mentors

Learning from Lukewarm Library Instruction

I said in my November post that it wouldn’t be the only one I wrote about library instruction. As someone who is still new to teaching and class instruction, learning how to be an engaging, fun, and informative teacher is one of my biggest learning curves as a first-year academic librarian. So, a few months later, I’m returning to this topic – specifically to talk about a library instruction session that didn’t go as well as the one that I prepared in 24 hours.

Teaching graduate students

In my role as a liaison librarian, I work with a specific department at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College. Within that department, I manage everything library-related for nine programs – five master’s degree programs, three Ed.D. (doctorate of education) programs, and one Ph.D. program. One thing you might notice from that list is that I only work with graduate students, which is something that I was both nervous and excited about when I accepted this position.

I was excited because I knew I would be able to relate to the students, having just finished two years of being a grad student myself. A lot of the programs I support are aimed at students who are coming back to school for a career change, or who want to further their current career by completing a degree while they continue to work full-time. As someone who worked for seven years before going back to school for my MSLS, I felt when I accepted the job like I would understand these students’ experiences, and working with them has confirmed this.

However, I was also nervous because I hadn’t worked with graduate students much before. I was a Graduate Assistant at a library at the university where I did my MSLS, but worked almost entirely with undergrads in that role. The only experience I had with teaching graduate students was one co-teaching experience with my supervisor.

The good news is that a lot of my nerves about teaching and working with graduate students dissipated during the fall semester. Most of what I was teaching was similar to what I had taught undergrads – the basics of Boolean and how to look beyond Google Scholar – usually with just a few more details or advanced database skills included. Although I knew I still had a lot to learn, I felt more confident in the content of my instruction sessions for graduate classes after a semester.

Teaching Ph.D. students – how different could it be?

Late in the fall, a professor asked me to teach a Ph.D. class of hers. She requested that I come for 10-15 minutes for a brief library overview, and if it went well, I could come back in the spring and teach the class again for a full session. I agreed, the fall session went well, and in December we scheduled a day for me to teach for an hour in mid-January.

Unlike most other lessons I had taught, this was a lesson that I needed to create from scratch. I had also never taught Ph.D. students, and had only a few vague ideas of what the professor wanted me to teach. However, I had worked with a lot of Ed.D. students one-on-one in the fall, so I decided to base the lesson on what I taught those students – the basics of Boolean, how to navigate a database, and an overview of the research-specific AI tools that we have. Both groups were doctoral students, I reasoned, so their needs were probably fairly similar.

I knew I was in trouble within the first five minutes of arriving at the classroom. I had prepared slides at the beginning of my presentation to explain who I was and give an overview of Vanderbilt Libraries’ resources – essentially a condensed version of what I had done in the fall. To my surprise, as I set up my computer at the front of the room, I realized that the group of students I was about to teach were the exact same students I had taught in the fall. Since this was the same class, I had figured the students would be different, because groups of students don’t usually take the exact same class in back-to-back semesters (or ever). But this was definitely the same group.

This made my first few slides obsolete, so I breezed through them like this was the plan all along, saying things like “since we covered this last semester, we’ll go ahead and move on!” I quickly reached my slides on Boolean. I cheerfully explained how databases speak a specific language, and that to be able to use them effectively, we needed to speak that same language. Then I asked how many people had heard of Boolean before.

Every hand in the room went up, and my heart sank. If all the students already knew Boolean, most of the rest of my lesson was also obsolete.

I pivoted as best I could, asking the students to generate terms for the example topic on my slide instead of explaining the terms I had already thought about. Then I used their terms to run some searches in the databases and talked about filters and peer reviewed articles. I was hoping to be able to move on to AI research tools and spend more of the lesson time there.

However, before I could change gears, the professor asked me to talk about searching by subject headings within a database. I hadn’t prepared anything on this topic but gamely pulled up the ERIC thesaurus and showed students how to use it for a search. No surprise that since it wasn’t a search I had prepared in advance, it didn’t return any results. My attempts to change the search or look for different subject headings didn’t help.

To make matters worse, by the time I moved on from subject headings, that conversation had taken up so much time that we only had 10 minutes left in the lesson to talk about AI tools – not nearly enough. Students had a lot of questions about the tools and there was no way I could answer them all. To finish off the fiasco, another event was taking place in the classroom right after the class ended, so as I wrapped up my presentation by telling everyone they could email me any time with questions, students were standing up and heading to the back of the room, where pizza was being set out in preparation for the event.

My hope from this lesson is that it will be one of the worst ones I’ll ever teach. If I only go up from here, I’ll be happy. I felt so awful about it all that when my friends and colleagues asked me how the class had gone, I mostly just said “It was okay” and left it at that. The only person I really talked to about it at the time was one of my former professors, S., who has become a mentor and friend over the last few years. I shared all the details with her and greatly appreciated how understanding she was. She didn’t try to sugarcoat it or to convince me that it probably hadn’t been so bad. Then, she gently moved the conversation to something even more helpful than empathizing with me – she started helping me think through what I could do differently to try to prevent a similar situation from happening in the future.

Lesson 1 – Ask the faculty member for details

S. asked how much I had known about the class and students before I walked into the classroom. When I said not much, she told me that it was okay to ask the professor for more details. I think one of the things I’ve struggled with this first year is not wanting to be a burden to professors. It’s often so hard to get them to invite us into their classrooms in the first place, that I haven’t wanted to ask them too many things or push too hard for information. S. helped me see that asking for clarification and details is actually a part of my job, and that I can’t worry (much) about frustrating professors with my questions.

Lesson 2 – Consider giving higher-level students a pre-test

One of S.’s suggestions that I liked the most was to give doctoral students a pre-test before I teach in their classes. While undergraduate or even master’s students might not be willing to take a pre-test, doctoral students might complete one. If the professor agreed to distribute it, the responses would help me understand what those students know and don’t know – and therefore would help me tailor my lesson to fit their needs.

Lesson 3 – It’s okay to be honest with professors

One of the things I said to S. was that I felt like I could do so much better with the lesson if I could do it a second time – but that I doubted the professor would ever invite me back. She encouraged me to be honest with the professor, reach out, and simply say that I know I could do much better and would appreciate another chance to come to the class next semester to prove it. I haven’t reached out yet, but plan to do so along with my other fall instruction outreach, and hope that being straightforward helps.

Lesson 4 – View professors as colleagues

Something that I thought about, and decided against, ahead of the lesson was sharing my slides with the professor and asking if what I was planning to teach was in line with expectations. Again, I chose not to do this because I didn’t want to burden the professor. I was also afraid that I would get edits at the last minute, and would have to scramble to make changes the morning of. However, viewing professors as colleagues instead of people that I’m working for changes the equation on this for me. The next time I create a lesson from scratch, I’ll definitely send it to the professor in advance and make sure it matches expectations.

Lesson 5 – Remember that I have colleagues and mentors who can (and want to) help me

I think this is actually the lesson that, in retrospect, makes me feel silliest. Librarians are some of the most helpful and giving people I’ve ever worked with, but I was so scared of looking dumb by admitting that I was unsure about how to approach a doctoral-level class that I forged ahead on my own and forgot how many times fellow librarians encouraged me to ask for help. During my entire conversation with S., I kept thinking how much better it would have been if I had reached out to her before I taught this class and asked for her advice – and if I had reached out to any of my other librarian friends, mentors, or colleagues as well. This is definitely one mistake that I’ll never make again.

Moving forward

As much as I wish I could, I can’t go back and change how the January class went. However, I can change what I do in the future, and hopefully I can even come back to this class in the fall and teach a successful lesson. After this experience, I also have a much better understanding of how much instruction is comprised of way more than just a lesson that’s taught in the classroom. It’s about working with the faculty and department, my colleagues, and the library system to make sure I’m setting students up for success. My hope is that a few years down the road, with a lot more instruction experience to rely on, I’ll be able to look back on this class not as a failure, but as a turning point in my library instruction journey.

Still Lost in the Academy: The Importance of #L1S and Other First Generation Initiatives

Disclaimer: This post is only about my experience as a first generation student. My experience is not truth. While I try to highlight some research done on this topic and point to others’ reflections, it’s worth stating that first generation student’s experiences are as diverse as they are.

Sometimes I get comfortable. I start to think that I have “made it” (whatever the hell that means), that I finally have some level of comfort with the academy, that I can speak the language of academia, that I can honor where I come from while still fitting in where I’ve worked so hard to be. And then I realize just how naïve I am.

A lot has happened in the last few months to bring me back to this topic. Kelly Kietur recently wrote a brilliant blog post entitled “HOT TAKE: class feelings and lis,” where she names her feelings of never belonging as being a “perpetual outsider”. This really resonated with me and pushed me to think about and reflect upon my recent experiences and how they relate to my first generation student status.

I just moved to a new institution, Davidson College, to start my journey as a new professional. The transition has been smooth sailing, mostly because of the awesome team that I have here. Still, Davidson is a very prestigious, selective college (the class of 2018’s median ACT score was a 31, which is 5 points higher than my best) and it has been difficult for me not to psych myself out about being in this environment. Davidson also recruits brilliant faculty that have degrees from other highly prestigious institutions. I often find myself doubting my ability (more on this later) to connect with them in a meaningful way or even have an in-depth conversation with them.

In addition to adjusting to Davidson, I’ve spent a lot more time with my mother recently. A few weeks ago she volunteered to help me move everything I own down to North Carolina, which was not an easy task, given that it was almost one hundred degrees for most of the move. Even just this one act illustrates my mom’s thoughtfulness and generosity. She has taught me things about the world that you can’t learn in a classroom. She continuously keeps me grounded but still ambitious. Yet being with her for almost a week reminded me that we always have to remember where we come from. She mispronounced words that are in my daily vocabulary now. She asked me a lot of questions about flying because she hadn’t been on a plane in over a decade. She talked about the physical work she had been doing and her fear of not having a real plan for retirement. I say these things not to embarrass my mom or ground sweeping statements about those without post-secondary education but simply because I think they illustrate what sparked my reflection. Does pronunciation really define how I feel about my mom? Of course not. But here I’m reminded of one of Maria Accardi’s more recent insights on her Library Burnout blog:

I think that the impulse to compare yourself to others in order to improve your mindset or make you feel grateful is not always the most affirming mental move to make, but thinking about my life in terms of my mother-in-law’s life has certainly informed and enriched my perspective, because while I do feel marginalized in some areas of my life, I also exist on multiple axes of privilege.

I value every minute I get to spend with my mom. But every minute also reminds me that I’m often playing make-believe, trying to pretend that I fit into academia and the poverty that I come from or, worse, that I have finally found my true place in the academy and that I should be ashamed of where I started and who I “left behind”. These feelings often create a sense of guilt that can be unmanageable.

To top it all off, I have also been working on the first draft of my first peer-reviewed publication. Kelly describes publishing in a journal as “daunting and almost impossible,” which I agree with. As I read more and more articles for my literature review, I find so much of the LIS and education literature inaccessible. These are articles about development, international forms of open access, the digital divide, and critical and inclusive pedagogy and I have trouble understanding a lot of it. Why write an article if the people that you are writing it for/ about can’t read it?! Ellen MacInnis recently tweeted something I think everyone claiming to do “radical” research needs to read:

Remember: if it’s not accessible, it’s not radical. #critlib

So what’s my point? Why am I writing about this on ACRLog? I believe that we still have a lot of work to do in LIS, both in supporting and nurturing new LIS professionals that come from a first generation background and in creating academic library services that support first generation students broadly. In addition, I often see a lot of conversations focused on either the financial or academic hardships that first generation students face. These usually talk about retention in terms of scholarships, grants, or work study or the availability of academic support structures like remedial courses or tutoring. These conversations are vital to the success of first gen students. But I think that the social and emotional challenges that first generation students grapple with sometimes take a back seat to these more “tangible” problems, even though addressing them is just as important to actually retaining students. Further, if students are feeling guilty, angry, abandoned, and alone it is likely to affect their academic success.

For Ourselves

There are LIS professionals that identify as “first generation,” whether that means being the first person in their family to go to college or graduate school or the simply someone that is currently part of a different class than the one they were raised in. How can we, as first generation LIS practitioners, support each other? How can our colleagues learn more about the challenges we face?

This work has already been started! Cecily Walker (@skeskali) has started to collect feedback from self-identified first generation LIS folks about what support they need. As a result, she moderated a Twitter chat on June 1^st where first gen LIS professionals discussed the challenges they face, how their experiences with class have informed their work, and what “coming out” to colleagues looked like. Cecily explains why she finds this work important on her blog.

I’ve had two revelations recently that I’d love to see the LIS community discuss more.

Several years ago, Teresa Heinz Housel wrote an article for the Chronicle entitled “First-Generation Students Need Help in Straddling Their 2 Cultures.” In the article, she describes her experience realizing that a new status didn’t change the disconnect she felt while in the academy:

After I accepted a faculty position, I wrongfully assumed that the old cultural demons would be gone. If anything, cultural isolation can increase up the career trajectory. Dinner parties, intellectual competition, and expectation of education as a right rather than a privilege underscore academic values.

I continue to learn and re-learn this. Earlier I described this feeling of “making it,” of feeling secure in academia. I am constantly realizing that being a first generation student actually means realizing again and again that I am different. I have profoundly different experiences than many of my colleagues and that’s okay. It’s actually something to be proud of. But sometimes I will find myself in situations where it’s difficult to remember that. I feel ashamed that I don’t know something or I feel lost in certain conversations. I feel like I’m a helpless college freshman all over again. How do other LIS professionals deal with these feelings? How do we continue to show pride in being different and assert that our voices make academia a much more rich and fascinating place?

I have also been thinking a lot lately about how the media and the public has informed the way I think about my abilities and myself. Lynne Coy-Ogan wrote a dissertation in 2009 where she studied first-generation students in depth. One of her findings was that despite their resiliency and success in other aspects of their lives, first generation students were often reluctant to identify themselves possibly because of shame related to the criminalization of poverty. They believed that they were “subordinate to their peers” and they often underestimated their abilities (Coy-Ogan, 2009, p. 19). They are also more likely to accept degrading or demeaning labels or representations of themselves (Coy-Ogan, 2009).

I do this a lot. I beat myself up. I underestimate my ability in a variety of situations, from #critlib chats to faculty outreach. I have already doubted this blog post and the quality of my writing several times! Part of this is that I am a human being. We always have some level of self-doubt and fear when we’re putting ourselves out there. However, the older I get, the more I realize that my feelings fit into a greater narrative that the world has told me about myself. From Missouri’s food bans to Arizona’s drug tests, our nation has no problem dehumanizing its poorest citizens. Welfare recipients are depicted as lazy drug addicts whose only skill set is manipulating and cheating the system. This idea has been alive and well since Reagan depicted the “welfare queen” several decades ago.

When you spend all of your life hearing these things about yourself, about your caretaker, about your community, what does this do to your self-esteem? What do you internalize? More importantly, how do we take these stories back? How do we assert that they won’t have power over us any longer? How do we help students do the same?

For Our Students

We have to acknowledge that a) first generation students exist on our campuses and b) that they experience the same challenges I’ve discussed above (and many more). There is a ton of literature on how to serve and mentor first-generation students and taking advantage of it should be an active part of library service planning, not an afterthought.

Again, I think that there also needs to be a more extensive conversation about the emotional, affective challenges inherent in being the first person in your family to straddle class lines and bear the emotional weight of “making it” for everyone before you that couldn’t. I know that having mentors that were more familiar with higher education than my parents has been invaluable. Having a community of other first generation students, faculty, and staff to work through these issues with would have also been helpful. How can librarians take on these roles?

Librarians should also start to think about first generation students’ needs in the context of information literacy, scholarly communication, and technology. Brinkman et al. presented an ACRL conference paper entitled “When the Helicopters are Silent: The Information Seeking Strategies of First-Generation College Students” in 2013. They explore a thought-provoking idea: if first-generation students’ parents don’t have specific information-seeking experience (as most other college students’ parents do) how do their information-seeking habits differ from their peers, both academically and practically? How does this affect library anxiety?

Getting to Work

Housel ends her Chronicle article with the following sentence:

I have slowly found other first-generation colleagues at my institution and others. Our conversations helped me realize that the biggest lie we have faced is that we do not belong in academic culture.

Let’s make our profession one that intentionally challenges and disregards this lie instead of perpetuating it.

References

Brinkman, S., Gibson, K., & Presnell, J. (2013). When the helicopters are silent: The information seeking strategies of first-generation college students. In D.M. Mueller (Ed.), Imagine, innovate, inspire: The proceedings of the ACRL 2013 conference. (pp. 643-650). Chicago, IL: Association of College and Research Libraries.

Coy-Ogan, L. (2009). Percieved factors influencing the pursuit of higher education among first- generation college students (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertation and Theses database. (UMI Number 3389750).

First Day Reflections

Please welcome our new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger Kim Miller, Research and Instruction Librarian for Emerging Technologies at Towson University.

This fall, as new-student orientation and move-in wrapped up, the campus at my new institution was noticeably abuzz with the promise of a new start – a new semester, new students, and new faculty. As a life-long academic, there’s something about this time of year – those first few days of a new school year, as the weather turns and the leaves begin to change – that always makes me feel like anything is… possible.

Earlier this summer, I also started my first job as a newly minted, “real” academic librarian. That day, although I had just completed the rigorous academic interview and hiring process, not to mention moved myself and my family 600 miles to our new home, I felt more like “the new kid” in school than a recently hired professional.

The night before my first day, I tossed and turned, anxiously awaiting the moment my alarm would ring, telling me it was time to begin my day. As I showered, got dressed, and ate my breakfast, I worried about basic things the other kids librarians probably already knew – like where to park my bike car, which door to go in, where the “cool kids” other staff members eat lunch, and when the final bell rings everyone leaves for the day. As I drove my new 45 minute commute, carefully following the directions printed out the night before, I excitedly wondered if today, the pinnacle towards which I had been striving, would be all that I hoped it would be. And luckily, it was. That evening, about eight-and-a-half hours after I first walked over the library’s threshold, I drove home excited by all of the… possibilities.

As I now welcome new students to our campus, I find myself reflecting on my own first day. And just like being the “new kid” at school, I think there are a few basic tips for the new academic librarian:

Use the buddy system… and find a mentor. New places are instantly more welcoming if you explore them with someone else. Two extremely useful types of people are: other recent hires (if available), and more experienced librarian mentors. If librarians at your college or university are on the tenure or permanent status track, your “cohort” of newly hired librarians will become the people you “grow up” with throughout your career. They are likely as eager as you to begin researching, presenting, and publishing, probably with YOU. And some day, you’ll be each others support as you complete the dreaded promotion “dossier.” Equally important are the “lifer” librarians – not just the people who’ve worked at the institution for a long time, but those who are integrated into the “why” and “how” of the library. They know the history, they’ve experienced successes and failures, and since they probably had a hand in hiring you, they are invested in your success. Having a hard time identifying a mentor at your own institution? Look into the national organization’s mentorship programs to find one.

Raise your hand… and ask a lot of questions. Every library works differently – they have different policies, different philosophies, different users, and different cultures. No matter how long you’ve worked in libraries or how much research you do about your new library beforehand, there are some things you simply can’t learn until you experience and question them. Simple things like, “Where’s the printer paper?” to more complex, cultural questions like, “Am I allowed to post to my liaison department’s email list?” will require answers. You won’t know until you ask.

Join a club… or as academic librarians like to call them “professional organizations” and “committees.” Our profession is all about making connections. Professional organizations and committees are one of the best ways to connect with other librarians in your community. We are all too busy, too underfunded, and have too many interests to work solely by ourselves or even within our own institution. Finding like-minded professionals to learn from and collaborate with, forming our own “personal learning network,” helps us develop our professional identities while collaborating with other people who are interested in asking the same questions and solving the same problems we face daily. And if you’re not physically near a pocket of professionals, social media outlets are making it increasingly possible to develop and maintain your PLN from a distance.

Walk like a duck… so pretty soon, you’ll feel like a duck. It’s not uncommon for brand new professionals to feel something like an “imposter.” Although we have worked hard to finish our degrees, made it through (sometimes numerous) professional interviews, and celebrated our accomplishments with family and friends, we are also faced with severe self-doubt. Given a real position of authority, we’re afraid we’ll be exposed as a fraud – that somehow we’re clever magicians who’ve fooled the world into thinking we know anything about… well, anything. In these instances, the best thing for us to do is “fake it ’till you make it.” That is, after a while, that fear and self-doubt will be transformed into the confidence needed to accept success and bounce back from failures.

Enjoy “recess” and obey your bedtime… you’ll need the downtime. The excitement of starting a new career makes it easy to dive into your work so enthusiastically that you forget about everything else. But to be our best at work, we need to respect the work-life balance and make sure to take care of ourselves in the process. People sometimes scoff when I insist on enforcing my own bedtime, but getting rest is essential for top-quality everyday functioning. Lack of sleep makes it harder for us to focus, remember, and learn new skills, making us less effective workers. Sleep deprivation also makes us sick, increasing the likelihood we miss work, adding to our own stress. Respect your body and it will serve you well.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all formula to surviving your first few days as an academic librarian, I hope we are all filled with the sense of possibilities the new beginning brings.

Did you start a new job recently? What are your tips and tricks for thriving in the first few months as a new librarian?

Image by Vipal