Bringing My Teaching Philosophy Into Focus

Teachers Point of View

I'd had the link saved for a while, but I finally got around to reading "Six Questions That Will Bring Your Teaching Philosophy Into Focus" last week. I've gotten in the habit of letting go of saved links if I haven't read them in a certain amount of time, but something about the title of that piece had me saving it - and I'm so glad I did.

I highly recommend reading the whole of the original if you have the time, but I thought it would be fun and enlightening to answer the questions and then share the results. If you only have time to read one, I of course want you to read my blog. However, you do need to know one thing from "Six Questions" - the author believes how we like to learn informs how we like to teach. I agree with that for the most part (caveats and addenda are all to do with the reading I've done about educational psychology and epistemology, and are besides the point of this post). So, here goes...

1. Describe the best learning experience you have had as a student.

I'm hoping the teacher who gave me this experience ends up reading this, which is likely since we're actually friends on Facebook. Without even a close second, my best learning experience was the time Mrs. Atwood (sometimes I can bring myself to use her first name, but not today) let us choose our own topics in the Talented and Gifted class she taught at my elementary school. (I know, forever ago, but it's pertinent.) I wrote about dragons, but it wasn't just a story I dreamed up. No. I compared the life cycles of eastern and western dragons. I discussed the science of dragon flight. I talked about St. George. I even covered the mating habits of different species. It was glorious good fun to write, and I may even still have the report itself around my apartment somewhere. Most important, though, that project let me know that my curiosity was just as important in the classroom as the teacher's goals. It taught me that education could be fun. Thank you, Debbie, for teaching me to enjoy learning.

2. Describe the best teaching experience you have had as an instructor.

Early on in my librarian career, there was this one student who tried to snowball me. We originally met during an instruction session I did for his class. He came once to ask for help. He came a second time to ask for help. The third time he came to ask for help, I gave him the help, but then I asked him a few questions about what he'd tried before coming to me. When I realized he was hornswoggling me, I called him on it. "I think you know how to do this and you're coming to me help so I'll do it for you." His face broke into a grin and he admitted it: "Well, I can be very charming." After his admission, I told him that he could always come to me for help, but that I was going to want some kind of proof that he'd tried it himself. Then I went further - I told him that I was going to inform the rest of the library staff about the deal we'd just made. He groused a bit, but then he agreed. A couple of months later, he came running up to me in the library to tell me about the B+ he'd gotten on a paper for which he'd found all the resources all on his own. It was in that moment that I realized I needed to hold our students accountable, that I needed to be kind but that I shouldn't be nice. Further, he taught me that students want to be held accountable.

3. What are you trying to achieve in your students with your teaching?

I want to get students to the point where they can teach themselves. It's a multifaceted skill set. Part of it is teaching them how to think critically, but that's not all of it. There's also the need to understand how to deal with failures, both in the short term and in the long term. Teaching students to concentrate on resilience and self-care while holding them accountable is a careful balance, and not one I can do on my own. (I've talked about my agenda in the past.) Information literacy cannot exist in a vacuum, nor should it.

4. Why is this important to you?

Because I care about the future. Grandiose, I know, but true. I know people who are educated to do a thing, and only that thing, aren't as well equipped to deal with change as are people who are educated to think. Because I want a well educated and informed, and yes - INFORMATION LITERATE - populace. Because, as I said in that post about my agenda, "our education system is churning out a generation of Spartans, but what we need is Athenians." Most of all, this is important to me because there are people in my past who gave me these lessons, and those skills have served me in good stead. 

5. How do you achieve your objectives you wrote down for question #3 above?

This is an area where I need to do a lot of thinking, since I don't have a strong enough answer. I know that I try to achieve my objectives by working to integrate information literacy into our curriculum and by educating members of my community about the research based practices I've developed. I know that I have built an information literacy curriculum in the past based on my constructivist pedagogy. I also know that I am working to do something similar at my new school in that vein. Of course, "Six Questions" is clearly focused for individuals and not programs, but I still feel I need more detail. And proof. Besides, if nothing else, I'd like to be able to answer the final question with more confidence than I currently feel.

6. Why do you use these particular teaching strategies as opposed to others that are available to you?

I do my best to use and advocate for teaching strategies that are research based because I know they are more likely to work, but that answer sounds hollow to my mind. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that I want to be able to answer this question with more depth. 

So, how about you? Do you think you could answer these questions? Do you want to?

Wears Heavy Boots, Is Loud: On "Brutal Optimism" in Professional Practice

At ACRL last year, I attended the keynote speech given by Henry Rollins. (Confession: Hank was the reason I even submitted a talk proposal in the first place. I may occasionally attend the bigger conferences, but my preference has always been and will likely always be for smaller conferences.) It was probably one of the best talks in that vein that I've attended in years. The man practically turned into a librarian fanboy on the stage as he talked about his own experiences with archiving early punk paraphernalia and his experiences at the National Archives. He even quoted the 14th amendment to us, word for word. Henry was a fascinating and riveting presence on the stage, and everyone with whom I compared notes afterwards said that the speech had been an energizing experience.

But, as amazing as Henry Rollins was, there was one concept he introduced during his speech that was even more captivating than the man himself: brutal optimism. I have come back to that idea over and over in the intervening time - playing with it, turning it over and over in my mind. To me, brutal optimism means "I believe the best of people, damnit!" It's fiercely advocating and truly believing that things will turn out for the best, that things will get better, and it means planning for that day - even amidst all the crap (*cough*budget cuts*cough*) that happens. A year and a half into my first administrative librarian position, well into my twelfth year as a librarian, I've decided that I'm going to adopt "brutally optimistic" as a professional touchstone, a phrase I'll consciously revisit again and again to remind myself that it's okay to believe things will be well.

Why am I doing this? Well, in order to explain that, I need to make a confession: I really do believe the best of people. Even when someone is being all craptastic to me, my first instinct is to wonder who treated them so badly that they think it's okay to treat others that way. I know I occasionally come off sounding pretty cynical, but my cynicism is more pronounced because I do actually believe things will improve... it's just that I sometimes get impatient. Maybe it's my study and practice of Buddhism, or maybe it's because I've got a stubborn streak, or maybe it's just that the alternative is too depressing. Regardless of the cause, I am an optimist. (Not saying I don't have my down moments. Being a human being is, by its nature, a roller coaster kind of thing. Just saying that, when all is said and done, I expect good things to happen.)

I guess writing this blog post isn't really about a new direction in my life as much as it's about a public declaration of that direction. Kind of a "Do I think things will turn out well? Yes. Do I think I'll have to fight a bit to help everything turn out well. F* yes." thing.  I'm sharing this with you because I'm hoping others will come out of their cynical shells to admit their inner Pollyannas, and to encourage new librarians not to hide theirs. Like I said, I'm pretty sure it is precisely because I know things will eventually turn out well that I get so angry at times. It's that vision of good things in the future that is the reason I publish posts like Jake Berg's think piece about a very flawed aspect of the proposed framework. It's that vision of good things in the future that is the reason why I keep fighting. (Cue one of my favorite bands.)

How about you? Do you think this is something we, as a profession, can get behind? Can we all become a bit more brutally optimistic?

Ethics, Copyright, and Information Literacy, by Jacob Berg

[Editor’s Note: I asked Jake Berg to publish this piece on LtaYL after sitting with him in the hearing on the draft Framework at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Las Vegas. My thoughts on this document are very similar to his, and I knew he’d put my feelings/perceptions into words better than I could.]

For the first time since 2000, the Association of College and Research Libraries will update their Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, replacing it with a more flexible Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. 

The second draft of this Framework, released last month, includes a new definition of information literacy. 

[A] repertoire of understandings, practices, and dispositions focused on flexible engagement with the information ecosystem, underpinned by critical self-reflection. The repertoire involves finding, evaluating, interpreting, managing, and using information to answer questions and develop new ones; and creating new knowledge through ethical participation in communities of learning, scholarship, and practice. (2)

Upon seeing this definition, I wrote (on my own blog)

That "ethical participation" was included here is a huge step forward. It creates a discursive space in which it is possible to turn the library into a site of resistance, a bulwark against government and corporate surveillance, as well as an entree into a discussion of the costs of knowledge that are a part of scholarly communication. I hope this section of the definition is our point of departure to tackle these and related issues. 

It’s this last part, the “ethical participation,” that I’d like to focus on, because later in the draft Framework the authors devote a frame, a series of related threshold concepts, knowledge practices and abilities, and dispositions, to the value of information.

Experts understand that this value designates information as intellectual property, and therefore, recognizes three important dimensions of value. First, information can act as a commodity, and as such, creators can use their work for financial, reputational, social, or civic gains. These motivations may determine how information sources are shared whether given freely, offered for sale, or leased for temporary access. Information users have responsibilities as both consumers and creators of information based on the work of others. Academic and legal practices such as proper attribution of sources and complying with copyright are a result. (12)

Putting information as a commodity front and center and tying it to various "gains"? Consumers listed before creators? Complying with a copyright regime that every information professional should know is broken, at odds with the common good and encouraging innovation?

In the Knowledge Practices (Abilities) section of this frame, titled “Information has Value,” a threshold concept is to "Understand that intellectual property is a social construct that varies by culture," (12) but the above excerpt reifies much of what is wrong with the North American conception of intellectual property, and may be at odds with "ethical participation" mentioned elsewhere in the document.

Information has Value, yes. Well, we librarians also have values. Here’s a selection of things that have been written on the topic:

• “Agendas: Everyone has one,” by Chris Bourg (Assistant University Librarian (AUL) for Public Services for the Stanford University Libraries)
• “Admitting Our Agendas,” by Barbara Fister (Instruction / Reference Librarian at Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library, Gustavus Adolphus College)
• “Me, Too!: On Agendas in Libraries, Especially Mine,” by Jessica R. Olin (Director of the Robert H. Parker Library at Wesley College)
• “Toward a Unifying Field Theory of Librarianship,Or Not,” by me

And these values happen to conflict with parts of the law. In particular, copyright law which (as I’ve already mentioned) I think most of us agree is broken at the federal level.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution authorizes Congress “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

Yet these “limited Times” keep expanding at the expense of the public domain. In 1790 a copyright would last for fourteen years, plus another fourteen for a renewal. Twenty-eight years later, all could benefit from a patent or creation. In 2014, some works can take as many as one-hundred-and twenty years to enter the public domain, and often these are “works for hire,” enriching not the creator of a work, but its distributor, at the expense of a public that could benefit from, build on, or reuse the work. (Source.) When you look at a partial list of works that would have been publicly available on January 1st, 2014 without our current intellectual property regime, it puts things into perspective.

We are at the point where, in 2013, Maria Pallente, United States Register of Copyrights, called for an overhaul of the US intellectual property regime. Indeed, this is the rare issue where bipartisan cooperation may be possible, with Derek Khanna on the right and Lawrence Lessig on the left, among others.

Is it ethical for librarians to teach students to respect a law that few of us respect? We know that members of the communities we serve will create knowledge, and they have rights that come with that creation. We also know that our communities want to participate in and interact with the cultural milieus in which we find ourselves. Using Legos to reenact a scene from a movie and then uploading a video of that to YouTube, for example, or using pop culture items/something else in educational settings without the threat of a lawsuit. We want to participate in what Lessig terms "remix culture," and we want to use culture to reach out to our communities.

Our professional ethics and values and the current copyright regime are in conflict. While the American Library Association lobbies for change while supporting the current intellectual property regime, how are we information professionals going to proceed? Because I'd rather not support this particular law, set of laws, at the expense of what I believe, and at the expense of professional ethics. There is too much at stake for us to behave in any other way. How will you reconcile "ethical participation" and copyright in the Framework in your communities?

Jacob Berg is library director at a small, academic library in Washington, DC. This is his second contribution to LtaYL, the first was “Doing Research Lets You Justify Why You’re Doing What You’re Doing.” He blogs about libraries and beer, roughly in that order, at http://beerbrarian.blogspot.com/ and is on Twitter, @jacobsberg.

Revisiting Purpose: Still a Rebel Yell

Source

Something strange has been happening to me lately. Occasionally, when I approach someone about writing a guest post for this blog, they tell me that they feel honored. When this happens I'm more confused than a litter of puppies going "baroo?" all at once. The purpose of the blog back when I started hasn't changed. I still see Letters to a Young Librarian as a kind of underground radio, a rebel yell. Those things that inspired me to start a blog are still happening - outdated curricula, misplaced emphases, disconnects between some library science graduate programs and what I (and a number of my colleagues) do every day. If you'll forgive the somewhat grandiose and decidedly nerdy metaphor, I see this and similar blogs as a kind of Rebel Alliance - and if you write for me it's like I'm asking you to fly an X-Wing  into battle.

I know that LtaYL is no longer just me shouting into the wind. As this blog approaches both the three year anniversary and the 300k views marks, I know it's become a bit of a thing. I've found a niche, have given others who don't blog regularly (for whatever reason) a place for their voice. But I picked the Star Wars analogy for a reason - just like Admiral Akbar wouldn't be an admiral without a fleet, LtaYL wouldn't be a thing without you all.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm honored that you're honored, but guest posts are the thing that makes LtaYL great. I'm a good librarian, and I'm also pretty good at this writing a blog thing, but you don't have to feel honored. We're all fighting the good fight and we're all human. Most importantly, we're all people who care passionately about the present and the future of libraries. As for me...? See below.

Source

Me, Too!: On Agendas in Libraries, Especially Mine

If you haven't yet read Chris Bourg's fantastic post, "Agendas: Everyone has one " and Barbara Fister's response, "Admitting Our Agendas," please do. The TL;DR synopsis of both posts is that both of these women are coming clean about having a driving force, an agenda behind their work in libraries. In Chris' case, she claims "a feminist and queer agenda for libraries [that] is a unapologeticly activist agenda, rooted in values of democracy, inclusion, and equality." And Barbara's push is reflected in her statement that, "We shouldn’t help students 'prove' something that is contrary to the evidence. We should help them find information and encourage them to form opinions based on the evidence."

While I am also a feminist who pushes students to deal with all the information they gather, not just the information that supports the opinion they had coming into their research, my own agenda is slightly different. And here's a hint:

Source

It's the reason I teach information literacy skills the way I do and the thing that drives me to make the library as appealing and inviting as I can. I want to get members of my community into my building, literally or figuratively, where I have a better chance of achieving my agenda. Why would this be behind everything I do as a librarian when I work at a college, and why would I admit it? Shouldn't I be focused on purely academic skills? Nope, nuh-uh, and not even, because my agenda is tied to knowing the truth about my students, even when the faculty members don't agree with me (which is thankfully less and less often as time goes by).

What I know is this: even at elite colleges and universities, most students will not go onto be professional academics. The majority of undergraduates are pursuing higher education because of the promise of better jobs. I've said it so many times in work conversations that I've lost track, but I'm putting it here because it is a (slightly pompous but) perfect way to capture my agenda: our education system is churning out a generation of Spartans, but what we need is Athenians. We need people who can think for themselves, not people who march lock step because it's what they were told to do. We need people who actually take the time to learn the stance of someone who's running for political office, not people who support the candidate who seems like s/he would be a good drinking buddy. To put it bluntly, my agenda is that I want to help graduate critical thinkers who are, therefore, well informed voters.

We've all got agendas when we think about it. For some of us, it's something that pushed us to pursue this career field in the first place. I applaud Chris and Barbara for coming clean with theirs, and have added mine to the list.

What's yours?