The Case for Theoretical Eclecticism

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I'm disgustingly well-rounded and balanced in my talents and in my interests. Back when the SATs were comprised of two tests, verbal and math, I got the exact same score on both halves. The reasons I got a tattoo of a blue morpho were as much about the science of tropical butterflies as about the symbolism and beauty of that species. This kind of balance plays itself out all through my life. In fact, one of my favorite things about being a librarian is that I am a professional generalist. The fact that I've always worked at small, liberal arts colleges - where I have to be at least somewhat well versed in a broad range of topics to do my liaison/outreach duties - has always suited me well.

This tendency also shows itself in the theories I turn into praxis. I hinted at this eclectic approach in a post I wrote last summer, down in the section where I list books I've already read that inform my librarianship. There are books by a Buddhist nun, a community organizer, a behavioral economist, a (misogynistic) philosopher, businessmen, and a folklorist. In the last year, I added one more book to the list of things that influence my day-to-day both in and out of the library: The Upside of Stress, by Stanford University psychologist Dr. Kelly McGonigal. Trying to make friends with stress has changed how I perceive my life as a librarian and as an administrator. And finally, there's a book I should have included in my original list: Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services by Carol Kuhlthau.

If anything about that list stands out to you, it should be the fact that there's no overlap in the professions or the perspectives of the authors. Sure, there is more than one academic on the list, but even they come from a broad range of disciplines. There are books written for popular audiences, for academic audiences, and for niche audiences. Admittedly, I am prone to being idiosyncratically eclectic or even iconoclastic. Maybe someday I'll write a Just for Fun post about how I consciously eschewed all the "popular" things in high school and in college. Even if it makes me weird outside of my career, when it comes to librarianship I know this is an approach that has benefited me and my communities. I also know that this approach would benefit anyone who adopts it.

Here are a few specific benefits of this approach:

• I've got a lot of different lenses through which to examine situations and opportunities to figure out the best way forward.
• I'm not stumped when the first thing I tried doesn't work. 
• Valuing this multiplicity of views in my theory translates over to valuing different perspectives in other people. 

One of my favorite parables is "The Blind Men and the Elephant." Using only one theoretical perspective is like being one of those titular blind men who only felt the leg or the ear or the tail of the elephant. I'm not going to pretend that I never get stuck; I'm as prone to falling victim to confirmation bias as the next person. But at least with my multiple ways of approaching a situation, I'm more likely to see the whole. What do you all think?

(I wrote the bones of this post a while ago, but I know there have been some scuffles on social media the last week about critical theories. This isn't a response or comment on that, but I will say this again: a multiplicity of views only adds to the conversation.)

#CritLib Recommended Reading List

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To Read

Last week I asked #critlib to recommend some reading to me. I haven't participated much with #critlib, but that's because I'm mostly fried by that time of night. This is important stuff, though, so I try to keep up with what is being discussed. However, I have volunteered to lead one of these discussions coming up, so I want to beef up on theories and theorists before then. For my own ease, I wanted to have all the readings in one place, but doing it here will help others who might not feel comfortable asking for the same recommendations. Also, I only got names in a lot of instances, so I'm hoping you all can recommend where to start with those theorists/writers.

Here's the list, in alphabetical order:

• Maria T. Accardi, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier, Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods
• Alma Flor Ada (She's written lots of things, but I'd like advice on her pedagogy writing.)
• Sara Ahmed, "Against Students"
• Andrea Baer, "Critical Information Literacy in the College Classroom: Exploring Scholarly Knowledge Production through the Digital Humanities"
• Stephen Eric Bronner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction
• Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom
• Michel Foucault, start with Discipline and Punish
• Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
• Donna Haraway
• Sandra Harding
• bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
• Kevin K. Kumashiro
• Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy
• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
• Bic Ngo
• Hope A. Olson
• Donald D. Palmer, Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners
• Mary Louise Pratt, "Arts of the Contact Zone"
• Laura Rendón, Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice and Liberation
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• Joan Wink, Critical Pedagogy: Notes from the Real World

I've got a lot of reading to do.

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Already Read

Also, here are some books that I've read that inform my perspective on librarianship. They tend to be a bit on the practical application side of things, but praxis is my jam, so... (Also, be warned: May Contain Some Misogyny.)

• Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

The subtitle for this book, "A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals," should give you a hint of why it's on my list. Alinksy is considered by many to be a founder of modern community organizing. 

• Pema Chodron, Start Where You Are

Chodron's writing was the beginning of my becoming a Buddhist. She talks about compassion, both for ourselves and for others. Compassion and kindness are core to the kind of librarian I've become.

• Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Practical application of epistemological theories (not that the authors talk about their work using that language, but that's what it is)...? Yes, thank you.

• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

I'm of the opinion that anyone in a service oriented profession like librarianship needs to know some basic behavioral economics, and Kahneman won a Nobel for his work. Bonus: Kahneman's writing is accessible.

• Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

This is the reason there's a misogyny warning on my list, but in my defense: it's really only in one chapter. This book covers topics like epistemology, emotive ethics, philosophy, and beyond. I don't agree with some of his conclusions, but his writing emphasizes the idea of broader context.

• Jack Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick

Zipes looks at fairy tales from what he calls an epidemiological perspective. I've spoken with some people who are better versed in epidemiology than me, and they took some issue with Zipes theories, but there's still something to be said for reading a book that talks about how memes and ideas spread. (He basically says that Little Red Riding Hood changes from culture to culture for the same reason that Darwin's finches had different beaks.) Caveat: he writes like an academic instead of like a person, but it's worth powering through to get to the ideas.

What Else?

"I think you have too many books." "Don't talk to me until you apologize for that remark. I have a phylactery, I have a plan."

— Evil Supply Co. (@EvilSupplyCo) December 17, 2014

I've already got 500+ books on my To Read list on GoodReads, plus all those books up there, plus books I bought but haven't read yet, and so on and so on. I have more books to read than I can reasonably expect to get to in a lifetime. I know that, but I'm still going to ask: is anything else you'd add to this list? Articles are welcome, too. You may or may not have noticed that my To Read list up there is heavily waited towards women and people of color, and that's on purpose. Last year I noticed I'd been reading mostly cishet white American male authors and have been trying to correct for that. Shameful realization for a heartless, humorless feminist like me. However, any suggestions are welcome. I am starting with Foucault, after all.

Students Are Not You At That Age

"my brains - let me show you them," by Liz Henry

In last week's post, "Ten Things I Didn't Learn in Library School, Academic Edition," the first thing I listed was about how present day undergraduates are not the same as we were. For the most part, it's not a "kids these days don't know nothin'" thing. As I said:

"Think about it this way: if you're an academic librarian (or want to be one) chances are pretty high that you liked college and were a good student, otherwise you wouldn't be thinking about spending your life in academia. Many of the students with whom I talk every day are here either because Mommy &/or Daddy made them, or because it's the next logical step. There will be students who want to be at college, but that's not every student."

After I published the post, I had a few people ask me how I deal with students like this. The truth is that I still struggle with it on a semi-regular basis, although I know that I'm better than I was when I got my first job. I have days, sometimes weeks, when I am instinctually calm and don't have to remind myself of the items I listed below. But I don't get too upset when I do struggle. Practice makes perfect, right?

Anyway, I deal with students by remind myself:

1. In some ways, students ARE you at that age (but you have probably forgotten what it was like because your brain has finished maturing). To put it colloquially, teenage & early/mid twenties brain chemistry/structure is MAD crazy. Not only are their brains constantly growing and changing, they are doing it at an amazing rate. Another side effect of this is that teens & young adults process social input from a much more primitive part of the brain than you do. Brain chemistry and structure changes are why students can be so surly, so I try to be patient.
2. The person in front of me could be a first generation college student. Statistics vary from school to school, obviously, but 40% of my undergraduate population falls in this category. I don't. Not only do I come from a long line of college graduates on both sides, both my maternal and my paternal grandfathers taught at the college level. This means that when I arrived at my undergraduate institution, I knew what was expected (at least to some extent). First gen students don't have that knowledge, so I try to help them fill in the gaps.
3. It's about good customer service skills. Bear with me while I tell you a quick story. I put myself through my first graduate degree by working at a mid-range, fancy-ish restaurant. I had my regulars who always sat in my section. For them, I'd explain the specials and then pretty much get out of their way. I also had plenty of first time customers, even at that fancy pants place. With them, I'd explain every single thing about the restaurant, the menu, the bar, and so on. If I did my job well with a new customer, and the circumstances were right, I'd eventually have a new regular. That's what I want in the library - someone who knows what they are doing and only needs to have occasional pointers - so I put in the time with them when they are freshmen.

Any thoughts? And, for those of you who have a bit of experience, do you have any advice you can add to mine?

Finding Your Voice, by Maureen Barry

Wright State students help prepare Chesterhill Produce Auction for it's opening during their week-long service trip to southeast Ohio last spring break.

When I was on the job market in 2004-2005, as I was finishing my MLS, I applied for both tenure-track and non-tenure-track positions. I preferred non-tenure because, like many new librarians, I hadn’t yet discovered my voice. Why jump into publishing if I didn’t have anything to say yet? This idea came back to me in the response I got to a question I asked during a phone interview, “What are the benefits of the non-tenure position?”  She said, “I like this situation [non-tenure] because I don’t feel pressured to publish, but I am supported if I want to publish.” 

It wasn’t until about five years into my career that I got the urge to start publishing. It happened when one of my friends, Dr. Sarah Twill, a social work faculty member at my current institution, introduced me to service-learning. Service-learning is a teaching and learning pedagogy that closely ties together course content with service to the community to help solve real-world problems. It’s different from volunteerism in that service learning is a delicate balance of curricular materials, service, and reflection.  It’s also different from internship because an internship is usually done after your coursework is complete. (See Andrew Furco’s continuum for further explanation.)

The more I heard Sarah talk about service-learning, the more I was hooked. One day, I thought to myself:  How can I use service-learning in the for-credit information literacy course that I co-teach? Has it been done? My thought was that incorporating service-learning would attach a real-world component to the course making the class a more meaningful experience not only for me, but also for my students and our would-be community partner.

A journey into the literature revealed NO instances of such a course, although there was some discussion about the parallels between information literacy and service-learning (see Riddle, 2003). Hmm. I realized I might be on to something here, even though no one else appeared to have tried it yet. So I went for it. (If you’d like to read more about the course and how it came to be, see my article, “Research for the Greater Good:  Incorporating service-learning in an information literacy course at Wright State University,” in the June 2011 C&RL News.)

Then I had a light bulb moment near the end of my first quarter of teaching the service-learning information literacy course. I was walking across campus with my supervisor when I said, “I may have found my niche with service-learning.”  She responded, “If you want to be known for service-learning, you need to start a blog.”  All I could think was, “Ugh. Really? A blog? Do I really want to write THAT often?  She’s right though – it’s what we librarians do.” And now, looking back on it, I’m really grateful to her for giving me that push.  At the time, I really didn’t want to blog; but when your boss suggests something, it’s hard to say no.  So, here I am, the self-labeled Service Learning Librarian.    

Because of my blog, I was invited to write a two part piece for LOEX Quarterly (Part 1; Part 2). Loanne Snavely, an academic librarian, recognized from my blog that my course engaged students with the library in a unique way, so she contacted me because she was seeking chapters for Student Engagement and the Academic Library. I have also been invited to be a panelist for the Women’s & Gender Studies Section of ALA’s President’s Program at the annual conference in July 2013. And finally, just a few weeks ago, I was contacted to blind review an article about service-learning in library education.  All of these opportunities presented themselves because of my blog.

In addition to my for-credit information literacy course, my success has helped me seek new opportunities to partner with faculty and instructors who incorporate service-learning pedagogy.  Over the past few years, I helped instructors pair information literacy and service-learning in English composition courses. I was the embedded librarian in an honors interdisciplinary service-learning course about sustainability in Appalachia, co-taught by Dr. Sarah Twill and an instructor in Earth & Environmental Sciences.  This course includes a week-long service trip to southeast Ohio.  Yes, in case you were wondering, I went on the trip.  It was without a doubt the most meaningful interaction I’ve had with students at Wright State.  Another benefit is that these experiences have provided new material about which I can write and present.

Service-learning has been a rewarding way to serve both my community and my profession. I’m grateful that I discovered the concept here at Wright State. Or, perhaps it discovered me. Either way, I found my voice, and I continue to develop it through seeking new service-learning experiences at my institution, giving presentations, writing, and also a little reading, of course.

If you haven’t found your voice yet, don’t worry. It will come. It doesn’t happen overnight, so don’t get discouraged. It took me almost 5 years to figure out what I could possibly offer to my field that was new and different.   

Maureen Barry is the First Year Experience Librarian at Wright State University in Dayton, OH. She tweets @SLLibrarian and blogs at Service Learning Librarian.

My Approach to Teaching

Creative Commons Licensed Picture from Todd Petrie

Had an involved conversation with a libr* friend about how I teach and realized I've never discussed my pedagogical philosophy here. Sure, I've discussed how my approach to librarianship is constantly evolving, but this is even more true of my approach to teaching. That recent conversation made me realize I've actually gotten my philosophy of teaching information literacy skills so refined that I can sum it up in five points, so here they are:

1. Be yourself. For me, that mostly means letting my nerd flag fly and using humor in every session. (Here's a joke I've told frequently: How many librarians does it take to change a light bulb? I don't know, but I can help you look it up.) For you, that might mean talking about music or your dog or whatever. If you aren't comfortable with yourself in the classroom, the students won't be comfortable either.
2. I believe in a constructivist theory of knowledge, and my teaching reflects this belief. Ascribing to this approach means I teach in a way that builds on my students' existing knowledge. For instance, when I teach students how to evaluate websites, I skip all the carefully constructed and clever acronyms that my libr* brothers and sisters have devised. Instead, I go with the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where, & why) since 99% of my students already have that mnemonic in their knowledge base.
3. If it's at all possible, I make them use the skills/knowledge right away. Frequently, this can be done during the information literacy session. Here's a recent example: this semester, in our first semester FYE classes, we break the students up into small groups and have each group evaluate a website that comes up in a search for a keyword related to the class materials.
4. Make it as real as possible. I talk about how I used the web to research the car I bought. I come up with papers I would want to write if I were in that class. When I teach web evaluation, I do a live, untested Google search. I do my best to make the context of my teaching reflect what they'll be facing when they use the skills and knowledge I'm presenting.
5. Most importantly, I give them a path back to the new information and skills, since even the best and most attentive students will forget stuff. Although this idea shows itself in a lot of ways, the biggest thing I do to give them that path is to make them memorize my name. It helps them feel comfortable with me. Students can search for my email in a campus directory, stop by my office, or even stop me on campus to ask a question. Presenting myself as the path back has been incredibly successful.

What about you? How do you teach? (And if you work with the public at all, you teach. One on one instruction is even more important at times than classroom instruction.)

That's Still My Jam, Or, The Continued Applicability of Ranganathan's Five Rules of Library Science

Before I get into the heart of my post, I want to remind you of the Five Laws that Ranganathan proposed in 1931:

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his [or her] book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.

Set aside the quibbling about books versus electronic resources versus movies versus whatever, and the prescience of good ol' Shilayi Ramamrita Ranganathan shines through, even to today's libraries. Or, to get back to my music metaphor, his proposal "has a good beat, and you can dance to it" even now.

This kind of thinking applies to any kind of library, to any kind of resource, and to any kind of person using a library. We don't have Westlaw at my library, but we don't have lawyers or even a pre-law program. On the other hand, we do subscribe to most of the really important databases for the disciplines represented by our faculty. We have a communication department, so we have Communication and Mass Media Complete. We have PsycInfo for our psychology people. And so on, and so on.

Similarly, we have a strong and growing popular reading collection. I know there are still people out there who think librarians should be the arbiters of good taste. That we should guide our patrons away from trash and towards "literature" (imagine those quote marks as sarcastic air quotes). You know what? Forget that. First of all, plenty of authors who are considered high literature these days were considered popular fiction in their own times. Jane Austen, anyone? Second, trying to tell people what they should and shouldn't read goes against Ranganathan's ideas.

In case you've forgotten, or in case you haven't been reading my blog for long, let me remind you what the community I serve is like. I work at a small, liberal arts college that is in a semi-rural part of Northeast Ohio. The nearest public library is in the next town over, but most of the students who attend my college don't have a car so the next town over is still out of reach. We are part of the OhioLINK consortium, which gives the community access to more books than you can imagine, but even those materials take 3-5 business days to arrive.

Taking all of this into account, some people would still question my collection development decisions. Why do I have the "Hunger Games" series? Why do I plan to buy the "Fifty Shades of Gray" series in the new fiscal year? Why did I add a copy of The Overton Window to our collection even though Glenn Beck's politics make me want to scream? My answer: because of Ranganathan.

1. Books are for use. I know these books will get used. Our copy of Hunger Games doesn't seem to get reshelved much these days. As soon as it's returned, out it goes again. That kind of thing doesn't happen that frequently at a library like mine.
2. Every reader his [or her] book. I have no personal interest in Twilight or the uber-popular fan fiction it spawned, but readers in my community do. Further, our rhetorician contributed a chapter to a book about Twilight, so I know I need to have the "Fifty Shades of Gray" books.
3. Every book its reader. I do lots of hand-selling, successfully, for our popular reading collection. There are a couple of members of the English department who are always open to a new graphic novel.
4. Save the time of the reader. Although I don't mind waiting, most people don't want to wait 3-5 days for a book to arrive. They want to start reading it NOW NOW NOW, especially when it comes to pleasure reading. That's why we have books by Jennifer Crusie and Les Roberts and Stephen King. If a member of my community comes in looking for something fun to read, I can save them time by having these things on hand.
5. The library is a growing organism. This is the most important of all of the laws. The library grows in response to the stimulus provided by the environment. I'm lucky in that there are many members of the faculty who teach popular literature, so I have curricular support/stimulus for my efforts. I'd still buy the same kind of books even if I didn't, because this is a lot of what the students and staff on my campus want to read. Back to my original music metaphor once again: you cannot dictate what kind of music is going to be popular, or how sub-genres of styles are going to evolve. Just as you cannot tell people what they should and shouldn't read.

It all comes down to the fact that I have Infinite Kung Fu in my collection for the same reason I have Atomic Comics or Writer M. D.: my application and understanding of Ranganathan's Laws.

What about you? Do you agree with the way I've interpreted S. R. R.'s Laws? Why/why not? How do you integrate them into your own collection development philosophy?