politics

Some Thoughts on Showing Up for Students and Overcoming Discouragement

I returned to library instruction this week bearing mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was excited to return to teaching after a pause between December and February that was replaced by other work priorities. I missed building connections in instruction sessions and individual consultations with first-year students and course instructors and navigating the library’s many materials and resources as a new employee. On the other hand, I returned with a great weight on my soul. The same December-February period has seen a series of assaults on information access that are too many to describe in just one post but include the scrubbing of data and resources from federal department and agency websites without notice and the downstream effect that government funding cuts will have on potentially impactful research. I mention this example not to revisit everything that has happened in Washington over the past several weeks but to say that I carried what was happening nationally in my mind and body.

The conflicted state I felt is one that many academic librarians across the country are very likely feeling. In these uncertain times, how we can best show up for our students and guide them toward becoming critical and responsible information users is a question that is more important and complex than ever. As a Black librarian, these questions are amplified by my concern for other students of color at my institution and my professional aim of creating a library space that is safe and inclusive—both now threatened by the undermining of DEI efforts on the federal level and increasingly in higher education nationwide.

As challenging as it will be with the brevity of one-shot instruction, consultations, and reference interactions, here are some ways I want to show up for my students this year:

Listen with intention and empathy: Having the patience to pay attention to what students are saying and the struggles they might face that are difficult to communicate.
Reinforce that I am a resource for different kinds of information: Remind students during classes, consultations, and more extended reference interactions that I can help them find things they need that are not just research-related.
Employ principles of trauma-informed teaching: Constantly be aware of stressful events and issues on campus and beyond that are potentially impacting my students and create a learning environment of safety, trust, autonomy, and support where appropriate and possible.
Model vulnerability and authenticity: Be honest with students about my struggles with research and library use and emphasize that I am growing like them.
Meet students where they are: Remember that, to borrow the focus of Dr. Carol Kuhlthau’s seminal research, the information search process will be different for each student and necessitates me working with them at the place they are at rather than pushing them to the “right” way of finding information first.

Whether I can meet even one of these goals remains as unclear as the direction of this administration. But even beyond the stress and nerves of teaching, two feelings I will likely struggle with this year are discouragement and disillusionment triggered by the state of the country and the fracturing of truth and fact due to mis and disinformation primarily online but also increasingly from unregulated artificial intelligence. In moments like these, it is vital to remind myself of the purpose of my role as a librarian–to support students in finding the information they need and equipping them with research skills they can use in college and life.

A few years ago, amid a challenging season of loss, a close artist friend of my partner and I named Soyoung Kim gifted us a watercolor sketch that we keep in our office. The sketch depicts a sailboat bobbing over blue waves with the following words on the bottom center: Advice for Discouraged Sailors 1. Stop 2. Steady Your Boat 3. Study Your Compass 4. Seek The Wind.

Image Credit: Soyoung Kim, 2023. See more of Soyoung’s work here!

As we journey into the deeper, busier waters of this semester and the uncertainty of this year, as we meet discouragements, disappointments, and failures, may we remember to pause, refocus, return to what inspired us to work in academic libraries, and pay attention what this work is calling us to do in these times.

Tired

I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two—
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
Langston Hughes, “Tired”

To my American colleagues, I am anxious for your future. Who knows what will happen to post-secondary education under the new presidential administration? As a Canadian, I can only hope that new policies and orders do not migrate to the Great White North, who’s own education system is under threat by another populist leader.

Looking to Langston Hughes’ prescient words, for his time and ours, gives us hope for calls to action. I envision this throughout post-secondary institutions, including academic libraries. I saw Hughes’ poem on social media Tuesday evening, but could not determine which of his books of poetry “Tired” came from. After some searching in our library catalogue and finding several anthologies of Hughes’ work, I found “Tired” was not in any of his poetry collections, but thankfully, our library has plenty of Hughes’ anthologies, including The Collected Works of Langston Hughes and The Langston Hughes Reader. I–of course–had to go to our library’s second floor to read a physical copy of the poem, which I found in several volumes of Hughes poems that our humanities collection has (pictured above).

It’s worth taking the time to process, but also to consider what happens next, and how we, as academic librarians, take action.

Information in the Indignation Age

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Mark Lenker, Teaching & Learning Librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

As a librarian, I worry about the ways that emotion, especially anger, influences our interactions with information. So much of our political discourse is intended to arouse indignation, and I’m concerned about indignation’s impact on one’s ability to learn. Higher education needs to become more intentional about preparing students for inflammatory discourse as a potential hazard in the information landscape.

An important Pew study offers a lens for understanding the cyclical relationship between our media habits and the increasing political polarization of the United States. The short version is that media consumers spend more time with media that confirms their political outlook, and that ideological reinforcement makes one less receptive to dissenting views. The degree of outrage and distrust in our political discourse makes this dynamic quite unsettling. A quick perusal of the online comments following any major news story shows that media-driven ideological reinforcement is not leading to higher rates of polite disagreement – AkronKittyLuvver is out for blood.

A subsequent Pew study confirms the tension. Researchers found that Democrats and Republicans tend to associate negative character traits with members of the opposing party. A strong contingent of Democrats say that Republicans are more dishonest compared to other Americans. An even larger percentage of Republicans say that Democrats are more immoral than other Americans. Majorities of both Democrats and Republicans say that the other side is more closed-minded compared to other Americans. We are all-too-ready to make hostile judgments about those whose perspectives differ from our own. What does this self-righteous antagonism mean for our capacity to learn about complex and evolving issues?

Indignation in both the media and in personal communications is particularly worrisome because it signals to one’s audience that the matter at hand is so grave and so morally charged that there is no room for alternative perspectives. Attempts to present other points of view will be met with resistance or even hostility, so there is little point in sharing a different opinion (unless you take moral offense at the indignant person’s thinking, in which case you can vent your own sense of outrage).

But is indignation necessarily the enemy of open-mindedness and open discussion? In True to Our Feelings, philosopher Robert Solomon presents a more nuanced view of anger and indignation. According to Solomon, anger arises when we have been hurt or offended in some way, and it manifests itself as an impulse to level blame against the offender. While anger can operate on a strictly personal level (“his loud talking is distracting me and it’s making me mad”), indignation implies that the offense oversteps important considerations of justice and morality (“his loud talking in the quiet area of the library is rude and unfair”). The sense of transgression involved with indignation can make a difference in the level of vehemence with which indignation is felt or expressed. Indignation involves more than simply being offended – it is being offended and having justice on your side (or at least feeling that way).

Because indignation is wrapped up with one’s understanding of justice and morality, it is not the sort of emotion that one can get over easily. Moving past indignation may require a revised estimation of the line between justice and injustice, and that sort of reexamination is hard to undertake in today’s polarized environment. The indignant mind presents fertile ground for confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and other obstacles to learning.

But Solomon also points out that anger and indignation have their value. For one thing, the ability to experience and express these emotions is essential to maintaining our personal dignity, to stand up for ourselves or to stand against unfairness. As Solomon puts it, “[T]here are times when one is a fool not to get angry, not only because the situation calls for it but because otherwise one degrades oneself as less than a fully functioning human being.” Indignation puts energy and backbone behind our convictions.

Furthermore, for Solomon (and for Aristotle), anger is not inherently irrational. Instead, anger is rational when it fits the occasion, when it is directed at the right parties, and when it is proportional to the offense (neither an overreaction nor an underreaction). Forward-looking considerations are also crucial for assessing anger’s reasonableness. Solomon emphasizes the strategic qualities of emotions, especially their impact on how we relate with others. Does one’s style of anger fit with one’s long-term interests, or is it better to revise (or even abandon) one’s current strategy?

Considering indignation in this strategic light, I find a theoretical home for my worries. For example, indignation is irrational if its heat and hostility get in the way of negotiating to address the conditions that inspired indignation in the first place. Indignation is also irrational if it entrenches the indignant person in righteousness to such a degree that they cannot consider other points of view or continue to learn about the circumstances of the offending injustice (which, in the case of political disputes, are probably quite complicated).

Can indignation foster learning? A sense of outrage might lend urgency to one’s investigation of an injustice, driving one to learn more quickly or more deeply than an investigator without the same sense of passion. Amia Srinivasan points out that anger is part of really understanding oppression, a matter of viscerally apprehending the gulf between the way things are and the way they should be. A vital educational message for these polarized times is that learning is a crucial lens for reflecting on the reasonableness of one’s indignation.

Rational indignation cannot become so all-encompassing that it crowds out dispositions to learn. Indignation motivates learning when it is combined with intellectual courage (a willingness to face ugly situations squarely, without rationalizing them away or exaggerating their severity) and with epistemic humility (a clarity about the limits of one’s perspective and a consistent recognition that one can always learn more).

Media-inspired indignation is an information problem, a potential pitfall that higher education should help students prepare for by exploring a range of important questions:

How do partisan media, indignation, and intellectual autonomy relate to one another? Does media-inspired indignation stimulate or stifle curiosity about politics?
How does indignation over political matters define one’s relationships with one’s peers? With other groups?
When political leaders and campaigns use rhetoric to inspire indignation, how does that work to their advantage?
Is indignation worth the costs? Political discussions in the media typically address exceedingly complex conditions that impact vast, diverse groups of people. Given the uncertainty involved in policy making, when we weigh the likelihood of achieving a satisfying political resolution against the consequences of being angry at our neighbors, is the antagonism associated with indignation justifiable? If not, what attitudes are more appropriate?

To be clear, my concern is not ideological. If one’s beliefs place them in the far reaches of the ideological spectrum, that may be perfectly legitimate, as long as those beliefs stem from the careful, iterative consideration of the best evidence available. But when I look at the polarization data from Pew, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I worry that indignation contributes to a cycle that drives us ever further from the ideal of informed political participation. Our students need to reflect on this dynamic – they need to demand better of their politicians, their news sources, and themselves.

(Though perhaps, not too indignantly.)