In an attempt to support first-year students as they acclimate to academia and begin to engage with college-level research, a writing instructor and librarian collaborated on curriculum for a first-year writing course that includes information literacy and First-Year Experience outcomes. We developed an embedded librarianship model and a curriculum we call “Research and Writing as Inquiry,” which scaffolds students into the iterative nature of the research process and familiarizes them with library resources as they work on a larger research essay. The goal of this curriculum is to facilitate growth, development, and confidence in not only their research and writing processes, but also in their sense of belonging on campus and in academia as a whole.

Our session will detail our embedded librarianship model and define this role in the context of the course. We will also explain how we blend the pedagogical frameworks from our disciplines, the WPA Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing (2011) and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2015), to create a curriculum that fosters the research and writing processes together. We will conclude with a discussion among session participants on the ways they implement information literacy instruction in their learning environments.

In 1968, Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the idea of carnival in his work “Rabelais and His World”. The idea, a rhetorical tool that was framed within the context of medieval literature, argued that carnival was a space in which social and cultural hierarchies were suspended. This allowed for all those involved to exist socially in ways they had not before. In the 80’s and 90’s, Carnival was applied by scholars Susan Miller and Jeffrey Carroll to the field of Composition and Rhetoric. They argued for implementation of carnivalesque ideas in the writing classroom like hierarchy suspension and the use of the vulgar canon. Though these spaces would encourage engagement and feelings of belonging in the classroom, I argue that the ideas as Bakhtin presents them is limited because of their temporal nature. Besides that, it has been argued that liberation when “allowed” is not true liberation, but only a representation of oppressive power structures. I argue that a more permanent application of carnival that encourages critical consciousness and strategic rhetorical disobedience through what I call rhetorical mischief can help foster student engagement and encourage students to create their own spaces of belonging without the need for permission to do so.