Category Archives: libraries and librarians

Mini-Immersion: A Shameless “How We Done Good” Post

By IRIS Posted on by

Well, last night ended up being un-fun and not very restful, and today started out with a low-grade fever (now gone, so things are looking up). So while I’m confining myself to laziness for the rest of the day, I thought I’d lay out this Mini-Immersion idea in its more logistical details.

The Two-Fold Inspiration

Many of us in the MnObe libraries have been to Immersion, but not all of us, so we thought it might be nice to spread the benefits a little bit. Think of it as a really intensive conference report where the audience has to recreate the conference for themselves.

Then last year, the instruction librarians at my library got together and shared teaching modules and strategies with each other, and ended up surprising ourselves at the wealth of experiences, approaches, and practicalities that we had to share with each other. Those days still stand out as my favorite days of the entire summer last year even though we’d all gone into it wondering just what the point was, exactly, since we thought we had a pretty good idea of what each of us did. Boy were we wrong! And the only thing better than the librarians of one liberal arts college library teaching each other how to teach? The librarians of five liberal arts colleges teaching each other how to teach, of course!

So the idea this year was to recreate a Good Parts Version of Immersion just for ourselves, emphasizing particularly the parts that are relevant for smallish private schools with similar missions and goals, squeezing it into one day, and acknowledging the wealth of expertise that’s housed among our colleagues, and spending some quality time teaching each other how to teach.

The Logistics

We picked a day (August 6th) and a place (Gustavus Adolphus) and met from 9 to 4. (In retrospect, building in some breaks would have been a good idea, but we were all so gung-ho!) All the presentations ended up being about half and half, lecture and discussion, which worked out really well.

  • 9am: Gather for coffee, conversation, and introductions
  • 9:30-10:15: Presentation — Information Literacy in the Liberal Arts (Barbara Fister)
  • 10:20-11:05: Presentation — Changing Paradigms: Shifting the emphasis from Teaching to Learning (Iris Jastram and Aaron Albertson)
  • 11:10-11:55: Presentation — Best Practices in Effective Instruction (LeAnn Suchy and Ken Johnson)
  • Noon-1pm: Lunch
  • 1-3: Instruction Workshops (small groups of 4–6 people)
  • 3-4: wrap-up discussion

Participants had two assignments:

  1. Plan out a SHORT presentation for the afternoon workshop (5-7 minutes) .
    This should be a snippet from instruction that you do or are planning to do and could either be something that works particularly well or that hasn’t worked as well as you’d like it to work. This could also be a narrative about a portion of a class that you are planning. Remember, you’ll be surrounded by experts who can help you, so take advantage of the opportunity! I strongly encourage you to plan to do these presentations without props of any kind. There will be projection equipment there that you can use if needed, but this exercise works best if the emphasis is on you and your teaching rather than a screen.
  2. Read the two articles below.
    Think of these readings not as prescriptive but as food for thought as you enter a full day of thinking about the kinds of instruction we do at our institutions. How do they work for you? How don’t they work? What aspects of your own instruction style and content do they make you think about (something that they show to be either a strength of yours or a potential weakness)?

    1. “Teaching the Library: Best Practices” by Laura Saunders, published in the Spring 2002 issue of Library Philosophy and Practice, available here: http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/saunders.html
      This is a short overview of best practices in library instruction. Many of these ideas we may have heard before or think about when we plan library instruction, but we want you to read this and think about your own instruction. How do you try to accommodate different learning styles? What supplemental materials do you provide for your class? Do you try to incorporate humor into your instruction? Bring examples of your own instruction, or ideas you come up with as you read this, to share with all of us on Immersion Day.
    2. “So, What’s a Learning Outcome Anyway?” by Mark Battersby, published in 1999 as an ERIC document, available here: http://tinyurl.com/nbkjby
      This article attempts a definition of Learning Outcomes that foregrounds this concept as an approach or set of attitudes rather than as a formula for classroom instruction. How well do concepts such as “generic abilities” fit with liberal arts education in general and library instruction in particular? How do we break down the big picture end result of multiple “generic abilities” to things to be taught in a library instruction session? And, how do we relate them to the library tools we feel students must learn about, like the library catalog?

The articles were chosen by the presenters of the morning sessions and gave us some concrete things to agree or disagree with early in the morning. And there was a lot of disagreeing, but in the most constructive way possible, of course.

The whole day cost $10 per participant to cover lunch, coffee, and snacks.

I should note that the entire day required a grand total of an hour and fifteen minutes of meetings on the part of the organizing committee, and all but about half an hour of that were 15–minute telephone conference calls. So really, this isn’t that hard to set up. The hardest part was finding people to step forward and present, so the steering committee ended up doing two of the three presentations ourselves.

I guess the point is this: it’s really not hard, and though it may look either too serious or too hokey or too whatever, you might enjoy it more than you think.

And now, I think I’ll take a nap.

Dragging a Stick and Other Obsurdities in Research

By IRIS Posted on by

With Fall Term looming, my colleagues and I have been thinking more and more intentionally about where our students are, where we want them to be, and how to move them closer to that second point. To kick of “Aaah, the students will be here soon” season, my colleagues and I from the 5 liberal arts institutions that make up the Minnesota Oberlin group got together for what we affectionately termed “Mini-Immersion.” It was a fabulous, exhilarating, exhausting day of intensive learning about teaching, and it served as yet another reminder that we have a lot of teaching expertise to draw upon in this group.

I’ve included the major themes from our sessions and discussions below in case you’re interested, as well as my own class-specific take-away, but there was one new pedagogical idea that I hadn’t thought about before and that has me intrigued.

Barbara Fister started off the day with a presentation on Information Literacy and the Liberal Arts in which she said that playfulness is important to learning and a key aspect of the liberal arts. “Research is really kind of a formalized playing around,” she said, and then wondered aloud how she could instill this idea of playfulness in her students.

The idea of Play allows you to explore avenues in your research that may not pan out, sometimes without the idea that you’re even doing something as serious as “exploring.” The idea of Play includes the prerequisite of being easily interested, amused, and inspired. The idea of Play assumes interaction with people or things or both. And probably most important, Play doesn’t assume an outcome.

I think of a child I saw this morning who was dragging a stick along the sidewalk and watching it intently as it dipped into each groove in the pavement. I need to be able to drag a stick through the world of information and watch it bump along whatever is in its path, to watch how it interacts with that world without predicting what I’ll see, and to begin to predict interactions without ruling out the possibility of surprise too quickly. I want to be able to help my students play this way, too, even in their world of impossibly short deadlines.

I don’t remember the last time I saw a stick and felt compelled to pick it up and drag it along behind me, or poke things with it. When did I lose that capacity to be so easily interested in my world, or even to notice these things that used to interest me? How can I relearn this critical skill, and how can I help my students find and pick up sticks of their own?

——
End of Post-Proper; Beginning of extra information…

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What’s In a Term?

By IRIS Posted on by

One of the things I love about language is how inexact it is. I went through a phase of bemoaning that very quality (“Life would be so much simpler if language were more more exact,” or even “Life would be so much simpler if all the rest of you people would use language more precisely”). When this seemed like it could become one of those fruitless grudges that I could harbor for the rest of my life, I decided to like it instead, and then discovered that I’d always liked it. I love learning what words mean to other people and comparing that to what they mean to me.

I apparently also like digressions.

On Sunday, Lori Reed asked the denizens of the LSW FriendFeed room whether they preferred the term Patron or Customer. People expressed preferences, some gave reasons for these preferences, and some proposed alternatives to both terms (with “user” being the most often mentioned).

Most of the time, I talk about “students” or “faculty,” but every once in a while, I need a good collective term. When that happens, I prefer “patron.” I appreciate the mutual respect that it implies, with my services being worthy of patronage and with patrons making the whole existence of the library possible. It may be a rather elderly term (the OED says it originated in the 12th century, after all), but the term “cottage” is even more hoary and hasn’t lost its vigor yet.

I tend not to like “customer” and “user.” When I worked in a bookstore, I sold things to customers, and I don’t enjoy selling stuff. For me, it muddies the waters, and makes me worry that the people I’m working with wonder if I’d even care if they didn’t have money. And while “user” is part of my library vocabulary (“user needs assessment” being a familiar and meaningful phrase for me), if I had to chose one term to the exclusion of all others, I’d stick with patron over user. Aside from sounding like “user” could mean “drug addict,” I mostly prefer my environment to feel less one-sided. A user is one who uses the library’s collections and services. I am one of the library’s services. A user uses me. Two of my favorite things about the work that we do is that it’s so collaborative with other members of our campus community and how much I get out of our interactions, and so I rarely think of our faculty and staff as using me.

For me, “patron” means mutual respect, and so every time I use it, I remind myself that I respect our faculty and students, and that they (ideally) respect me. If “patron” feels like disrespect to you, please don’t use it, but please don’t assume I mean disrespect when I use it.

Have Interest – Will Adopt New Conference

By IRIS Posted on by

For the last couple of years, I’ve been wondering just which conference I should adopt as “my” conference. I want it to be one where the sessions are thought provoking and where I’ll get to hang out with people I know and like and are interested in things I’m interested in, and where I can meet people I’ve never heard of before and that have the potential to become my new best friends. So far, the conferences I know about are either so far above my technological abilities that I’d be lost the whole time and not have much reason to apply those skills in my everyday life, or they are at the “no really, the web can help you” level. And so far, I’ve attended the latter sort of conference primarily because that’s where other people who are stuck in the middle like me attend. These are the people I learn from the most, and this is where they go, so that’s where I want to go.

My experience last week reinforced this for me. I had a great conference! But reading Kathryn’s post, I realized that what we all want is a different conference to attend. We want something that falls in between the two kinds of conferences that are out there already but that has national (and international) draw like the current options do. Personally, I want something that gives nearly equal time to carefully thought-out presentations and less structured discussion. I want to hear from library-types and non-library-types. I want the moon.

Does this exist? Shall we descend on some unsuspecting conference and make it so? Shall we invent it from scratch?

"The Library" and Other Grand Unifications

By IRIS Posted on by

A few weeks ago, while attending ACRL, I heard a question that nagged at my imagination: “If we define a doctor as ‘one who practices the art of healing,’ what is the analogous one-sentence definition of a librarian?”

Yes, I know that boiling everything down we do into one sentence is a little bit absurd, and that the given definition for a doctor is similarly circumscribed. But to the extent that we use such questions to focus and motivate our thinking, I think they can help us to step out of our own day-to-day existences (full of tasks and politics and committees and budgets and “where is the bathroom”) and gaze out at the broad, breathtaking, and inspiring vista of our profession as a whole.

This is exactly what Kathryn Greenhill, John Blyberg, and Cindi Trainor have done in their Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians.

So what happens when you make “grand, optimistic, obvious, and thankful” statements about The Library-with-a-capital-L? So far, it seems that people take a deep breath, let the statements sink in, feel them, taste them, and then start comparing them to everything we do and have done and hope to do in this profession, trying to see how the statements stack up against reality. This strikes me as a beautiful response. Even most of the responses that contend that “Your Library-with-a-capital-L doesn’t pertain to my library” or that “saying that ‘The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization’ is far too ambiguous” are evidence of this kind of productive, stimulative thinking.

Today I’ve been thinking about the relationship of The Library to individual libraries, asking myself “What is the one-sentence definition of a library?” and wondering if it’s similar to asking “what is poetry?” Is it like porn, where you’ll “know it if you see it?” And what do we learn by theorizing a Platonic Library? In what ways does this focus our thoughts and motivate our futures regardless of our individual circumstances?

T. S. Eliot theorized about the art of great poets in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” A great piece of criticism in itself, I have always particularly appreciated the way he positions the best poets as those who display their individual talent through grounding in the poetic tradition rather than in opposition to it. He explicitly does not say that the best poetry is “traditional” or copy-cat-ish or anything like that. Quite the opposite. He writes that “tradition is a matter of much wider significance [than "blind adherence" to past forms]. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour” (Eliot, paragraph 3). In his view, writing from a sense of tradition requires that poets step outside of their own location in time and space, “write not merely with his own generation in his bones” (Eliot, paragraph 3), and become the catalyst that will make the particular and the general spark into art. In the same way, being a librarian in a particular library is rendered meaningful and significant not solely based on our own individual missions and actions. We have the fundamentals of The Library that bolster our efforts and define our innovations.

The beautiful part of Eliot’s essay, though, comes in the 4th paragraph in which he explains the ramifications of having all of poetry tied together by Tradition. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,” he writes. Everything written must be valued and appreciated in relationship to everything else that has been written, but this influence is not unidirectional. “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives,” he says, “For order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered” (Eliot, paragraph 4). If we accept the theory of the Platonic Library, the Tradition that allows for poetic creativity, then we are also accepting that as each of us effects change, we fundamentally affect The Library as a whole. This strikes me as a daunting, inspiring, thought provoking, somewhat terrifying, but empowering outcome of theorizing a Platonic Library even for the many individual libraries that may not feel included in the Darien Statements.

This post has gone on over-long and is really just a sketch, just my first attempt to figure out what about the idea of a Library-with-a-capital-L resonates with me so strongly. I hope some of you will speak up and help me figure out what I’m saying, where I’ve gone wrong, and what makes sense to you. I don’t fully understand my own stance at the moment, but like Steve, I know which conversation I want to be having.