Last fall, our Research Engagement department selected University of Arizona graduate students Aaron Escamilla and Maya Bernstein-Schalet to participate in a new program that supports the university’s strategic imperatives by focusing on enhancing learning and professional development for graduate students. 

Escamilla and Bernstein-Schalet each received a $600 stipend to create and facilitate workshops in November and December 2025. Associate Librarian Anthony Sanchez worked with both students as a supervisor.  

Using artificial intelligence to create learning paths

Escamilla is working on a Master of Science in Cyber and Information Operations. He led his "Exploring AI Tools for Research and Creativity" workshops to show how AI can help create better learning paths for students and improve their knowledge retention. Participants spanned from technical machine-learning engineers to everyday AI chat users and education professionals. This wide-range skillset was important to Escamilla, a technical consultant in threat intelligence and Machine Learning for cybersecurity.   

"I was excited to interact more closely with our students and community and understand their day-to-day needs to help them achieve their goals," he said. "I kept the curriculum flexible, so we could adapt to the majority’s needs." 

The workshops were designed to establish a baseline understanding of how to better serve a community that has large and diverse misunderstandings and concerns around AI tools and their functionality. Escamilla surveyed target audience members to understand their interests in tools, explored the use cases of various AI tools, created a slide presentation, and provided follow-up tutorials. He also created a poll to gather feedback from participants after the workshop.

Looking back on the experience, Escamilla said that having a broad audience made the workshops difficult to execute. At the same time, participant feedback indicated that they wanted the workshops to cover different topics. Time constraints were challenging as well. "What looked like a one-hour workshop should have been a four-hour workshop to allow for more questions and a deeper dive into some of the tools," he said. 

Despite these challenges, there were positive outcomes as well. "Aaron did an excellent job by not only talking about the basics of how AI functions and the breadth of resources available, but also the ethical concerns, which resonates with how libraries nationwide are starting to build services around AI," Sanchez said. 

Escamilla, who is graduating this May, has some ideas for workshops tackling the topic of AI in the future. "My hope is that we can provide a variety of AI workshops that are more focused on the different levels of AI application, technical audiences, and specific departments or professionals like educators, [and] those involved in creating content, programmers, and developers."

Investigative research skills can benefit everyone

Bernstein-Schalet is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She learned to be a creative, multidisciplinary researcher through her training in anthropology, sociology, and journalism. 

One of the most common research challenges that Bernstein-Schalet sees is learning how to think creatively when it comes to conducting research. "Learning investigative research methods is a great way to gain a flexible research mindset," said Bernstein-Schalet. "My own writing process involves extensive research, and I regularly assist my peers with research."

Based on her experiences, Bernstein-Schalet developed and facilitated two introductory workshops. Her workshop, "The Investigative Research Toolkit," focused on helping participants strengthen their research skills and learn about investigative research using materials such as archives, books, films, and digital correspondence. 

"Maya's workshop embodied many of the critical information literacy values that librarians strive for, featuring an innovative approach to teaching research methods and evaluating sources, especially in this era of widespread misinformation and disinformation," Sanchez said.

Each 90-minute workshop began with clips from movies and television that introduced participants to the kind of creative mindset that quality investigative research requires. The end of the workshop was dedicated to thinking of research leads that were specific to each participant. 

“There is as much to be learned in watching archival footage from a century ago, as there is in scrolling through a person’s Instagram feed from 2016," Berstein-Schalet said. "Teaching that kind of flexible understanding can be difficult when students are taught that research only means reading a hard-to-find book or annotating articles full of academic jargon. It can mean those things, but not necessarily."