I had the awesome opportunity to present as part of a panel with Romel Espinel and Adam Mizelle at ACRL/DVC’s Fall 2016 Program on Friday Nov. 11. The theme was CritLib: Theory and Action. Veronica Arellano Douglas gave a fantastic keynote, which you can check out here.
This day emphasized for me the necessity to continue to theorize and engage our everyday work. The essential and deeply-foundational role that theory plays is essential for understanding and producing meaningful work. Theorizing librarianship, as Veronica’s keynote beautifully, visually and textually, shows is accomplished through experience, reflection and action. Theoretical texts enter into that process and strongly inform and undergird it but are not a necessity for entrance and participation.
Got to have some really awesome convos with various attendees as well. Spending the day with a bunch of super-kind, friendly and thoughtful librarians was deeply needed and really restoring.
The slide deck is linked here and a draft of my notes follows below. What I actually said differs a bit from what is there, but the rough idea is there. Bibliography is included in the slide deck.
NOTES:
When librarians and the library literature discuss hiring they are often refer to the hiring of full-time library staff. This is important and bears discussion and reflection, particularly in seeking to de-segregate this process. However there are significant opportunities to engage in critical library approaches when working with and engaging in the hiring, training and managing of student staff. Library materials written for librarians working with student staff have tended to rely on business-motivated language and supervisory approaches to training and working with student staff. The context of higher education offers significant opportunity to engage students working in the library with critical, feminist and other meaningful types of pedagogy. Employing students should not be viewed only as preparing them as malleable members in a future workforce but attempting to provide opportunities to reflect upon their learning and development in holistic and critical ways. If we accept that “pedagogy occurs whenever knowledge is produced…” then the library has a pedagogical role that connects to students working the library proper. (Giroux, Border Crossings 218)
Eve Scrogham & Sara Punsky McGuire begin their chapter entitled “Orientation Training and Development” with this idea. “Many university departments could not survive without students to provide assistance in the daily operation of facilities, programs, services, and projects.” They follow this idea just a few short sentence later with “It is professional staff members’ responsibility to provide student employees with an opportunity for involvement that is both meaningful and educational while assisting them in becoming successful members of an increasingly global society.” (p. 199)
The library as a platform for engaging students as part of the educational process specifically in the institutional context. Now this is, in my experience, easier to engage in social justice initiatives from the library when the institutional culture is with you. It is much more difficult to do this when it is not. Student employment and student learning are together; they are not separate, disconnected entities. “what information literacy instruction is supposed to do, is foster a student’s capacity for and interest in seeking, finding, synthesizing and evaluating information.” (Graves McGown and Sweet Critical Library Instruction 153)
As Elmborg has pointed out, when libraries talk about instruction it is most often limited to the context of the classroom. While the items for discussion, as referenced in the email, are often dealt with separately how can these topics be connected? For example, how does working with student staff connect to or offer opportunity for instructional approaches? This is dependent on how librarians view themselves. Are we data rangers, managers or pedagogues; of these roles which identity leads or shapes? Also, why do we hire students? What’s the point of employment? While critical librarianship is not dependent solely on critical pedagogy, I would suggest this practice forms an essential part of thinking about critical librarianship. To this end I suggest librarians concerned with critical practices in librarianship should view themselves as pedagogues, as teachers practicing the construction of teaching moments and spaces within our respective contexts. There are conflicts with this. This approach takes time, proximity to students, agreement between staff members as to how to approach working with student staff.
This presentation will discuss the specific strategies I’ve taken in working with student staff that connect the areas of hiring practices and instruction. These strategies have included learning objectives as part of the job descriptions, a rubric-based approach to student evaluation and developmental goals for each student staff member. These strategies have links to critical and feminist pedagogies and as such are important to critical practice within the library context. While focusing on student staff as examples, this presentation will emphasize the importance of the role of the librarian as pedagogue in fostering a critical and reflective librarian practice. I argue that it is not possible approach doing librarianship in a critical matter if one does not have a clear sense of one’s own role and that role is particularly tied to the roles of teacher and pedagogue.
A sense of clarity about one’s role engages with these two questions. How do we view ourselves, our roles overall? And how is on-campus employment viewed? Do we see ourselves as instructors in all roles, not just inside the classroom? Is student employment a separate disconnected entity or is it connected to a student’s overall academic development? Student employment offers a chance to continue to engage with students pedagogically and particularly in the library, engaging the student’s development and offering opportunity for synthesis. This is where the learning objectives become particularly helpful in making that connection overt.
Librarians as employers can wield a great deal of social power over the students they work with and/or employ. Additionally, in a role as educators, student staff have the opportunity to answer/solve a variety of problems in their daily work; that their work “…connects to the concrete reality of human beings in particular situations.” (Kopp and Olson-Kopp in Critical Information Literacy) A very simple question: how do we structure and conduct training session for new students? Do we bank the information where we show the students everything they need to know and expect them to remember it? Do we let them drive and make mistakes and talk them through it and then review throughout the first couple of weeks to see how they are doing?
Doing this well takes time, takes imagination and takes development and assessment. Recognizing that assessment can be kind of seen as a dirty word, in this case assessment is reflecting if the goals that were set are being met, and if not, why not. Tweaks can then be made and retried.
I have played piano and taught piano lessons on and off for a fair number of years. While piano recitals can be moments of incredible anxiousness and nervousness, they provide something towards which to work. They give a reason for learning pieces. Similarly engaging student staff pedagogically, incorporating periodic assessment and interaction with their own educational development gives arc and purpose to the student’s time. If we care about being pedagogical then instructional practices should be engaged at every opportunity. Student employment in the library offers a fantastic opportunity to engage in critical, pedagogical work that engages students and challenges us. Thank you.
Jeremy McGinniss 