Towards a “pedagogy of the depressed”

“Okay guys, genuine question. How long until we’re justified in killing people over this?”¹

Alarmed, I tried to reroute our whole-class discussion. I asked students to refocus on the prompt I’d provided: Choose one of the AI-related issues we’ve discussed this semester and brainstorm a potential policy solution. Consider timelines, barriers, stakeholders, and other decision-making factors.

When one student reluctantly suggested that local, grassroots action would be the most effective way to make change, I excitedly shared a case study in which local resistance led to a city dropping their Flock contract. But the mood in the classroom continued to spiral.

“I don’t know about the assassination thing,” someone offered.

“Okay, but they’re already killing us,” a student said. “They’re literally killing us.”

“We need to do what they’re doing in France,” another declared. “They’re not going to school. They’re not going to work. They’re massing in the streets and burning buildings. That’s the only way they’ll listen to us.”

During class, a student made this observation: “It feels like all the older generations are panicking about AI, but our generation is just like ‘oh yeah, another apocalyptic catastrophe, okay.’” Their classmates nodded.

This is a generalization, of course, but I believe it’s grounded in a real phenomenon, at least here in the United States. In other countries that have been shaped by different catastrophes, generational divides may look different. Here, I’ve often noticed a difference in political and social affect between those who remember the world before 9/11 and those who don’t, and again, another between those who were adults before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the release of ChatGPT and those who weren’t. Many of my students were only middle-schoolers in March 2020. They were children in 2016. For my older colleagues, the world is spinning off its axis, but for my students, the world has no axis. There is no stable world to return to, one where we trust authorities and well-resourced institutions. Their world is rotten to the core, and it always has been.

I’m twenty-five, just a few years older than most of my students. I don’t remember a world before 9/11, though I’m told it was different. I don’t remember a world without the Internet, but I do remember one—barely—where iPhones and social media were wondrous and new. I haven’t allowed myself to feel big, world-changing hope in a long time, and I don’t remember a time when I hoped for something and it happened, or when I trusted an authority figure and they followed through. I can’t imagine what my students must feel like.

After my recent classroom experience, I felt more unsure than ever about my teaching. How can we teach students who feel so cynical and hopeless when we also feel cynical and hopeless? I want to feel something again; I worry about developing apathy, and, most importantly, about my students developing apathy. If a student finishes my course feeling less empowered than they did when they started, I believe I’ve failed as a teacher. I want students to leave my classroom equipped to follow their curiosity, engage in productive civic dialogue, and make change in their communities. But this semester, I’ve consistently heard from students that there’s no point in trying to do any of those things. That nobody will listen and nothing will change, no matter what they do–unless they do something very, very drastic.

To help me think through these issues, I returned to Pedagogy of the Depressed by Christopher Schaberg. Titled in a cheeky reference to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Schaberg’s book reflects on the rapidly-evolving, often depressing state of the college classroom in the early 21st century. “At a certain point, it seemed like all my students were depressed,” he writes. I nodded furiously as I turned the pages. “Or, rather, it wasn’t a certain point at all: it happened ‘gradually and then suddenly,’ to borrow a line from Hemingway. This was depressing. It changed the feel of the classroom, it altered the possibilities of how we could learn together.” (pg. 2)

Critically, Schaberg gestures towards this particular “depression” as a phenomenon caused by structural forces both inside and outside the academy, rather than an issue of individual students’ and teachers’ mental health. Even if we all had access to amazing therapists and infinite workplace wellness initiatives, the “depression” in question would persist. “The ‘depression’ I am interested in tracking in this book is not so much an individual experience, not located (at least not solely) in the depressed subject,” he writes. “It’s a state of things. It’s a depressed atmosphere, a dispersed feeling of dread that has as much to do with cultural forces and planetary circumstances as it has to do with the intense feeling of solitary helplessness.” (pg. 4)

And what a state of things! In the same vein, one of my colleagues recently shared this article with me: “Is It Burnout? Or Demoralization?” by Doris A. Santoro. While this article is targeted towards K-12 teachers and administrators, I believe it applies just as well to higher education. Santoro says, “Teachers who experience demoralization believe that the school practices or policy mandates that they are expected to follow are harmful to students or degrading to the profession and that their attempts to alter them have been fruitless. Demoralization is a moral type of dissatisfaction that needs to be understood as a problem of professional ethics.” While this is certainly a problem in higher ed, which Schaberg explores in Pedagogy of the Depressed, I think our students also experience “demoralization” in everyday life. So do we. “Demoralization” captures the dissatisfaction from feeling like it’s impossible to live in accordance with one’s values, that one is forced to live unethically, and there’s nothing one can do about it.

Defined either way, in a broad or narrow sense, “demoralization” is a cause of the malaise Schaberg describes. “Maybe what’s so depressing about all this is that it feels very much like living at the end of something,” he writes. “[. . .] I’m tired of keeping up the charade that we’re working toward real transformation, when it feels more and more like we’re mostly just maintaining a cobbled together machine that’s on the brink of falling to pieces.” (pp. 115-116)

The bulk of Pedagogy of the Depressed reflects on Schaberg’s personal experiences teaching college English. Schaberg contextualizes the need for a “pedagogy of the depressed,” and he raises useful questions around what it might look like. But he stops short of theorizing a clear, distinct “pedagogy of the depressed.”

I’ve been strongly resonating with this term of late, and I’ve also been trying to remind myself that all teaching (and all doing, of anything worth doing) must involve some failure, especially when I’m doing something as tricky as facilitating discussions on current events. Plus, failure invites curiosity and facilitates learning. I want to close by offering some thoughts on what a “pedagogy of the depressed” means to me and inviting you to share what it might mean to you as well. What does it require—from us, of us—to teach these students in this climate, when we often feel the same weight of cynicism as they do? How can we empower our graduates to be lifelong learners who change their world for the better?

A “pedagogy of the depressed” embraces the whole people who enter our classroom, with all their complexities, life experiences, interests, and frustrations.
A “pedagogy of the depressed” means not just accepting, but embracing, the fact that the classroom is an inherently political space. As Freire explains, there can be no democracy without an educated population; education is one of the fundamental pillars of a functioning polis. A classroom that claims to be apolitical is not, in fact, apolitical; it is interested in maintaining the status quo, which is a political choice.
- What follows from this? A political classroom is a classroom that empowers students to act. This requires them to understand what’s happening around them, why it’s happening, and how they might change it. I don’t think that third element was present enough in my instruction this semester. I could have provided more case studies of successful change-making, like communities resisting data center construction or Flock contracts, and then used those case studies as springboards for conversations about the issues at hand (economic investment in AI, surveillance technology, etc). I still want students to develop their own opinions and solutions; they might want to change the world in ways that I disagree with, and that’s okay. But at the heart of the discussion is a case study that shows them how change is possible, and hope isn’t pointless. As Freire himself writes in Pedagogy of Freedom, “One of the most important tasks of critical educational practice is to make possible the conditions in which the learners, in their interaction with one another and with their teachers, engage in the experience of assuming themselves as social, historical, thinking, communicative, transformative, creative persons; dreamers of possible utopias, capable of being angry because of a capacity to love.” (pg. 45)
A “pedagogy of the depressed” is based in the politics of refusal. Some might view “refusal” as a give-in or dead-end, but as Carole McGranahan (2016) has suggested, refusal may be a far more generative practice than acquiescence. Practicing refusal allows us to imagine an array of wild, beautiful futures that we may not otherwise consider. “Refusal is insistence on the possible over the probable,” writes McGranahan. “[. . .] Hope combines with will to refuse authorized anticipations, thus moving away from the probable into the possible.” (pg. 323) In this way, refusal may be a route to addressing demoralization.
In order to enable work based in the politics of refusal (refusing AI, for example, or refusing classroom surveillance), unionization is critical. And as my own faculty union says, “Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions.” This is true of the working conditions of all library workers, regardless of faculty status.
As one of my students shared: “I think it’s still important to stand up for our values, even if we know we’re going to lose.” This is the most important part of a “pedagogy of the depressed.” If nothing else, we must remind ourselves that we are still human, still kicking. Still here.

Works Cited

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
McGranahan, Carole. “Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction.” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 3 (2016): 319–25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48579449.
Santoro, Doris A. “Is It Burnout? Or Demoralization?” Educational Leadership Magazine, June 1, 2018. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/is-it-burnout-or-demoralization.
Schaberg, Christopher. Pedagogy of the Depressed. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

For reasons of privacy, student quotes are approximate and representative, not exact, throughout this post. ↩︎

Re-envisioning an Instruction Program with Critical Information Literacy in Mind

My name is Kevin Adams and I am one of the new First Year Academic Librarian (FYAL) bloggers! My pronouns are he/him/his. I am interested in critical information literacy, pedagogy, all things punk, and a bunch of other stuff. I am so happy to be writing for this blog and I hope that by sharing some of my experiences I can spark some fun conversations or just brighten somebody’s day.

I am the Information Literacy Librarian at Alfred University. Alfred University is a small private university in a little village in upstate New York. The closest city of note is Rochester. Because Alfred University is so small, I am one of eight librarians (including the dean and director). I don’t want to speak too much to other librarians’ workloads, but suffice to say we all have a lot of different responsibilities. One responsibility that we all share is instruction, and in my new position I find myself leading the instruction team. In this post I want to share my experience navigating reconstructing an information literacy program shaped by Critical Information Literacy. I hope to share what my goals are, what some of my strategies are, and the challenges I have faced.

Goals

The United States is a hell scape. Late stage capitalism is siphoning money from the working and middle class folks in this country to support billionaires’ and corporations’ hoarding habits; cops are continuing to murder innocent black and brown folks with no significant repercussions; climate change is driving natural disasters that are forcing people from their homes; innocent immigrants are being held in concentration camps where agents of the state are carrying out forced sterilizations; over 200,000 people have died in the United States from COVID-19; and the list goes on. I am aware of this, my colleagues are aware of this, other teaching faculty at my university are aware of this, and students are ABSOLUTELY aware of this. So, creating a standard information literacy program that doesn’t recognize what is going on in the world felt totally useless. For this reason, and others, I am trying to create an information literacy program that integrates Critical Information Literacy (CIL) throughout the instruction design and delivery process.

CIL is not the answer to all of the problems that I have listed above, but it is an approach that does not actively ignore the situation that we find ourselves in. CIL is an approach to information literacy that is informed by critical theory and critical pedagogy. It recognizes that information is not neutral or objective; rather, it reflects social, political, and economic power systems and privileges. CIL engages with learners as contributors in the classroom to investigate, understand, and use the contours of information structures and manifestations (Wong and Saunders, 2020). In many ways, this is an approach to information literacy that uses a social justice lens.

This approach has two elements: 1) a deep understanding that information and libraries are not neutral, and 2) a centering of students in the classroom stemming from an understanding that students are important, active agents in the classroom. This agency allows students to contribute their ideas, experiences, and even expertise.

Strategies

When I applied and interviewed for this position, I centered my commitment to an inclusive information literacy program that, if possible, would implement CIL. Keeping this method front and center in my communications with potential new colleagues set the stage for me to have challenging conversations about neutrality and the role of instruction librarians as I began my new position.

Fast forward to my first month on the job. After getting acclimated to the new culture and climate of the position as best I could over Zoom, I started putting together a written Information Literacy Plan. I found myself in a unique position. Due to some shifts in the library prior to my joining, the previous instruction models were still primarily based on the ACRL Standards. This created a need for a new plan that centered the ACRL Framework. In filling this need, I saw an opportunity to incorporate CIL as a basic tenet of the Information Literacy Plan.

In order to tie the Information Literacy Plan into the values of my library and university, I consulted the strategic plans and mission and values statements for each. Alfred University strives to be “outside of ordinary” and uses language about inclusivity and diversity, affecting individual students, and changing the world for the better. While this type of branding sometimes leaves an unsavory taste in my mouth, it has allowed me to connect the CIL goals of social justice and inclusivity to the broader goals of the university. This has proven to be a failsafe as the White House has released statements that attack Critical Race Theory, an important theoretical foundation for CIL.

Implementing a plan for information literacy that negates that libraries and information are neutral from the very first page might not be possible at all institutions and might be highly controversial at others. In addition to creating a plan that ties in the values of the university, I worked closely with library administration. The Dean of Libraries at my institution is very sympathetic to social justice issues and information literacy. He has provided ample support for this idea from the outset. This has been extremely helpful in drumming up support for the idea amongst the other librarians, all of whom have been very receptive.

CIL does not exist in a vacuum. I was thrilled to find that AU libraries were actively working on a commitment to anti-racism and anti-oppression. In this commitment the librarians showed that they were already thinking about many of the concepts that inform a CIL approach, for example anti-racism, false neutrality in academic spaces, the history of white supremacy in libraries, etc. Finding ways to talk to fellow librarians about these topics created fertile ground for the seeds of CIL.

Challenges

A little over a month ago I introduced the librarians to the Information Literacy Plan. The plan is still a living document and will be adapted as necessary, but it lays out a shared groundwork that can inform each librarian’s instruction practice. The plan was so well received that I nearly cried after sharing. It can be difficult to find high points this semester, but that was certainly one of them.

In spite of how well received the plan was, explaining and implementing it is and will continue to be challenging. Most of the instruction practices at my institution have, up until recently, been primarily informed by the ACRL Standards. Updating the program to include both the ACRL Frameworks and CIL is a dramatic shift. While working with fellow librarians that are excited and curious, I continue to find myself asking and answering new questions about how to best connect with and platform students in the classroom.

These challenges are compounded by the fact that all our instruction sessions have been online this semester. Centering students in a meaningful way during a one shot can be challenging in any circumstance. Add to that Zoom fatigue, frequent technical difficulties, and all the social, political, and environmental challenges weighing on our minds in 2020. JEEZE. It is not easy, and feeling encouraged by or excited about a session is becoming a rare occurrence.

I am still figuring out new strategies to overcome these challenges. I am excited to continue to share about this and other new developments in my first year as an academic librarian! I would be thrilled to speak with anyone about what this process has looked like, share strategies, or just commiserate. You can reach me by email, or hit me up on twitter @a_rad_librarian.

Assessment as Care

water from watering can falling on small plants - Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash — Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I’m in a weird head space at the moment. I attended the Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium (CLAPS) last month and am about to attend the Library Assessment Conference (LAC) later this week. Based on what I experienced at CLAPS and what I’ve read about LAC, the two conferences couldn’t feel more different. I am very curious about how we continue to conceptualize and shape the idea of assessment in libraries.

At CLAPS, I had the pleasure of attending a workshop led by Anne Cong-Huyen, Digital Scholarship Strategist, and Kush Patel, Digital Pedagogy Librarian, at the University of Michigan. Their exploration of critical digital pedagogy in librarianship was a wonderful mix of writing, reflection, and discussion on the ways in which we can build critical and queer feminist communities in our classes. As part of the session, Anne and Kush asked participants to read five different excerpts of selected texts on care, praxis, technologies, design, and assessment, and then write our reflections on these excerpts as they apply to our own teaching and the learning we want to facilitate in our classes. (You can read the excerpts on the slides they’ve graciously shared online). The excerpt that resonated with me the most was from Critical Generosity by Jill Dolan, which illustrates a generous and caring approach to the criticism of dramatic performances and artists. It was presented as a model for assessment in teaching and learning, one that recast–in my mind, anyway–assessment as care and sustenance.

The current narrative of assessment in libraries is that of justification. We prove our value, show our impact, and demonstrate our connection to student learning and student success. I know we are working and teaching at a time when higher education funding and academic jobs are precarious and departments and faculty are constantly being asked to prove their worth. I am sympathetic to our attempts to demonstrate, through assessment, that our work in libraries is important. I’ve done and published this kind of assessment myself! But because our assessment is done with the intent to appease an external audience, we are constantly in a position to validate our own existence, rather than support the learning realities of our students and teaching librarians. Our assessment is an act of survival, in our minds, rather than something that enriches and feeds ourselves and our students. I’ve shared my professional angst about librarianship not having a seat at the academic table and the ways that influences interactions between librarians and faculty. Our library assessment culture reflects this reality, but it also continues the narrative that we need to prove ourselves worthy of trust and acceptance.

Dolan writes about her first encounter with “critical generosity” in David Roman’s book, Acts of Intervention. Roman describes caring for friends who were HIV positive during a showing of the famously long play, Angels in America. Throughout the performance, he conducted frequent interpersonal assessments: Is everyone doing ok? Does someone need to take their medication? Is there enough food and water? Do people need a break/rest? The root and ongoing narrative of this assessment was care, sustenance, and really, love.

I recognize I’m asking for what many may view as a stretch: making a connection between the interpersonal care Roman and Dolan write about and institutional library assessment. But our teaching and learning in higher education and libraries is about the students we teach and the interpersonal connections we make everyday. So many of our attempts at assessment stay away from “messiness.” We want numbers that make good stories, and we want those good stories to make the library look good. But in staying away from messiness we are erasing the people at the center our work–their complications, needs, bodies, etc. In short, we’re staying away from the “gore” of learning. I don’t mean to be graphic, but I do think our proclivity for neatness is in direct conflict with the process of learning. In my own attempts at large-scale, summative, value-focused assessment, the best I’ve been able to show is that learning takes time, and our own work as teaching librarians is never-ending.

Yes, I know we have annual reports to write and numbers to share with our directors, deans, provosts, and presidents. I do too. But we have power within our profession with the papers we write, the kind of assessment we advocate for and practice, and the care that we exhibit within our work. What would it mean to embrace a critical practice of assessment? What could that look like?

Trust Me

Reading Annie Downey’s Critical Information Literacy was like looking into a mirror that only shows your most awkward professional reflection. Her interviews with “critical” librarians (those who adopt a critical approach to information literacy and practice critical pedagogy) are some of the most honest, true-to-life experiences I’ve read from those of us who consider ourselves teaching librarians. Her descriptions of “turf issues” hit particularly close to home:

“it’s a long process to build relationships where the faculty members have some trust in the librarian and respect the librarian’s knowledge, and the librarian has to do it in a graceful way.” –quote from “Linda” (Downey, 2016, p.133).

Librarians described years of making “gradual changes” to classes and workshops, “tread[ing] lightly when it came to introducing new ideas or using [new] methods” in the classroom, and working hard to “gain the trust of [a] department’s faculty so that she could exercise more freedom in the classroom” (Downey, 2016, p. 132-133). To which I replied in the margins of the text in my special angry orange pen:

REALLY?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Why Must We “Gain” Trust?

It’s most disturbing to me that academic librarians are not automatically seen as experts in our disciplines of information literacy (critical or otherwise) and information organization. When an Intro to Women and Gender Studies instructor at my institution wants to introduce students to the concept of feminist economics, she calls on a colleague in the economics department to guest lecture. When a literature professor wants to offer students a deeper context for a novel set in France, she might ask a friend in the International Languages & Culture department to sit in and offer commentary during a class discussion. But as an academic librarian we are not necessarily seen as possessing valuable expertise until we prove ourselves worthy, which is virtually impossible to do if we aren’t invited into a class to teach.

Efforts at librarian-faculty collaboration privilege departmental faculty, even when librarians are members of the faculty at their institutions. Librarians work hard to seek out teaching opportunities within the curriculum, then must go the extra step of convincing faculty that they have something to contribute to students’ educational experiences. I have had so many conversations with faculty before, during, and after classes where they demonstrate pleasant surprise that I’ve planned out a lesson, given thought to my teaching, and even created assignments. As I stand there stunned, smiling, I can’t help but think, “What else did you expect? How little did you expect of me? What do you think it is I do?”

No, Really, Why?

The auto-librarian response to faculty who desire us to prove our worth is to work hard to do so. There is this belief within the profession that we are or have been somehow deficient, and now we must work to prove our worth to our colleagues in academia because we either a) didn’t do it before; b) tried, but were really bad at it; or c) are trying to make up for bad professional practice. We look inward and blame ourselves. We blame our graduate school training, internships, professional values, and practices. We blame our library administrators, librarian colleagues, predecessors, and librarians-in-training.

But we never blame academia.

We never blame the institutions that force us to beg for seats at the academic table and prove that we belong to be there. I sometimes wonder how my friends in the psychology department would respond if someone asked them, “Why are you on the curriculum committee? What do you possibly teach?” I can’t imagine my colleagues in the history department would respond well to a last minute request to “Come on in and do your history schtick tomorrow in my class, will you?” We can blame ourselves all we want. We can continue to create and attend conference presentations on collaborating with faculty. We can continue to read about ways to demonstrate our worth and our importance to our faculty through outreach. Or we could stop trying to prove ourselves and just assume that chair at the table–the one right in the middle– is our due the same as it is for every other faculty member at our institution.

I recognize that not all librarians are faculty at every institution (although I think we should be), but we are still a profession, despite decades of various work sociologists trying to say otherwise. Yes, relationships, including working and teaching relationships, are built on trust, but there is an implicit understanding that as a fellow faculty member or educator that you are, well, an educator. That understanding should extend to librarians as well. I realize that this sentiment may border on petulant: We are important! You need to think so! But that’s not really my intent with this post. I want us to internalize and embody the expertise we all possess. It is so easy (and so overdone) to denigrate our profession and blame ourselves for our current subclass position in academia. But that’s the power of, well, POWER. We think we’re in this spot–where we have to beg for classroom time and hope that we do well in that one class so that one professor will trust us with their class again–and it dictates our entire professional identity. This belief has created subsets of academic librarianship–liaisons, outreach librarians–that exist because we believe that we need to accept the current educational situation and work within it rather than upend it.

Yes, it’s easy to say, “Down with the hierarchy of academia!” but what would happen if we started to act like it didn’t really exist? What would our education programs look like? How would our jobs change? I think they are questions worth exploring as we perpetually engage in the “library of the future” dialogue and the never-ending back-and-forth of whether or not libraries even have a future. I think we do, and I think the library itself is the educational disruption.

Peer Coaching for Professional Learning

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Marisa Méndez-Brady, Science Librarian, and Jennifer Bonnet, Social Sciences & Humanities Librarian, at the University of Maine.

Finding the time and resources to devote to professional learning can be a challenge, especially at institutions that are less geographically proximate to the broader library community. The University of Maine is a land and sea grant institution in the rural town of Orono, where opportunities to engage with peers at other colleges and universities take a concerted effort and may require additional financial resources to participate. While these constraints limit our ability to go to as many conferences as we would like, one day a year our department attends a gathering of Maine academic librarians where colleagues across the state present ideas that generate excitement and lead to further exploration.

During the 2016 Maine Academic Libraries Day, Bowdoin College librarian Beth Hoppe made a strong case for using the ACRL Framework to embrace non-prescriptive practices in our teaching, as part of a critical pedagogical approach to working with students.

Following this talk, we couldn’t stop thinking: how might we enhance the delivery of information literacy concepts in our own library instruction by more deliberately incorporating critical pedagogy? Motivated to improve our teaching techniques and extend our professional learning, the two of us embarked on a peer coaching project. Over the course of three months we used a study group model to brainstorm, design, and implement a suite of lesson plans that centered the diversity of student voices and experiences in our instruction sessions.

Peer coaching is commonly used in K-12 learning environments, and is a technique lauded by the instructional design community for its broad applicability. It is a non-evaluative, professional learning model in which two or more colleagues work collaboratively to: design curricula, create assessments, develop lesson plans, brainstorm ideas, problem solve, and reflect on current pedagogical practices (Robbins, 2015).

Although peer coaching can be formalized within a department or unit, we participated in an informal method known as the study group model, where two or more people engage in collaborative professional development for learning (PDL) around a subject of interest. We chose this model because it offers flexibility when it comes to constraints on time or finances, providing a sustainable method for professional development during the hectic instruction schedule of a typical semester. The graphic below illustrates different approaches to utilizing peer coaching for professional learning.

From https://www.polk-fl.net/staff/professionaldevelopment/documents/Chapter16-PeerCoaching.pdf

To shape our peer coaching project, we consulted instructional design literature, which (1) emphasizes the importance of creating professional learning that is individualized to the specific learning context and audience for the learning, and (2) focuses on content, pedagogy, or both (Guskey, 2009). We also integrated the three key components of effective peer coaching: a pre-conference to establish the goals for PDL; the learning process; and a post-conference to assess the PDL process.

The pre-conference in the context of peer coaching consists of meeting to establish PDL goals based on participant interest and applicability to one’s praxis. Our pre-conferencing took a two-pronged approach. First, we established an overarching goal to use the ACRL Framework to develop learner-centered teaching outcomes. Then, we held individual pre-conferences focused on the following Frames: (1) research as inquiry, (2) scholarship as conversation, and (3) searching as strategic exploration. We selected three upcoming instruction sessions (i.e., already scheduled in the library) that would be opportune for trying out new pedagogical approaches.

After we set each agenda, we turned from pre-conferencing to the learning process, which involved three study group meetings to design our lesson plans. In advance of each meeting, we selected relevant articles to read and reviewed two to three corresponding lesson plans in the Community of Online Research Assignments. The lesson plans we chose not only engaged with the Framework but revolved around students’ interests and experiences, which helped us consider teaching techniques that were non-prescriptive in practice and drew on critical pedagogical concepts. We then used the scheduled meeting time to adapt these lesson plans to fit the goals of our upcoming instruction sessions.

“When everyone in the classroom, teacher and students, recognizes that they are responsible for creating a learning community together, learning is at its most meaningful and useful.” – bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

The first lesson plan involved a teach-in that asked students to share their decision-making process when searching for information in both open and licensed resources (ACRL frame: research as inquiry), and was targeted at an upper-level undergraduate communications and marketing course. The second lesson plan focused on deconstructing citations and reverse engineering bibliographies, and was designed for an upper-level undergraduate wildlife policy class (ACRL frame: scholarship as conversation). The third lesson plan used one piece of information from a vaguely-worded news article as a jumping-off point for finding related information across various media, which we co-taught for a student club on campus (ACRL frame: searching as strategic exploration). Although these lesson plans were designed for specific contexts, they are broadly applicable across disciplines and academic levels.

We further engaged with critical pedagogy in a post-conference that succeeded each study group meeting. In the peer coaching context, the post-conference acts as an assessment of the study group experience for us (the learners) and emphasizes the role of self-reflection in gauging our own learning. Building on the work we started in the classroom (via each lesson plan), we took a feminist pedagogical perspective to self reflection that involved open-ended questions about process and practice, and addressed our own PDL outcomes.

“Feminist assessment is inherently reflective, and reflection itself is a feminist act.” Maria Accardi, Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction

We hope to continue using peer coaching in other areas of our praxis. Peer coaching offers a low stakes, low-cost option for professional development that leverages existing resources, draws on the interests and skills of colleagues, and allows for higher frequency contact among participant learners (versus a traditional yearly conference). We also found that the informal structure of the study group model supports flexible implementation and facilitates home-grown continuing education opportunities that are targeted to specific issues we face at our library.

So often, we absorb ideas at conferences, webinars, or through informal conversations. Yet, actualizing these ideas in our own institutional environments can be challenging due to issues like time, motivation, and support. Next time you discover a novel approach or way of thinking about your praxis, we encourage you to try peer coaching! We’d love to hear from you about how you use this professional learning strategy in your own environment.