I heard from a colleague about an initiative that is being done at ECU by the Dean of Students' office called "Don't Cancel that Class!" It is a webpage that has some offerings for 1-hour classes where professors cannot be present. Faculty give the Dean of Students' office two weeks' notice in order to have a professional staff member cover their class. They have a listing of offerings available from units like the counseling center, disability support, campus police, student health, and more. Quite honestly, the list is really well done and has a lot of important content, but some of the topics sound kind of punitive in nature (Code of Conduct, sexual harassment, etc).
You may have heard about the fake classes being offered at UNC Chapel Hill for athletes. This scandal has led to a larger emphasis on professors in seated classes not canceling their class if they are going to be away at a conference or have another reason to be absent. This has made room for greater involvement of student affairs and support units in academics by having guest speakers. Not only ECU is creating these Don't Cancel that Class listings--if you do a Google search you will see that many other colleges and universities are doing it, too. I think it is a wonderful idea, and I am really excited about trying to get the library on the list.
I am creating a listing to send to the Dean of Students for inclusion. Although we are not going to list library instruction explicitly, we will offer some of the following:
Video editing
Audio editing
3D printing
Copyright/plagiarism for students
Designing a scholarly poster
RefWorks/citation management
Special Collections session
From technostress to techno joy
Email etiquette
Library tour with iPad
Some other possibilities I am working on, but are not yet set in stone are:
Mini-Human Library: see my blog post about this. It would be like a non-romantic speed dating where the students were both the human books and the attendees.
Film viewing: show a 30 minute video, such as the history of the university, and then facilitate a discussion.
Facilitated Lynda.com tranings: like the idea above, we could show bits and pieces of a Lynda.com training and walk students through a training session step-by-step.
Does your institution have a Don't Cancel that Class website? Is this something your library could cultivate or become part of? I'd love to hear from anyone who has tried it with success, or with a failure.
Session Title: Everything We Do is Pedagogy: Critical Pedagogy, the Framework, and Library Practice
Presenter: McGinniss
The presenter, Jeremy McGinniss, was so excited about what he was talking about in this session that it was palpable. He also had to be nervous because this was the biggest breakout space and the room was full. I had a number of take-aways from this session. He asked the question, “How does the library as a whole engage in pedagogy?” I loved this, because this led him into talking that pedagogy is present wherever knowledge is being produced. So often, I feel that we see things like Book-a-Librarian as a service and not as a teaching moment. This helped me get excited and think that even the little things are teaching. The next sound bite from this session that I gleaned was this: Students are “whole human beings in search of meaning.” The thing I like about this is that it takes into account that we are not talking to robots, we are dealing with people who are messy and each at their own level of understanding. It reinvigorated me to think about this and I vowed to myself that I would try to listen more at the reference desk. Something related that he said was that it was “difficult to engage in a culture of questions without people and relationships.” This is so true. We have to be positive and open and allow room for a culture of questions. McGinniss pointed out that all forms of learning are positive, iterative, and relational. He said that our student workers are seen as an authority when they are behind the desk. So often, McGinniss said, we think of them as assets to be managed and not people in a place of learning. This made me think a lot about our graduate student workers and the training and support that they receive--we train them to work at the desk, but we do not train them in teaching and pedagogy. McGinniss brought this point around to the Community of Practice idea from the McMichaels & Dimmit presentation, which was a great tie-in. He said that teaching is hard work, and if we forget that, we are in trouble. One of the funniest parts about this session was how the topic was related to the plenary speaker and how he glowingly talked about her presentation, whereas I found it difficult to keep up with. My feeling was that despite any nerves he might have been feeling, the content of this presentation would have been much more digestible as the plenary. I certainly found it uplifting and helpful in considering my own practice!
Title of Session: Rhetorical Reinventions: Rethinking Research Processes and Information Practices to Deepen our Pedagogy
Presenters: Witek, Snyder Brossard, and Burkholder
This presentation was comparison of rhetorical theory and information literacy. The
main point of the presentation was to compare the framework used by Writing
Centers and English departments (Framework for Success in PostsecondaryWriting) and drawing comparisons between that and the ACRL Framework forInformation Literacy. The presenters did this by talking about three main
areas where these frameworks intersect: scholarship as a conversation, research
as inquiry, and searching as strategic exploration. They posit that moving away
from a mastery of tools and focus on building on the students’ prior knowledge
by situating our instruction in context. One of the things I really picked up
on during the session was that “mystery is a source of inquiry” and the fact
that we should focus on “less efficiency and more mystery” in academics. They
suggest finding a way to invite students to approach research tools with an air
of mystery or curiosity. Of course, when we only get them for 50 minutes, we
have to be focused on efficiency, so this was perhaps just rosy thinking and
not exactly correct thinking for most librarians. But I, for one, loved the idea of it. Lastly, they talked
about making learning explicit to students, which I felt was something I could
do more in my instruction. They talked about the flexible structures in the
brain called schema and talked about how new information gets attached to what
we already know. The presenter had a tinker toy structure that she had built
and she compared the tinker toys to schemas. In the same vein of explicit
instruction, they referred to a concept called BEAM, which stands for
background, evidence, argument, or method. This concept challenges students to
think about how information is being used. The same piece of information may be
used as background information in one article, but may be used as an argument
in an essay. Some instructors in the crowd said during the comment period that
they teach BEAM with the information timeline.
Another nice connection for this topic happened shortly after LOEX. At the NC-BIG Camp unconference at UNC-G, we ended up talking about this again during the breakout session on the ACRL Framework. Notes from that session can be found here.
Session Title: Breaking Good: Becoming Integrated into Student Learning Communities
Presenters: Santamaria and Pashkova-Balkenhol
If I had to rate these sessions, this one was the second most important one that I attended. The librarians from Millersville University were engaging and their ideas for outreach to living and learning communities were sound. Michele Santamaria was a trained Anthropologist before becoming a librarian. She actually did research on Quechua speakers in the Andes. She talked about 4 considerations outsiders need to break into a group: timing, local context, endorsement, and relationship building. The joke here was that despite her training, she did not think to apply these considerations to groups of freshmen living in these student learning communities on their campus. She definitely got some laughs. Her co-presenter was Tatiana Pashkova-Balkenhol. They mainly talked about breaking in with their Millersville Scholars group (first generation college students) and the international students. One great tip was to get in with the students when the group is just forming their bonds, because you will be seen as an insider if you are part of the group early on. They tried a number of events related to research. One was called “Treat Yourself” and was around Halloween. This event was not very well-attended, but they tried having snacks and doing research consultations. Around the same time, they also met the person coordinating the Millersville Scholars because they were in the library setting up for an event. This was their way of getting in with the group--they helped the director move furniture. The next thing they planned was an “exclusive” event where they had golden tickets and made themselves available 3 nights in a row from 6-9 PM. They had peer mentors come from the writing center and they also planned the event around a big deadline for a common assignment. This was also lightly attended, but the idea was still sound and they planned it at the right time. They also did a chat version of the event. They chalked the lower attendance up to the fact that the students felt uncomfortable with them as outsiders and that as first generation college students, they may be nervous about asking for help. When talking about the international students, they said that it helped that both of them are considered to be international in some way--Michele is Latina and Tatiana is from Russia. During the session talking about international students, they mainly talked about a few of the students that they had connected with more deeply. One of the good ideas from this session is that during their library tour, they send students around with a video camera and have them make a “library story”. Although I like our iPad scavenger hunt for our institution, this was a neat idea. The presenters said that even though their events were not always a success, it was great to get the exposure and that they feel that students may have felt more comfortable coming later, even if they did not come to the event. A big takeaway here was that it is one thing to be introduced, and another thing completely to be endorsed. They now have a seat at the table when it comes to the Millersville Scholars because of the events that they put on, and they encouraged people to become ‘part of the system’ when it comes to certain university groups. I got a lot of ideas from this session and I plan to include outreach to Living Learning Communities at ECU in our RIS department goals.
I just got back from LOEX in Pittsburgh. The following blog posts are from my conference report that I write for my colleagues, but I feel like they sum up some of the best sessions that I attended at the conference. I will roll out a few in the coming days. Enjoy!
Session Title: Becoming Legit: Reimagining Instructor Support Through Communities of Practice
Presenters: McMichaels and Dimmit
If there was one session that made LOEX for me, I would say that this was it. This presentation was done by someone known to me from NC-LITe, Jonathan McMichaels (see my Design Thinking blog post). He works at UNC-Chapel Hill. The presentation was the culmination of a graduate student’s master’s thesis. They described a high-demand one-shot instructional model much like the one we have at ECU. Unlike at ECU, McMichaels is tasked to train a large cadre of graduate students (from SILS) how to do library instruction in a short amount of time and then get them instructing undergrads. His prior way of training them was a page directly out of my playbook: people are given a whole lot of information at once, then they do shadowing, then they plan their first class and co-teach it, and then they are on their own to conduct future instruction. They found that they were limiting the new teacher’s potential by sending them in an isolated pursuit of a “teaching voice.” Quantity was valued over quality and this stagnated instructor development. He wanted to make good instruction and building on instructional design concepts achievable for these novices. Instead of this model, with the help of Dimmit, they have created a Community of Practice, which asks many of the students to rely on each other. They created a rubric that shows the different stages of instructor development and then asks the students to work through the rubric at their own pace. This has resulted in the student teachers becoming more fully engaged in the process and informal collaboration between the initiates was incredibly helpful. It also took the onus off of him to be the sole contact for the new instructors. This idea of a Community of Practice was incredibly intriguing to me, having just trained two new librarians in instruction. I also felt that this was a way to improve instruction in the RIS department for instructors of all levels. I plan to include this in our departmental goals for this year.
If you know me, you probably know that I like to fashion myself a bit of a "hack graphic designer." I call myself a hack because I enjoy doing this kind of work, especially layout. That being said, I have
only taken one formal design class and very few scholarly art and design
classes. All of my knowledge of Adobe past the basics is self-taught. I went to a conference on Friday where I had a chance to meet a professional graphic designer who worked for the academic library. He was conducting a great poster session on branding. (The poster is at the end of this post, for those interested.) We talked briefly about the fact that Mr. Crawford was a professional graphic designer and the issues that we had at our institution. In brief, we had a person who worked in a marketing role, but that position was subsumed by the university and we now have to rely on a central pool of marketing professionals, instead of having one person in the library who coordinated the marketing. This has been problematic for us, and instead of relying on the marketing pool (which has a 6-week lead time), many of the people in the building have been making flyers, TV slides, and posters to advertise in-house events. For a recent game night, the planner actually had 4 of us make different posters for the game night, which caused a bit of friendly competition and resulted in some really creative posters. There are many different ways that libraries configure their marketing. If you find yourself suddenly needing to make a marketing tool like a flyer or poster, here is a instructional tool that my colleague, David Hisle made for his Instructional Design class. I think that it really sums up the basics of visual design well, and I wanted to share it with you. It teaches the basics of visual branding. Here is a link to it.
The poster from the conference can be seen below:
Poster by Crawford & Yeager, UNCW from Azalea Coast Conference, Wilmington, NC 2016
I just watched a video on Lynda.com on the difference between creativity and innovation. Lucky for us, it was also posted on YouTube (Lynda requires a login), so you can watch it here:
This video ties into some thoughts I have been having lately about humans in general. First of all, I do not feel that any one person is 100% creative or 100% innovative or devoid of either of these qualities. In most cases and with most things dealing with a person's personality, these qualities exists on a continuum. If I reflect on myself, I would put myself above average on that continuum of creativity and a bit lower on the innovation continuum. I have colleagues who are always helpful in bringing my creative ideas to the sphere of reality by asking questions, making suggestions, or letting me know my theory will not hold water. I have others who are more creative than me--sometimes they may find it hard to thinking in a convergent way and settle on one particular path or direction. I think self-awareness is very important, so I urge you to think about your level of creativity and innovation and how this applies to your practice as a librarian. A real life example outside of libraries could be helpful. Imagine that you are a researcher and that you are considering applications and methods for curing diseases. You may be working in a lab and coming up with ideas to cure cancer. You may have the idea, but unless it is able to be brought to market by the lawyers, businesspeople, and marketers, you may never see your treatment on TV as a commercial with a long listing of potential side effects. Creativity is not enough--it is important to consider risks and come up with a refined idea. Creativity is nothing but a bunch of ideas without the follow-through of innovation.
I have also been thinking a lot about a theory I read about recently. The theory states that there are two types of people: farmers and hunters. (Please feel free to read this with a hint of skepticism, as I do; the continuum likely applies here, too, and I am not certain that this theory has been scientifically proven, although there is a related scholarly article here.) Consider for a moment that our ancestors were hunter/gatherers and later, raisers of agriculture. The kinds of attributes needed to survive as a hunter are hyper-awareness, being able to rely on yourself, quick reflexes, and the thrill of the hunt. The kind of attributes needed to be a farmer are diligence, working as a team, and trying new innovations to survive on the land. Farming was an innovation at the
time that allowed humans to remain settled in one area, whereas
hunter/gatherers moved around. Another way this has been applied is that hunters are people who switch jobs often, always looking for new challenges, etc. Farmers stay with their jobs longer and enjoy the perfection of a routine. This theory is also used to explain different types of salespeople in business literature. Sound familiar? Perhaps creative types could also be considered hunters
and the innovators would be farmers. Are you able to apply this theory to yourself? Are you the type who conducts outreach to new student groups on campus, or who cultivates a group of
long-term patrons that can be maintained as a satisfied user base? What lessons do the farmers have to teach the hunters and vice versa?
