Editor’s Note: Please join us in welcoming Jonathan Rowe, Associate Instruction Services Librarian at Boston College, as a new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger for the 2024-2025 year here at ACRLog.
As Brat Summer ends, we are entering what my spouse likes to call “Irish Autumn,” a season they say has fading sunshine, ever-growing cold weather, and a moodiness rising alongside log-fire flames and knitted sweaters pulled out of storage. Irish Autumn is an appropriate way to convey fall in the Northeast, especially on the college campus in Boston, where I start my first role as an academic librarian. But it could also convey the unpredictable time I begin my role: amid the 2024 general election season.
My position’s official title is Associate Instruction Services Librarian. It combines library instruction for first-year undergraduate students and reference services to the broader institution. The job excites me because I can help prepare new college students to become lifelong scholars and critical information users. I can also serve the college community by ensuring its information needs are met, whether academic-related or not. As many instruction librarians can surely attest, some challenges in the teaching side of this role are the pressure to make each one-shot instruction session meaningful in a minimal amount of time, the often repetitive nature of lesson planning, and the stress of post-assessment and follow-up consultations. Nevertheless, as I finalized my fall schedule of library sessions with my instruction team in the days leading up to the first day of classes, I felt a nervous excitement at the prospect of equipping first-year students with research skills and revealing all the resources the college’s library offered—training I never received and had to painfully figure out myself during undergrad and in my MLIS program. However, after looking through the seventeen sessions I was expected to prepare for and teach, I realized with a slight dread that four sessions later in the semester fell in the week after Election Day.
At a time when the United States is politically polarized, the last thing I want to consider is how the outcome of a political contest would affect my instruction session. And yet, even outside of an intense electoral cycle, politics is an ever-looming subject that is impossible to ignore. My teaching philosophy is informed by Paulo Freire and bell hooks, two well-known educators and theorists whose critical pedagogy pushed against teaching and learning as a depository action and called for an education that was more liberatory, more focused on addressing social issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and nationality around us. To have an instruction practice like this requires bringing politics into the classroom. Moreover, following Freire and hook’s pedagogies to the fullest extent means removing the instructor as the center of knowledge and direction for the class and giving authority over learning to the students, something I found impossible to do with the fall semester starting in a few days. All this is to say, politics constantly manifests itself within academic institutions and libraries in ways too many to discuss in one blog post, and no election would change that. As author James Baldwin has said, it was something that needed to be faced.
And so, knowing that the election was something I would have to face, I launched into teaching preparations. I consulted old resources, lesson plans, and materials our team compiled over the years, Bloom’s taxonomy, assessment, and active learning techniques, and observed colleagues teach their own classes to figure out what would be most helpful to the 100+ students I would work and build relationships with during the semester. Along the way, I began to realize how difficult it can be for those who work in academic libraries to engage in political matters and the vital role we, as academic librarians, play during electoral seasons like these.
Academic librarians’ struggle with openly engaging in politics can be rooted in the longstanding idea that librarianship is a neutral profession (see principles #1 and #7 in the ALA Code of Ethics, for example). This ethic sets the expectation that librarians should not allow their personal and political beliefs to influence how patrons use the services and information they receive, especially multi-sided or controversial information. And yet, critical librarianship scholars have offered the idea of neutrality as a myth, noting that librarians, particularly in an academic context, often allow personal beliefs to inform their decisions around which sources and knowledge repositories are prioritized when shared with a patron. Though the idea of librarians as neutral professionals is on uneven ground, the expectation that we must be so in our work can cause us to avoid political matters altogether. A recurring fear I have as I plan post-election library sessions is that its direction could be derailed by content I include that addresses or alludes to the election results and that I could face accusations of bias (a no-no in the academy). As valuable as library school was, what training could it offer to address a scenario like this? While this was something I knew I had to face and handle as best as I could, I did have the comfort of knowing that I didn’t have to do it alone; my instruction team colleagues, who had more than thirty years of experience between them, were facing the same task and had faced similar tasks in the past and would make space to process the election’s impact on our teaching and classes.
So, facing an impending general election, what change can I make as a first-year academic librarian starting my career in these unique political times? Far from being an objective referee of information access, my role in the coming months is not to influence how my students vote but to ensure they have the skills to engage in critically-minded and informed research and, if they choose, civic choices as well. Ensuring they know how to search for information effectively and can evaluate what they see and hear for accuracy and fact, especially around political news and policies, will hopefully keep them civically engaged now and in the future. In addition, as I work at an institute that deeply values reflection and social justice, I hope to instill in my students the importance of reflecting on their decisions as learners and citizens and the systemic injustices that operate around them whether that be through targeted content or an active learning activity like the problem tree exercise. While it’s uncertain whether I will be able to meet these lofty goals during my first year, I am cautiously optimistic that some of them will be possible as my students and I start working together amid shorter, colder days and the moodiness of these political times.