primarily an asynchronous experience, which means that it can be completed totally online on your own time. We recommend you pace yourself to one module a day but the specifics of your participation are entirely up to you.

We offer an optional Slack experience as part of GSRI to help encourage peer to peer networking and to facilitate communication with Libraries staff. Slack participation is not required to complete the workshop.

Events

We offer optional synchronous Zoom meetings in each session of GSRI to help build community and address more complex issues of graduate student research. Attendance is not required to participate or complete the workshop. Details about Zoom sessions will be shared via email or in Slack.

Code of conduct

Students are expected to follow the Libraries Code of Conduct. This includes online interactions in Slack, email, etc. If you have questions about this, please feel free to reach out to us anytime at via Slack or by using the contact form.

Commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion

Equity is a core value of the UW Libraries. We believe that libraries have a central role to play in building a more socially just and anti-racist society. We bear the responsibility to investigate and dismantle policies and practices that perpetuate inequities and have devalued, neglected or harmed BIPOC and other minoritized communities. We are committed to engaging in an ongoing process of identifying and confronting ways in which organizational and institutional culture, bias, and discrimination may inhibit the lives and education of groups that have been marginalized in our society, on our campuses, and in our libraries. We actively support the University in advancing equity, sustaining diversity, creating inclusive experiences for all members of our community, and confronting institutional bias and structural racism.

The UW Libraries, as a community, commits to identifying, resourcing, and implementing actionable next steps in pursuit of becoming a more equitable and anti-racist organization.

Land Acknowledgement

University of Washington, its global community, and all of our lives and institutions exist on Indigenous land. We acknowledge the ancestral homelands of those who were here before us and who are still here, especially our local area where area Native peoples identify as the Duwamish, Suquamish, Snoqualmie, and Puyallup, as well as the tribes of the Muckleshoot, Tulalip, other Coast Salish peoples, and their descendants. We are grateful to respectfully live and work on these lands and to follow the leadership of our community members (including Affiliated Faculty, Research Assistants, and campus and community partners) who are Native and Indigenous, particularly those who are from these territories.

We ask those who are engaging in this workshop and any class or event at UW to reflect on the lands on which you live and acknowledge all of the ancestral homelands and traditional territories of Indigenous people. If you are unsure on whose ancestral land you reside, you may consult Native Land for more information. Land acknowledgements like this are just one small act in the ongoing process of honoring the land and the people of the land and building relationships with them.

Inspired by the land acknowledgements of UW Libraries Constitution Day and the UW Banks Center of Educational Justice.

Access and accommodations

Your experience in this workshop is important to us. It is the policy and practice of the University of Washington to create inclusive and accessible learning environments consistent with federal and state law. If you have already established accommodations with Disability Resources for Students (DRS), please activate your accommodations via myDRS so we can discuss how they will be implemented in this course.

If you have not yet established services through DRS, but have a temporary health condition or permanent disability that requires accommodations (conditions include but not limited to; mental health, attention-related, learning, vision, hearing, physical or health impacts), contact DRS directly to set up an Access Plan. DRS facilitates the interactive process that establishes reasonable accommodations. Contact DRS at disability.uw.edu.

Contact information

Please use the GSRI Slack to interact with members of this workshop. If you have any concerns that need to be addressed outside of the course, use the contact form and a member of the team will be notified.

Who are the creators of GSRI

The Graduate Student Research Institute was created in 2017 by the UW Libraries’ Instructional Design & Outreach Services Team (LibID), with the support of Jaye Sablan and Kelly Edwards in Graduate Student Affairs (formerly Graduate School Core Programs) and Carolyn Jackson of the Office of Graduate Student Equity & Excellence (GSEE, formerly Go-MAP). We have maintained and continued to revise and offer GSRI to graduate students each summer, with the support of UW Libraries’ tri-campus staff that mentor students in the program, facilitate zoom sessions, discussion boards and Slack discussions, and help to revise content.

The LibID Team focuses on scalable and innovative approaches to library instruction and coordinates Libraries support for fee-based degree programs, with special emphasis on the needs of professional, online, and non-traditional learners. LibID focuses efforts on building programs and services that intentionally support Black, Indigenous and Students of Color and have core Antiracist Commitments that have guided the development and decisions of GSRI.

The core LibID Team is Robin Chin Roemer, Perry Yee and Reed Garber-Pearson. Joe Lollo and Amber Mak are Online Learning & Engagement Specialists with the team.

Frequently Asked Questions

Unfortunately, this course does not provide certification for any of the tools or methods used during the learning experience. However, participants gain exposure to new ideas and frameworks while building practical research skills.

We ask participants to engage with course content and interactive elements of this workshop throughout the entirety of the course. You will be asked to read through our course content, complete short activities, and engage in discussion with peers if you so choose. This process should take no longer than one hour per day.

No, you may review content based on area of interest but completing each module will give you a better understanding of resources, services and support the UW Libraries can provide for you.

We request that you fill out and submit a feedback form that will allow us to improve this course for future cohorts. This will also be your opportunity to reflect on your learning experience. You will continue to have access to this open website for information.

A copy of this syllabus is available in PDF format.