space

Holding Space for Students

Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Stephanie Sendaula to the ACRLog team. Stephanie is an On-Call Reference Librarian at Mercer County Community College, West Windsor campus. Her professional background includes a transition from librarianship to publishing and back again, with a sideline in freelance writing. Her research interests include outreach, instruction, and information literacy.

We’re in the midst of summer and in anticipation of the beginning of the next academic year, I’ve been reconsidering the concept of space. This is a subject that has been covered on the ACRLog earlier this year, when Maura Smale asked how we can better shift services and spaces to meet students’ needs.

I have been thinking along the same lines, with a specific focus on how the library can meet the needs of community college students who are in a transitional stage in their lives. In my case, I’ve been seriously considering the needs of community college students who may be the first in their family to attend college, who are often living at home while working part-time and attending school part-time, who are often responsible for caregiving for older relatives and younger siblings in addition to managing their coursework, and who often speak English as a second or sometimes third language.

I keep these nuances in mind since I remember how I felt as an undergraduate student, intimidated by the imposing rows upon rows of stacks. I think about how overwhelming it can be to walk into a library and immediately see imposing desks for reference and circulation, and not know where to turn because you can’t differentiate one from the other. I consider how intimidating it might be to approach a desk and ask a question, even if library staff happen to look like you.

I also consider the recent update from the ACRL Academic Library Trends and Statistics Survey, which was discussed at a session at ALA Annual in Washington, DC in June 2022. Among other figures, the survey cited the decline in reference desk visits while circulation checkouts remained stable, as well as a decline in the circulation of print materials while the circulation of digital materials increased. That also rings true for my experience as a reference librarian at a community college.

How does this tie into space? Reflecting on the needs of the community I serve, I am often wondering how the library can better utilize space to serve students’ needs, both physical and virtual. For students who might be apprehensive to visit the library, how can we meet them where they are? In terms of physical space, are we taking advantage of our limited physical space in order to house collections that are relevant and up-to-date?

Thinking of virtual space, do we have enough technological resources in order to accommodate the number of students who lack a private computer at home and rely on library computers or cellphones in order to complete their assignments? When thinking about space, I’m also considering the needs of students who physically visit the library, but frequently utilize options such as chat reference and libguides.

These questions are often rhetorical since, similar to other libraries, there is always something that we could be doing more of, or something that we could be doing better. The challenge is often: Where do we start? What small steps can we take in order to ensure that students feel the library is an approachable space, both in terms of physical appearance and online resources? What can I, as a reference librarian, do in order to ensure students that library staff are there to assist them when they don’t know where to turn?

My answer to this question is to develop radical empathy–a social justice concept of actively striving to better understand and share the feelings of others–and to consider how I would approach the library if I were a student (and how I approached the library when I was an undergraduate student). To be honest, I often avoided the library since I was often scared to approach, and I was overwhelmed by the numerous virtual options to connect with library staff. It was often easier to ask a friend for help, and have them guide me to wherever it was that I needed to go, whether that was finding a specific course reserve or navigating a public computer.

Thinking back to the ACRL survey, I’m also keeping this in mind as more students check out items digitally instead of walking across campus, depending on where they’re coming from, in order to find course materials. It’s not just space, it’s also time and convenience. We’re all stretched thin, and that includes students, who are juggling multiple responsibilities at once during a difficult time in their lives–an ongoing pandemic and, for many students I serve, a move toward four-year institutions or an entry into the workforce. Space can mean a lot of things, but it often comes back to, How does the library hold space for the students it serves?

A hook to grab onto: Creating context cues in online instruction

In a recent meeting, I found myself yet again wondering if I had already shared a particular bit of news with my colleagues or was I thinking of the previous meeting? My schedule, probably much like yours, is usually full of meetings. In the pre-pandemic world, my schedule reflected a mix of online and in-person meetings that were peppered in among the classes I taught (almost exclusively in person), hallway chats, and so on. A meeting frequently also meant a change of scenery, whether just down the hall or across town. These days, my physical surroundings from meeting to meeting are largely unchanged: I’m typically at the makeshift desk in my makeshift home office. Just the link that I click on changes. Even on the days when I’m physically on campus per our rotating schedule, meetings still happen online from my office.

It’s no great surprise that the sameness of my physical environment contributes to my sense that time is simultaneously sticky and slippery. Yet it felt like a moment of realization to first recognize its impact on my ability to recall–or perhaps situate is the better word–details. In such moments of memory lapse, I’m struck by how much I have typically relied on context cues from my physical space to trigger my memory. I might think back to how a room was configured, where I was sitting, where my colleagues were sitting, and so on in order to make a connection or dig up a detail. As I frequently find myself in the same chair at the same desk overlooking the same window, I no longer have such easy triggers to help me differentiate.

As my information literacy instruction schedule kicks into high gear for the semester, I now find myself wondering how the sameness of physical space is impacting students. My institution is currently offering in-person and online classes. We’re doing all of our information literacy instruction online. Of course, the impacts of the pandemic on student learning are broad and deep. Here I’m thinking, though, specifically about the physical space from which students are engaging in their online classes and its impact on their experience, as well as their perception of their experience.

This all makes me think back to an interaction I had with a student at my former institution a number of years ago. In that library, we frequently scheduled information literacy instruction in the library’s main computer lab. Often, then, students would visit the same space for any research instruction. On one occasion while chatting with a student before class began, he said to me that he already knew what we were going to do that day because he had been in this lab before. When I probed further, I learned that the student had attended sessions led by different librarians for courses in other disciplines. Yet the student assumed that he already knew what our class would entail. This student’s comment could mean many things, of course. Perhaps the comment suggests that the student was already able to transfer important takeaways about the research process from those sessions to the project at hand. Or perhaps the comment suggests that the student perceived all library research tools and strategies as the same and wasn’t able to distinguish between them in the nuanced way that librarians perceive them. But the student’s comment specifically referred to the association he was making between the content/learning goals and the physical space leading me to infer that the sameness of the space primed the student to think that he was about to learn the same material or participate in the same activities.

With this new lens on my own online experience, I’m thinking anew about this student’s comment. I’ve often reflected on how a physical classroom, meeting room, or library area is arranged to promote (or inhibit) engagement and communication or guide behavior, but I haven’t before given much thought to how our spaces (whether physical or online) perpetuate a feeling of sameness or carve out a feeling of uniqueness. As our students connect to what may feel like an endless string of Zoom rooms and with no ability to influence the physical spaces from which our students are connecting, I’m now thinking about the small moves I can make to help create a hook for students to grab onto–the little things I can do to help situate a memory, trigger recall, and facilitate connections. In addition to thinking about the learning goals to guide our session and the active learning experiences to achieve them, then, I’m also thinking more about how I pose questions, design slides, format handouts, even modulate my voice to help facilitate context cues and triggers for students. How do you create hooks for students? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

If our spaces could speak, what would they say?

Over the summer, we updated a small lounge area in my library. We had multiple goals for this project; chief among them was to add seats in our often packed-to-the-gills library and also reduce noise problems that the area seemed to foster. Previously, this area was home to two clusters of chairs separated by a tall double-sided bookcase. Each cluster included four lounge chairs and a coffee table. The updated area now seats twelve rather than eight (not a huge difference, but meaningful for our small library) with four work tables and eight chairs overlooking a courtyard plus four lounge chairs. We removed the bookcase that bisected the area and also repurposed the shelves lining the walls to now feature a browsing area of periodicals and displays, rather than the general collection, and an assortment of succulents. The new space is more open and brighter with a more modern sensibility.

Now that we’re a few months into the semester, it’s gratifying to see how consistently and heavily students are using the space and to observe significant changes in how they’re using the area. In the previous configuration, students who didn’t know each other would be reluctant to sit together in the clustered chairs so just one or two filled seats would deter students from using the other open seats. At other times, large groups of students would gather on and around the clustered chairs to loudly socialize, disrupting students working in nearby spaces. Now, it’s not unusual to find every seat in the area filled. Students appear to be using the space for various purposes in very close proximity: working individually or with a friend, tutoring each other, meeting with group project collaborators, and relaxing. When working or chatting with friends and collaborators, they generally speak in lower voices. While I expected the new furniture would have some impact, it’s been surprising to see the degree of impact. With just a few changes, the space has been transformed.

Meanwhile, other areas in our library continue to be beset by noise conflicts (which I’ve reflected on before). We are brainstorming other ways to improve our current space while also advocating to expand our library with a Learning Commons model in collaboration with our learning center and other departments. Reflecting on the aesthetic and configurations of our current and (hopefully) future spaces is making me think more and more about how space design influences users’ attitudes and guides their behavior.

I was chatting with a colleague in the English department recently about this and she offered this term: rhetoric of space. I find the phrase–new to me in this context–a meaningful lens because it helps me focus on the explicit and implicit messages embedded in our spaces. It helps me consider the values our spaces communicate, the behaviors and attitudes our spaces foster and impede, and the interactions our spaces support and hinder. I think frequently about how the configuration of a classroom impacts students’ participation or a meeting room impacts engagement between colleagues. But how do our other spaces also condition us? This means not only asking how our students want to use a space, but also how does the space shape their expectations and use?

What is the rhetoric of your spaces? What is the rhetoric of the spaces you want to create? If these spaces could speak, what would they say? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.