Library Instruction West 2020

The customary home of the instruction librarian is often someone else’s classroom, governed by norms and expectations that may not align with our own. In the presenters’ efforts to engage in a more transformative teaching praxis, we focus on the learning space created by and with our library student employees. Whether our students are staffing public service desks or completing technical projects, they form an engaged community ideally suited to collaborative, dialogic learning via their relationships with us and each other. Moving from a training to a teaching model grounded both in critical pedagogy and emergent strategy offers a generative space to dig into nuance, make mistakes, embrace experimentation, and support reciprocal modes of mentorship. Drawing on connections strengthened over months and years working together, the presenters will explore these practices as a means of breaking down hierarchies and imagining more equitable relationships amongst library workers and student staff. Such relationships can create more equitably distributed and just ways of operating, empowering student learners to bring their ideas into the workplace and engage in meaningful decision making. Furthermore, librarians and staff are emboldened to create teaching and learning environments that mesh with their values, without the frustrations of incongruous faculty expectations. As a model of shared power and justice, we hope to inspire library workers to consider not only their student workspaces as potential pedagogical sites but also other extracurricular spaces where more robust and reciprocal relationships may be developed with students.

The SSU Library Art Committee curates exhibits for the Library’s gallery space; in tandem, the Committee develops course-integrated programming and aligns exhibits with the ACRL Framework to engage viewers with information and visual literacy concepts.  In this session, committee members will cover strategies for curating exhibits related to social justice, collaborating with disciplinary faculty on course-integrated instruction and programming, best practices for working with campus administration, and marketing and outreach opportunities.

The fall 2019 exhibit, Queeries: Queer Artists & Identity exemplifies the arts integration efforts of the Committee through course-integrated programs with the Art Department, Freshman Year Experience, and Women and Gender Studies Department. One of several examples the Committee will share is the collaboration between performance artist Seth Eisen, the Library, and an LGBTQ+ U.S. History class to create a course-integrated lecture and an on-campus performance. Librarians and Eisen developed a lesson in which Eisen described how he locates and uses primary source materials to develop his performance pieces, followed by a librarian-led discussion about the importance of collecting archival materials from underrepresented communities and making them accessible through finding aids, metadata, and preservation. Students examined and discussed LGBTQ+ materials from SSU’s Special Collections with the goal of inspiring questions for their research assignment. After the session, Eisen and his company led students through an interactive queer history walking tour on campus that he created using primary sources.
Committee members will share the exhibit’s supplemental LibGuide, a self-guided worksheet for the exhibit, and other outreach materials with attendees.

In the fall of 2019, three classes were identified as structurally important for the possibility of embedded librarianship, as they are required by studio arts students and have potential for scaffolded learning outcomes: Arts 101 - Introduction to the Visual Arts or Sophomore Seminar, Arts 301 Writing about Art, Arts 401- Senior Projects. Studio arts students often do not readily recognize the relationship of research to their own practice and profession. Therefore, myself and our instruction librarian, embedded ourselves within the three classes to be situated at points of need and learn about how the students are discussing art. Within this process, the relationships between indigeneity, the art world, art practice, and personhood all came to the foreground. Questions were then raised: how does research relate to these processes; and how can librarians address these information needs? After sitting within these classes and talking with students, we developed a scaffolded information literacy program to present to the studio arts department.

The traditional teaching power dynamic, where teachers are experts and students are receptacles of information, persists despite the call for student-centered learning. Librarians can provide first-year students with the types of attention, support, and care often advertised by institutions, but lacking in students actual experiences. Furthermore, librarians are uniquely positioned to challenge the traditional power dynamic as we are not usually evaluating student work, which is particularly helpful to first-year students as they work to build their academic and emotional support systems in a new environment. Of the many teaching methods used by librarians, the individual research consultation is certainly the most affective for it allows interactive instruction that is personalized and humanizing. Individual research consultations provide librarians with the opportunity to lift students as autonomous and knowledgeable while information and resources are shared between them.

In this session, the presenter will lead attendees through a structure of individual consultations modeled from Care Theory and Relational Cultural Theory to demonstrate how consultations can be both instructive and nurturing learning environments. Afterwards, attendees will participate in a facilitated discussion of their own best practices for research consultations, their work with first-year students, and how they can equalize the power dynamics within their offices. Time will be allotted to discuss self-care in recognition of the labor required to provide such emotionally supportive instruction.

This lesson plan is based on a collaborative teaching experience between Research Librarian Pamela Mann and Prof. of Spanish Joanna Bartow and is designed to intentionally incorporate critical information literacy (CIL) into an advanced-level, community-based learning (CBL) course, Spanish in the Community. Although the focus is Latinx communities it may be adapted to focus on other issues or marginalized groups and other course contexts.

The CIL session, Narratives about Latinx Immigrants uses active learning strategies to explore how information about immigrants and immigration is created and disseminated by focusing on media framing and how cognitive and confirmation biases lead to different narratives about Latinx immigrants. During the session participants will explore how authority is created in specific communities by evaluating immigration research, policy and advocacy organizations’ websites and analyzing rhetorical appeals made by these organizations. We will also look at how these groups use information systems and tools to target specific audiences by comparing how information created by these organizations is used by news organizations, researchers, advocates and others.

The CIL session is grounded in the ways society and institutions construct narratives and frames within social, political and economic systems. The objective is to challenge the epistemologies of the privileged by asking students to rethink the politics of knowledge production and to reimagine the sites where information is produced.

We are now surrounded by information 24/365, so how is it that information privilege is on the rise? This session addresses the complex question of information privilege and highlights the goal of achieving justice through information-literacy instruction. After an introductory overview by the presenters, attendees will participate in a facilitated discussion to explore this topic and share methods and ideas from their own practice. The introductory overview will focus on our describing the unique aspects of life in Alaska: vast geography, a debilitating gap in access to technology; cultural and linguistic diversity.

The facilitated discussion will focus on questions such as:

-How do our library and local community environments exacerbate the injustice that lies at the heart of information privilege?
-How may national and international statements about access to information as a basic human right help in the quest for justice?
-How does the era of fake news impact our ability as professionals to bridge the gaps caused by information privilege?
-How do we address and overcome information privilege through our library instruction to bridge these gaps?
-How do we achieve best practices in an era of declining budgets?
Discussion around these questions by the facilitators and attendees, as well as other ideas from attendees will help to foster greater understanding of this complex issue.