This library guide will accompany your library instruction session on February 20, 2025. You will also be able to use the links for your research.
The instruction session and the guide will enable learners to:
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Locate information pathways on the library website.
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Use library discovery tools (the online catalog and databases) in order to find resources for upcoming assignments.
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Identify different types of resources.
Your Assignment
Students’ Choice Final Project (20%): Because you all have different interests, learning styles, and talents, you can choose your own direction for a final assessment, and here are a few ideas: 1) Activist Analysis – If you lead or participate in any Native community project or event (like ecological restoration at Schiller Park, or working with the Chi-Nations Youth Council, volunteering at Trickster Cultural Center), you can develop your plan and report on it. 2) Synthesis or Research Paper: If you find one of the authors or topics we cover particularly compelling, or if there is a contemporary issue, environmental or otherwise, that the course texts have enabled you to better understand, you can bring together the course ideas, discussions, and texts to analyze that topic. How do the course materials speak to each other and provide insight regarding American Indian identities and cultures, particularly with respect to the overall course theme of kinship? What new lines of inquiry do they suggest for you? If you decide to research one or more of the texts in greater depth, you will need to provide a Works Cited page. 3) Students’ Design: What else would you like to do? A group or partner project? A book/film review of another text we should read for this course? Your own storytelling practice, film, drama, poetry, or short story? For this final project, you will each arrange criteria for evaluation, expectations and deadlines with me. You should be thinking about what kind of project you want to do and propose it for approval before midterm. (NOTE: 200 points (20%) will be for the final project itself, and 50 (5%) for your presentation.)
Your Librarian
Hi! My name is Nancy Bialek. I have been an adjunct librarian at Oakton College since 2019. Before becoming a librarian in 2016, I earned an M.A. in English from DePaul University and worked as a college English instructor with a focus on composition, critical thinking, and literature. I also have an M.A. in Religion from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. My interest in all performing arts was nurtured from a young age by artistic family members leading me to study Music and Theater as well as English at California State University, Sacramento. My husband, a mathematics professor, and I raised three daughters in the northern suburbs. Since our oldest left for college in the Fall of 2021, the people in our household are outnumbered by pets.
