Tag: workshop

Making the space: Researching beyond IRDL

I’ve spent the last week at the Institute of Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL). Most of the workshop has happened in the beautiful William H. Hannon Library on Loyola Marymount’s campus. Last month on the blog I talked about my preparation for this week-long research workshop. The week has been a whirlwind and it’s hard to believe we’re finishing up today (Saturday). I have learned a lot — about the research process, the projects my cohort members are working on, and about librarianship at a variety of institutions. I feel energized and excited about conducting strong LIS research. My research project has changed and evolved and I’m headed back to Penn State with a stronger version of what I submitted back in January.

Throughout the week, I’ve been thinking about how I’ve been intentional about creating space for this learning and research. When I was preparing for IRDL, my research mentor mentioned in an email that I should set aside my work for the week in LA. I took their words to heart; I put on my out-of-office message, alerted my co-workers that I wouldn’t be responding, and haven’t replied to anything. I put my work in Pennsylvania on hold and that allowed me to concentrate on the material being covered. I had the chance to develop my project, connect with my peers, and apply what I was learning.

And everything was okay.

My colleagues respected my time to be away and I had the opportunity to immerse myself in this work. This time pushed me to spin my wheels, read more of the student engagement and involvement literature, and craft a journey map template for student engagement opportunities. During our workshop days, I got to spend time with my peers and work through the research process together. We spent an hour crafting 10 survey questions and an afternoon deciding on a set of questions for a focus group. What I learned was that in order to get the data you need, you have to be willing to devote uninterrupted time to finding ways to ask good questions. A good survey just doesn’t happen; it requires thoughtful decisions, defined variables, and a pilot test. This stuff cannot be rushed.  

So yes, it was great that I had this time to think, process, and experiment. This time was exactly what I needed. But I know that once I’m back in Pennsylvania, all those other priorities will return. IRDL has been good for lots of things, including forcing me to consider how I should spend my time when I come home.

The question I keep returning to is: how do you create this meaningful space for research work? How can I replicate the work environment of this week? Can I find ways to be just as intentional about setting aside work for this work when I’m back in Pennsylvania? I have never been good about blocking time and asking for that time to stay uninterrupted. In order for me to do this project, and to do it well, I’ll need to start defining those boundaries more clearly. It’s a habit to be developed.

But it’s not something that I have to do on my own. Community is always an important piece of my librarianship and with research, community support is important. We built LibParlor to create community and now, after a week in Los Angeles, I have a new community to lean on. We tell the students we teach that research isn’t a solo process and that’s a good reminder for us too. Throughout IRDL, I have seen the strength of collaborating with others for surveys, interview questions, and inferential statistics. It’s better to tackle that stuff with someone else and I’m thankful my research network community continues to grow. And I know they will help hold me accountable for the time I need for this project.

While I’m still figuring this out, I’m sure others have some ideas. So, how have you created this space? How have you found balance between the day-to-day of your job with the time to research? How do you depend on and support your research community?

Featured image of the William H. Hannon Library, taken by the author of this post.

Emerging as a Community-Engaged Librarian: Reflections on the Emerging Engagement Scholars Workshop

Context of the workshop

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to participate in the Emerging Engagement Scholars Workshop (EESW), sponsored by the Engagement Scholarship Consortium. This workshop is meant for PhD students and junior faculty who consider themselves engaged scholars or aspire to be engaged scholars. For those who don’t know about engaged scholarship, just look up Ernest Boyer, he’s the guy around this topic. At its core, engaged scholarship is about academia collaborating with the local community to share and leverage expertise and ultimately, make social change.

The workshop is meant to give participants an inside scoop on the history and current context of the field, connect them with their peers and mentors, and in general, get jazzed around doing community engaged scholarship. All workshop participants brought in a community project, and we had several hours of dedicated mentor time to talk through these projects and make some strides forward. I decided to explore building a community of practice for the undergraduate interns at our library (more on that later).

I have been wanting to participate in this workshop for a few years now, mainly based on a recommendation from my graduate school mentor, Martin Wolske.  I’d say Martin was the one who showed me what community engaged scholarship could like for librarians. He did that through his day-to-day work as a community member and librarian and by bringing me on as a Community Ambassador for the grant, Digital Literacy for ALL Learners, where community-engaged scholarship was the first outside the class thing I did in graduate school.

Overall, the workshop, and corresponding conference, was great. I did learn a lot, found some new language to talk about my job, and connected with new people. While I made an initial stab at my thoughts post workshop on Twitter, below is an expanded version of what I took away from participating in EESW.

Questions of identity

The workshop was billed as a space for PhD students and junior faculty (me). PhD students outnumbered junior faculty at least 2-1, which was not usually the case at previous iterations of this workshop. I was also the only librarian at the workshop, which meant I got to have a lot of conversations about what I do and why I was a participant with EESW.

At times I felt a little out of place. As with any space where you’re the sole librarian, there are questions about what we’re doing in that academic space. Do we actually do scholarship? What does an LIS research agenda look like? Can we really achieve tenure? As expected, talking about my faculty status, my ability to achieve tenure, and my research interests was the way in, and I definitely opened up some eyes. I will say that this space was incredibly welcoming; I had thoughtful peers who wanted to ask questions about my job and share experiences they have had with their subject librarians. My assigned mentor, Diane Doberneck, was also amazing. She’s doing great work at Michigan State and had such insightful feedback for my project around building a community of practice.

This workshop also reminded me that I do know a lot, more than I give myself credit. For example, we spent one section of the workshop talking about the tenure process and how to write about engaged scholarship in your dossier. While some PhD students had never discussed what tenure looks like, I felt prepared for the conversations and actually made good strides on my dossier (draft due soon!). Or, in one of our mentoring sessions, we talked about frameworks that supported our community projects and I was able to share reading suggestions (like Dorothea Kleine’s Choice Framework and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s many articles on intersectionality). In those moments, I felt like a librarian, passing along information, while also showcasing a bit of my expertise.   

Where do I want to go? And why am I doing this work?

As the workshop progressed, a few questions kept popping up for me. The first was, “Where do I want to go with this work?” And that question was quickly followed by “Why am I doing this work?”

Bottomline, I want to be a community-engaged librarian scholar. In learning about librarianship, it has always been in relation to communities – the community of Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, New York City, Urbana, IL, and now, Penn State. As a librarian, I do my job better when I listen, include, leverage, and support communities. Decisions about services, resources, and programs should be made with the community, not on behalf of the community. Communities can be vibrant, complex, come with a lot of baggage, embrace a rich history and traditions, or be ready for change. I love discovering all those threads as a librarian.

Furthermore, I see community engaged scholarship as a foundation of my research agenda. The work I’ve been doing as the Student Engagement Librarian has been building relationships, getting to know the various communities I engage with; these relationships will allow us to conduct meaningful research. To be a community-engaged librarian scholar means that understanding and working with communities not only drive forward my day-to-day, but influence and shape my research. Everything I do should be in service to or connected to the communities.

Finding the language and lingo

Recently, as my second-year tenure documentation due date looms, I’ve been low key freaking out. Some of the freak out was due to the me wanting to be intentional about how I build my dossier and the words I use to describe my work. I wanted to paint of picture that both my tenure colleagues AND my non-librarian colleagues can understand. This pressure, totally put on by myself, stopped me cold from getting some of that legwork for my dossier completed.

This workshop was exactly the push I needed to think about that language again. Our pre-readings and then workshop conversations highlighted how I could use community-engaged scholarship lingo to describe my work. I am grounded in community, and for me, I define and work mainly with communities connected to Penn State – undergraduate students, library student employees, undergraduate and student affairs professionals, and my Commonwealth library colleagues. I am hoping framing my work through a community engaged scholarship lens will resonate with others (we shall see!).  

What’s next?

Well, I have emerged as an engaged (librarian) scholar. I’m glad I had the opportunity to participate in the workshop and know those conversations will stick with me for the next few months. I would encourage others to consider applying and attending this workshop, especially for those who work closely with communities, in academia or with the local community. Does anyone else do engaged scholarship at your institution and if so, what does it look like? I’m always trying to find more community engaged librarians!  

Featured image by Park Troopers on Unsplash

Personal Development As Professional Development

Like many of us I was dismayed by the results of the last US presidential election, and at one year in I’m even more concerned for the nation and the people who live here. One of the things I resolved to do in the aftermath was to make the time for some training that I’d long been interested in but hadn’t prioritized. Over the course of this year I’ve taken a bystander intervention workshop as well as a 5-week self-defense course, both facilitated by a local organization that focuses on violence prevention programs for marginalized communities. I also attended a one-day medical first aid training session offered by my university, and a one-day mental health first aid training held at my local public library and provided by the NYC Department of Health.

I consider these workshops to be more for my own personal than professional development: they were programs I attended on my own time rather than work time, and I’ve felt generally safer and more aware since, which I appreciate. But I definitely think these experiences have been useful for my work in the library, too. As a workshop participant I’m focused on listening to and learning the content, but I also pay attention to how the facilitators run the program. Do they lecture, use slides or handouts, or show video clips? For longer trainings, how often do they intersperse opportunities to participate in an activity (and breaks) with sitting and listening? How do they handle groups with folks who are reluctant to answer questions, or folks who take up more than their share of conversational space? I’ve learned so much about strategies for effective workshops from watching successful (and less-successful) facilitators work, strategies that I can bring to my work when I teach, lead a meeting or workshop, or give a presentation.

Most valuable, I think, is the opportunity these programs have given me to think about my community, both narrowly — family, friends, colleagues — and broadly, in my neighborhood and city. I’m more introvert than not, and talking about or working through sometimes sensitive topics with a group of people I’ve never met before is somewhat daunting to me. But for all of my hesitation I’ve appreciated the opportunity to listen to and learn from my fellow participants, diverse in age, experience, and background.

I went to these trainings because I wanted to learn strategies to deal with multiple kinds of potentially scary situations, but I’m grateful that they also provided me the chance to build empathy. The end of the semester is approaching with speed, the political situation continues to be disturbing, and everyone is stressed. I was struck last week by a Twitter thread by a social worker that reminded me how important it is, especially right now, to start with empathy. Let’s commit to being gentle with ourselves, our colleagues, our students, and our communities in this busy time of year.

Wondering About Workshops

Like many academic librarians, my colleagues and I teach several drop-in workshops each semester for faculty and staff at the college on topics like citation managers, Google Scholar and other specialized research tools, and instructional web design, among others. I’ve written a couple of times here about these workshops: we consider them to be opportunities for outreach as much as for instruction, though our attendance levels have waxed and waned over the years, leading us to add a workshops by request option for departments or other groups of interested faculty and staff. The latter has been intermittently successful — some semesters we’ve gotten several requests for workshops while others have seen none — though since these workshops can typically be prepped fairly quickly we’ve decided to keep offering them for now.

The past year or so has brought a new twist to our faculty/staff workshops: students! For several of the workshops we’ve offered — most recently one focusing on using ILL and other libraries in New York City to make the most of research beyond our college library — we’ve had one or two students attending as well as faculty and staff. We advertise the workshops on a faculty and staff email list that doesn’t include students, but we also hang posters around campus, which is probably the way students have learned about the workshops (or via our blog or Twitter). We’ve always had plenty of room in the workshops for the students who’ve dropped in and, as far as I know, there haven’t been any problems with the occasional student sitting in on a workshop with faculty and staff.

If there aren’t any problems, what’s to say about it? I keep coming back to thinking about students in the faculty/staff workshops for a couple of reasons. We used to offer drop-in workshops for students, too, but stopped doing so a few years ago because we very rarely had anyone show up. Perhaps it’s time to bring drop-in student workshops (not course-related) back into our instructional mix? One thing to note is that in the past the drop-in student workshops typically covered one resource like Academic Search Complete or LexisNexis, or were much more general workshops on research strategies for students. Maybe the more specific and advanced topics covered in the faculty/staff workshops are more appealing to our students, especially those who’ve already taken English Comp I, which requires a library instruction session?

On the other hand, every workshop requires at least a little bit of prep time, not to mention the time to promote it via email, posters, blogging, and Twitter. Our workshop committee is fairly busy already, so to add workshops that may not be well-attended could be tough.

All of which makes me wonder: if our faculty/staff workshops are not currently overcrowded, and our student workshops were not historically overcrowded, might we consider offering workshops that are open to any member of the college community, faculty, staff, and students alike?

To my knowledge we’ve never done that before. What are the possible ramifications of workshops open to all? Research has shown that interaction between students and faculty outside of the classroom has a positive impact on student engagement (Kuh et al., 2007, Piecing Together the Student Success Puzzle). Could open workshops provide those opportunities? Would faculty be uncomfortable learning something new alongside students, or vice versa? We would probably want to avoid workshop topics focused on developing plagiarism-resistant research assignments or the like, right? Or would there be a benefit to opening up an information literacy workshop pitched at faculty to students, as well?

If you’re offering workshops or other instructional opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to attend together, I’d love to hear about it!

Participatory Learning, Active Application: Reflections on the ACRL Conference

With the month winding down folks are getting back into the swing of things following this year’s ACRL Conference in Indianapolis a couple of weeks ago. Several of us ACRLoggers were in attendance — we took the opportunity to meet face to face and chat, and in those conversations the idea of a collaborative post-conference blog post was born. Several of us focused on participatory learning at the conference, while some attended more traditional sessions and brought back ideas for active application in their libraries. All of us had a great time.

Kim Miller: Seeking Application

ACRL 2013 has been highlighted on my calendar since I missed my chance to attend in Philadelphia two years ago (the conference fell during the second-to-last week of graduate classes, not great timing). This year, I was determined to make it happen since my classmates who were crazy enough to go in 2011 had nothing but positive reports, and I heard from my current colleagues it was a conference where academic librarians can get a lot of bang for their buck. I was looking forward to visiting a new city, learning new things, meeting new people, catching up with old friends. The cherry on top turned out to be my opportunity to also lead a roundtable discussion about mobile games in libraries.

Throughout the conference, I found myself naturally drawn to talks which explore issues I’m currently facing at work. For instance, our library recently started planning to redesign one of our classroom spaces which will incorporate modular furniture, group workstations, and iPads to facilitate a more creative and active learning space. So I was interested to attend “The Flipped Classroom: Integrating Formal and Informal Learning Spaces” session in which I learned about the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College Library’s Wisconsin Collaboratory for Enhanced Learning (WisCEL) classroom. With collaborative computing areas, break out small group workspaces, and technology-enabled teaching stations, WisCEL seems like a marriage between a library learning commons and an active learning classroom; it’s definitely a space I would love to explore as an instructor (though it sounds like the UWM librarians do not currently teach library sessions in the space). They presented some interesting footage of professors explaining how they approach instruction in this space, as well how students have responded to the environment. I left the session inspired to start brainstorming ways our new space will used to promote more active library instruction sessions and how I might facilitate my colleagues’ experiences transitioning to the new space as well.

As a self-described “research nerd,” I usually love reading through stacks of literature from diverse areas of scholarship. However, at conferences I particularly look forward to poster sessions because, in addition to learning about a multitude of projects in a short amount of time, I have the opportunity to talk one-on-one with the people behind these projects. I appreciate the instant gratification of having my lingering questions or comments addressed first-hand by the librarian project experts. Again drawn to projects which speak to my daily work, a small sample of the areas I learned about over the 4 poster sessions include: re-thinking online subject guides with “Mapping Standards to Content: Creating Comprehensive Research Guides using ACRL’s Psychology information Literacy Standards”, connecting with first year students through workshops with “Making Connections, Providing Support”, iPads in instruction with “iPedagogy for Adults,” using concept maps in instruction with “Sketching Success”, and responsive web design with “Once is Enough.”

Ian McCullough: Mission to Learn

I may be the only blogger who didn’t have an official reason for going to ACRL 2013; I didn’t present, have a poster, or lead a roundtable. I was the only one with the time and interest to attend from Akron; so I balanced my schedule between personal interests and broadly applicable knowledge I could bring back. Two workshops, three sessions geared to science librarians, two poster sessions, and some library marketing.

The workshops are what really stuck with me. I attended “Flip It, … Flip It Good!: Adapting the Flipped Classroom Model to One-Shot Library Instruction Sessions with Understanding by Design” and “Higher Learning: Effective and Engaging Information Literacy Instruction for Upper-Level Students,” both were heavily pedagogical – and both were awesome. Steven Hoover taught the flipped classroom workshop and as noted in the title cribbed heavily from Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTighe. He presented the clarifying content priorities model as a way to decide what to present in person and what to flip in an IL one-shot. “Enduring understanding”? Try to present it in person with active learning. “Important to Know and Do” or “Worth Being Familiar With”? These are your candidates for external tutorials. Each table tried to work through a scenario and pare down our (hilariously long) list of learning outcomes, triage them, and come up with instruction strategies. We didn’t make it, but the strategy made sense and I’ll be trying this for a chemical engineering class in the Fall.

“Higher Learning” addressed the problem of upper division students stultified by repetitive IL sessions. Lynda Kellam and Jenny Dale used a variety of fun activities, which we could deploy back home, but also emphasized the connection of outreach to and collaboration with the faculty as critical to effectively reaching upper division students. If the communication isn’t there, the instructional design will suck and you’re likely to bore the students. Like my earlier workshop, we took a scenario (of our own devising this time), broke it down to learning outcomes, and reverse engineered a lesson, this time with using the ADDIE model. Once again, we didn’t finish; but the structure is there and my advanced chemistry lab students should benefit.

These workshops addressed a problem, mainly that my pedagogical background is weak – I can hold attention but am historically poor at using active learning techniques in class. But also Akron is modernizing our information literacy program, so I may have some colleagues who might benefit as well. The conference got me fired up about improving both my teaching and our IL program. I’m hosting a brown bag session for some of the other faculty to share what I’ve learned and I hope my enthusiasm rubs off.

I wanted to quickly praise two posters – “Mapping Standards to Content” which Kim has already noted and Can Bibliometric Indicators Predict Institutional Citation Patterns?” which was the closest thing I saw to my own research at ACRL, but way better.

Maura Smale: Thinking, Camping, and Sharing

I arrived in Indianapolis later than expected due to weather-related travel snafus; the conference was well underway by the time I set foot in the Convention Center, and I felt a bit like I’d fallen behind before even beginning. Perhaps that’s the reason that, once I finally got to Indy, I found myself preferentially seeking out the kinds of conference experiences that offered the opportunity for conversation and participation rather than the more traditional paper sessions. There were lots of papers and panels that looked interesting, as usual. Actually, that’s always my one complaint about ACRL: there’s just way too much to do. Instead, I decided that I’ll spend a day at some point over the summer going back to the conference website to take a look at the papers, presentations, handouts, posters, and video of the sessions I missed (a colleague suggested calling it #ACRLrewatch — who’s with me?).

On Friday morning I attended the first half of THATCamp. I’m a big fan of THATCamps and had a great time at the sessions I participated in: Diversify the Digital Humanities and Libraries and Publishing (links are to the public, collaborative notes in Google Docs). I think what I most appreciated at THATCamp was the chance to talk with librarians from all over the country and lots of different kinds of academic libraries: from research universities to community colleges, from rural to urban, from small to large. Not to devalue the interaction we all have online — of course the library community is very digitally connected — but I so rarely have the opportunity to have a face to face discussion with a variety of folks about big chewy topics like diversity and inclusion, community activism and engagement, and scholarly communications. It was delightful.

Another participatory highlight of the conference for me was the Saturday morning panel How Feminist Pedagogy Can Transform the Way You Teach and How Students Learn. One of the panelists started with a story, which is always a great way to begin a session, about her own experience with feminism. Then the panelists asked those of us in the audience to do some work, to turn to a fellow attendee and consider our own feminist perspectives and lessons we’ve learned. I’m sure I’m not the only one who initially blanched at the prospect of engaging in a think-pair-share activity at 8:30am on the final day of the conference, but it was easy to get into conversation with my partner and we found lots to discuss. The panel continued with definitions and themes of feminist pedagogy, and each of the panelists shared examples of the ways in which they’ve brought this perspective into their library classrooms. To round out the session we were asked to participate in a follow-up think-pair-share and consider the ways in which our responses and understanding of feminist pedagogy in library instruction had changed. It was reassuring to learn that feminist pedagogy incorporates active learning strategies that many of us already use in our instruction sessions: group work, asking for student input, and encouraging discussion, to name just a few. I left the session eager to bring new focus to feminist pedagogy in my own teaching, and luckily I still have a couple of classes remaining this semester to try it.

Marc Meola: Entering Conference Space

This was my 5th ACRL National Conference and each one always seems better than the last! Three sessions that stuck out for me were a writing workshop, a THATCamp, and a Roundtable discussion.

The workshop was called, “Get Writing! Overcome Procrastination, Remove Roadblocks and Create a Map for Success.” This was perfect timing for me since I am working on a paper right now and feel a little stuck. Unlike Contributed Papers or Panel Sessions where attendees can simply sit back and take in information, the Workshop format asks that participants actually do some work. Instead of just hearing someone talk about how to create a work plan for writing a journal article while saying to yourself, “hmm those are some mighty fine ideas and I sure am going to do that someday,” you actually have to sit down right there and go ahead and create a work plan for writing a journal article. Trained facilitators are on hand to whip you if you can’t hack the workload.

Creating a work plan for writing a journal article involved:

  • breaking the project down into steps
  • writing the steps on post-it notes (green or yellow)
  • identifying roadblocks (red)
  • creating milestones (blue)
  • organizing the post-its into a time line on a piece of 11 x 17 paper.

Simple enough, but very useful tools for anyone, novice or experienced, working on a journal article. Some ideas for getting over roadblocks included getting a mentor/coach and using an accountability buddy who checks in with you at milestones. (Don’t forget the ACRL Research Coach program!) I took my work plan home and taped it above my monitor, where it now mercilessly taunts me. Facilitators Jerilyn Veldof and Jon Jeffryes of University of Minnesota Libraries did a masterful job of organizing the content and managing participant interaction.

Handout: How to Get a Paper Written and Published: Designing a Work Plan to Avoid Procrastination

I arrived at THATCamp at 8:30am on Friday morning with a pounding headache thanks to a libation called “Remember the Maine,” which I and some librarian friends felt compelled to investigate fully (because of our pure love for American history) the night before. In the session I attended we created an e-book using a web bibliography, our laptops, and a tool called Calibre. The whole spirit of how we went about doing it was great fun: people were willing to admit when they had no idea what to do; those who knew taught; and those who just learned then taught someone else. It would be wonderful if we could duplicate aspects of this model in our workplaces. Although our finished product was not perfect, working through the complete process together was very valuable. Micah Vandegrift skillfully coordinated the whole thing.

One Hour: One Project – DH and Libraries Ebook

Finally, although I’m not quite there yet but like to look ahead, I attended a roundtable discussion called, “55 Years Old with a 33 Year Library Career: What Now?” The discussion was wide ranging but included important issues such as ageism in librarianship, career and retirement planning, and the need for intergenerational dialogue. These issues deserve more attention; look for a blog post that continues the discussion soon!

ACRL Conferences are perfect for getting yanked out of your day-to-day routine and entering Conference Space — that unique zone where you explore new ideas, meet new people, and return to work reinvigorated and re-energized. Thank you ACRL, see you in Portland!