Tag: role of librarian

Discussing the 4 Pillars of Immersion: The Educational Role of Librarians in Higher Education

Editor’s note: This guest post has been authored by Daisy Benson and Melissa Bowles-Terry. Daisy is the instruction coordinator at the David W. Howe Library at University of Vermont. Melissa is the sciences librarian at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This post is the second in a four-part series, “Discussing the 4 Pillars of Immersion.” Read the first post about Information Literacy.

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 future portfolio of Immersion programming. The first post in this series focused on information literacy. In this second post, Daisy Benson and Melissa Bowles-Terry reflect and share their perspectives on the changing roles of librarians in higher education. When asked about the educational role of librarians in higher education, our current cohort of Immersion facilitators identified some common themes among us, most notably that all of our potential roles are definitely contextual and sometimes contested. 

(Melissa) When we brainstormed this question as a group, there were many potential roles we could think of: educators, partners, researchers, stewards, interlocutors. I know that over the course of my career, I’ve definitely experienced changes in my educational role. Early in my career I was in a coordinator role for information literacy and instruction, and then a head with more authority for library instruction. After a decade as a librarian, I left libraries for a while and was director of faculty development at UNLV, in the provost’s office. Last year I returned to the library faculty as science liaison. This is a brand new role for me, and I feel like more than ever I’ve been leaning into my relationships with faculty and administrators in my liaison areas. It’s interesting to be in a partner role like this that I feel in some ways is even more about my relationships than about my expertise. How about you? How do you currently think of your educational role?

(Daisy) First off I’ll say that I see myself first and foremost as a teacher; although, I recognize that some librarians don’t see that word as applying to what they do. For me, the work I do with students, in a wide variety of contexts such as working with classes or meeting one-on-one is all part of my teaching portfolio, as is working with faculty to help them build their own capacity to address information literacy. All of this is where I find the most satisfaction and energy as a librarian. I think one thing librarians are really good at is pivoting as higher education changes. For example many libraries are developing new roles for librarians to support their educational missions. On my campus we recently created a new role for an outreach person to work with groups around the state who might not otherwise have access to our services – it ties in to our role as a traditional “land grant” institution. Are there new roles and ways of engaging on your campus?

(Melissa) Yes, we have a makerspace that is becoming a real hub for creativity and community. It’s a fun place to spend time and to see what students are coming up with, in terms of design projects for their classes as well as just-for-fun things like building games or accessories. 

(Daisy) Melissa, as we were prepping for this conversation one of the roles we identified was that of the “researcher-practitioner” or “practitioner scholar.” How do you define this role for yourself and how does it impact your work?

(Melissa) For me as a faculty member and a librarian, I have had opportunities to present at conferences and write about library programs and user behaviors. I’ve had an incentive to do it as well as support for that work. And clearly, institutional culture has a huge impact on the roles that librarians find themselves in. Over several years of facilitating Immersion programs, I remember hearing from many librarian participants about ways their information literacy goals were stymied by either academic departments, their own librarian colleagues, or other administrators. Some institutions see librarians as partners in education, and some have more of a service orientation. How do you think institutional culture impacts the educational role that librarians play? 

(Daisy) That’s a great question, I think there are so many factors but one that comes to mind especially is whether librarians have faculty status or not. At institutions where librarians have faculty status,and mine is among these, librarians have a direct and codified role in institutional governance. So, at my institution this means that we have librarians who sit on the university-wide Curricular Affairs committee. I currently serve on our General Education committee and am part of a team that reviews courses that are being considered for all of our general education requirements including those seeking designations for our two Writing and Information Literacy requirements, as well as requirements related to sustainability, the sciences, and more.This gives me a broad and detailed view of the curriculum across campus and gives me as a librarian a role in shaping the curriculum.

When we think about what our work looks like now and what it might look like in the future, it’s clear that we can’t always predict what comes next! I’m looking forward to considering how we might lead ourselves and our colleagues into new roles. Our next post in the Discussing the 4 Pillars of Immersion series will build on this conversation and focus on leadership. Join Veronica Arellano Douglas and Jessie Loyer as they reflect on some of the questions we posed here and ask new questions as well. Look for that post in the next few weeks!

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.