Editor’s note: This guest post has been authored by Carlos Duarte and Mary Broussard. Carlos is the Associate College Librarian for Public Services at Colorado College. Mary is the Arts and Humanities Librarian at Bucknell University. This post is the fourth in a four-part series, “Discussing the 4 Pillars of Immersion.”
This series was inspired by conversations during a January 2024 Immersion Facilitators retreat that examined our relationship with the foundational pillars of the program. The team explored each pillar by sharing questions and perspectives and considered how to integrate each pillar into the portfolio of Immersion programming. The first post in this series focused on information literacy, the second on the changing roles of librarians in higher education, the third on leadership, and in this fourth installment, Carlos Duarte and Mary Broussard will explore the role of critical reflective practice in the work of teaching librarians.
What is critical (about) reflective practice?
Carlos: As librarians we are asked to wear many hats, some days we are teachers, others we are liaisons, sometimes we are colleagues and peers, others we are supervisors and committee chairs. Across these various roles and throughout our workday we have shared workplace norms and routines that inform our workplace culture and climate. Reflecting, iterating, and refining these routines and practices may help us improve our workplaces. It may lead us to find efficiencies; better ways to approach work and communication, improved lesson plans and so forth. However, it may also entrench systemic inequities or biases leading to the exclusion of different groups or ways of thinking. This is where the critical part of critical reflective practice comes in. As Immersion facilitators, we are working to critique assumptions, the unspoken or tacit rules that frame our everyday decisions and actions in the workplace. These may be hegemonic norms that entrench and support dominant culture, the paradigms we use to organize our world views, and prescriptive assumptions about how we think things should be, are embedded all around and in us. In short, we are using critical reflective practice to explore power and privilege in order to develop or recommit to inclusive and accessible practices.
So how or when can we engage in critical practice? On any given day I am switching between multiple job roles, working with students, other librarians, trying to honor the commitments I have made and probably agreeing to commitments I don’t have time for. I have plenty to reflect on, the question is where to start. As a librarian committed to inclusion and access, I try to narrow my focus by using critical reflective practice to examine the intersections of my daily work and the pillars we have been discussing in the blog series, information literacy, the role of librarians in higher education, and leadership. This has helped me find a starting point or center as I engage in personal reflective work and outward facing creative work. All of this is of course easier said than done, and it is still a struggle sometimes to move from reflection to action, to put ideas into practice.
Mary: In the past few years, my professional writing has evolved towards critical reflections of well-being in the workplace and what common customs, conventions, cultures, and habits promote our professional well-being and what harms it. I have been writing about disability advocacy within the profession. It can be intimidating to talk about specific people groups, because even with the best of intentions, it’s so easy to accidentally leave someone out. There are many criticisms of feminism and disability advocacy that they only serve white members of those communities. As a white person, how do I speak from my lived experience while also making space for others who do not share all of my identities? One thing I fall back on is an ongoing promise to learn and grow over time.
So I’m doing critical reflective practice and advocacy in my writing, but in my everyday practice, I agree it’s really difficult to move from reflection to action. In my work with Immersion in the past few years, I have come to look upon every relationship through a lens of power dynamics. In any given situation at work, what identities, positions, or talents give someone more power than another? I feel like taking that into consideration, particularly when I have any amount of power, as I choose between my options must be some kind of action. However, it usually feels very small.
Many of the librarians who come to Immersion are newer to the profession and don’t necessarily see themselves as having “power.” I still obviously think it’s useful to talk about power to understand the dynamics within a group, but it can also be useful to ask oneself what one can control, what choices one has, or what one can change. I think librarians, particularly those who are newer and not in supervisory positions, can lose out on opportunities for positive change because we don’t feel like we can control anything. And that’s usually not true.
Figuring out how to disentangle power from control.
Carlos: Yes, thanks for bringing the conversation to this point. I think that figuring out how to disentangle power from control can help us find a starting point for action in our work lives. At Immersion, we often think about power in the contexts of privilege, the norms of dominant culture, and paradigms that shape our work as academic librarians. In other words, we are talking about how power manifests itself in wider society, in the working lives of librarians, and in our conversation around information literacy instruction.
Control, on the other hand, might be thought of on the scale of the individual or immediate working group. It can be helpful to examine what is in our control as librarians and focus our efforts where we can affect change. I agree that as an individual it can feel as if we don’t have a lot of control when thinking about our institutions as a whole, but it is important to take a minute to ask what we do have the power to shape in our daily work. For example, we may have the ability to shape how we engage with collection development, or curriculum design, we can control how we engage with students. We can also think about shaping community at work, by modeling behaviors and values that lay the groundwork for future interactions. Working with our colleagues to create a community of practice we can begin to tackle assumptions and offer a critique of power in pursuit of inclusive and accessible practices.
Is Critical Reflective Practice an individual or group activity?
Mary: The critical reflective practice I’ve talked about so far is definitely a solo activity, but of course librarians do it together all of the time, and Immersion is a great place to do it! One of my favorite parts about the Immersion summer program is watching participants apply the principles of critical reflective practice to help solve each others’ problems, from relationships with difficult faculty, to workplace harassment, to schedule changes that conflict with the needs of one’s personal life. We all bring talents, perspectives, and experiences to the table and we can be a generous community. It can be very helpful to have the input of a neutral party when analyzing a problem or its possible solutions.
In our next post, Melissa Bowles-Terry and Jessie Loyer will discuss the role of community in the Immersion Program.