Bryan Miyagishima, M.Ed, M.L.S.

Bryan Miyagishima is the Instruction and Outreach Coordinator at Western Oregon University, and a subject reference librarian working with its College of Education. His research interests include library instruction pedagogy, and he has presented and written on the topics of program planning, instructional design, and habits of mind in information literacy. When not in the library, he may often be found on the ski slopes during the wintertime, where he has worked as a snowboarding instructor for the last five years.

Robert Hautala, Ed.D.

Bob Hautala is an Assistant Professor of Physical Education at Western Oregon University, with extensive experience teaching at the k-12 and university levels. He is an expert on motor learning and pedagogy, with over twenty refereed journal and service publications in these areas. He counts among his honors the 1992 "Excellence in Teaching" award from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, but most proudly boasts of his 2005 Oregon State Fair Blue Ribbon in Fly Tying!

Let's get physical!

Bryan Miyagishima and Bob Hautala, Western Oregon University

session 3b / Thursday, May 11 / 3:30 - 5:00

In our work with faculty and students across the curriculum, we can examine teaching methodologies in other disciplines with an eye towards improving our own practice. In this presentation, an examination of theories and teaching methods in Physical Education/ Motor-Learning will shed light on how librarians can structure instruction and learning activities so as to lead to greater student engagement and retention in their own classes.

The motor-learning theory of "dynamic systems" presents the learner as one part of other interacting systems, including the learning environment and task objectives; changes in just one system can effect changes in the learner's performance. With this knowledge, instructors can manipulate the learning environment and/or the tasks to facilitate student performance. For example, in the PE classroom, providing the student a lighter ball will produce a different movement pattern; in the academic environment, placing limitations on the types of research sources allowed will likewise produce different patterns of behavior.

The theory of "contextual interference" shows how the order and difficulty of learning activities affect learner results. For example, a basketball coach might intersperse foul shooting throughout practice, rather than providing one focused time for this skill; an instruction librarian might intersperse database searching instruction with visits to the periodical collection and an examination of article references. In both cases, the target skills (foul shooting, database searching) occur several times during the session, but are "interfered" with by instruction in other skills. In these high-contextual interference examples, learning is slower, but research shows that engagement and retention are greater.

The presenters, a specialist in motor-learning and a librarian/part-time snowboard instructor, will present information on these theories, rationale for their use, and a model for their application in the library instruction classroom.