CFP: Critical Pedagogy and Library Instruction: An Edited Collection

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Critical Pedagogy and Library Instruction: An Edited Collection

Maria Accardi, Coordinator of Instruction, Indiana University Southeast: maccardi@gmail.com

Emily Drabinski, Reference Librarian, Sarah Lawrence College: emily.drabinski@gmail.com

Alana Kumbier, Reference and Instruction Librarian, Wellesley College: alana.kumbier@gmail.com

Critical pedagogy seeks to identify, critique, and disrupt the inequalities of the dominant culture, thus equipping learners to transform oppressive social, cultural, and economic conditions.  While many theorists, critics, and practitioners have considered how critical pedagogical strategies and perspectives might be employed in higher education, the academic library remains mostly absent in these discussions.  There have been few interventions in the library literature with specific reference to critical pedagogy, but these perspectives mostly consider critical literacy applications.  Other forms of critical pedagogy, such as feminist, queer, and anti-racist, have yet to be fully explored in the context of the library instruction classroom.  We intend for this book to intervene in this gap in the literature.

 

What I learned from ALA Annual 2008

What I Learned, in a categorized list format:

 

Letting ourselves fail

If you know me at all, you know I’m suspicious about endings–finishing up, getting to the end of things, looking for finality, it all seems akin to the death drive. “Oh, let’s just get it all over with.” So it was refreshing and a good reminder yesterday to see Char Booth’s presentation on an experiment in video kiosk reference work at Ohio University.

 

ALA 2008, day three

I just walked out of a session, shaking with anger and righteous indignation.

I went to the LIRT session this morning about energizing library instruction. When I walked in and saw people blowing bubbles, that should have been the first sign that something was amiss. I sat down and paged through the sheaf of handouts and tried to not worry that there was some treacly poem in there about love. I tried not to worry about the powerpoint slides flashing on the screen before the session started. The slides were full of tidbits of non-interesting trivia–I seriously did NOT come to the session to learn that the number one product that Wal-Mart sells the most of is bananas–and there were also some embarrassing grammatical errors on the slides as well. There was one slide in the presentation that said something about losing weight or losing inches, but I assumed–or I hoped–that is was some sort of lame punny jokey gimmicky thing about instruction. I tried valiantly to counter the resistance I felt building steadily inside of me. C’mon, I told myself. Give it a chance! Try to have fun! Have a better attitude! There were so many red flags pointing to intellectual bankruptcy, but still I remained, forcing myself to give it a chance.

 

ALA 2008: day two

First, some complaints: I am not a fan of Anaheim as a conference location. I was at ALA last year in D.C., where there were lots of hotels in the vicinity of the convention center, and it was all fairly compactly organized, and it didn’t take much more than ten or fifteen minutes to get from place to place. But here in Anaheim? The hotels are too scattered and far away from the convention center. I am not opposed to walking from place to place, but I am opposed to walking a half an hour or more. The shuttles help, some, but not enough. Tomorrow I have a session I want to attend in the Hyatt. I can take a brisk hour-long walk from my hotel–which is one of the conference hotels, by the way–or I can take two shuttles to get there. It seems like it shouldn’t be this hard to get around! The distance and the difficulty of getting places means that I find myself choosing not to go to sessions once I realize where it is and what it will take for me to get there.

 

ALA 2008: day one

Emily and I are in Anaheim, refreshed and relaxed after a dip in the Holiday Inn jacuzzi. Our main conference activities of the day so far have been: 1) checking in at conference registration and getting our Big Orange Bag, and 2) attending the ACRL Instruction Section soirée. The soirée was a smidge overwhelming and the place was packed. I wouldn’t say that I really “networked,” but I did manage to talk to a few people.

My agenda for Saturday is pretty over-scheduled, and I’m not sure if I’ll end up going to everything I’ve put on my itinerary. The session I’m most looking forward to is REFORMA’s “Nine Digits Away from my Dream: The Plight of Undocumented Students Seeking Higher Education in the U.S. and the Hope of the Dream Act.” There has been an influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the Kentuckiana area over the past few years, and we are starting to see some of them enrolling at IUS. This is a very new and different demographic in our student population, and I want to learn more about how we can serve them better.

What have you done or seen so far, and what are you looking forward to?

 

getting ready for ALA annual

So, in a few days, I fly out to California for the ALA annual conference in Anaheim. This is my second annual conference experience. My most memorable experiences from the 2007 conference are related mainly to socializing and alcohol consumption and navigating the Metro.  I did manage to work in a session or two, of course, but to be honest, I left the conference wanting more. I’d say that about half the panels I attended were not that impressive. Some were downright disappointing and awful. Some panels I wanted to attend but didn’t, because I was at a session immediately before it, and it was a 10 minute walk to the other hotel location, and by the time I got there, the room was packed, people sitting and standing cheek-by-jowl. Some panels were actually really good and interesting, and those sessions were usually ones that had more to do with Big Thinking and Big Ideas and less to do with Hey, Let’s Play Video Games In The Library, or Hey, Let’s Attach Ourselves To The Latest Technological Trend Without Thinking About It Critically And Regardless Of Its Usefulness To The Actual Work Of Libraries.

I don’t have high hopes for this year’s annual conference. I have picked out a bunch of sessions I want to go to, and maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. And given the relative paucity of sessions related to things I’m interested in, both this year and last year, I’m not entirely certain that the ALA annual conference is the best conference for me and my professional needs and interests. Still, I’m going anyway, because I’m willing to give the conference another shot, and anyway, its geographic location is a good one for me.

My goal for this conference is to 1) go to sessions that I want to go to, not ones I think I should go to, 2) try to learn some new things, 3) meet other people who do what I do and who also approach their work with a similar critical perspective, and 4) have a swell time.

 

What the internet is doing to our brains

Nicholas Carr’s recent essay in Atlantic Monthly, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“, discusses the ways in which internet has changed the way we read and absorb information. He cites a study of online research habits, where researchers investigated the behavior of users online. Carr says:

They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.

It is clear that the internet is changing the way we think and read and process information. But is it making us “stupid,” as that title of Carr’s article provocatively asks? I don’t think so. It is making us different, for sure. What interests me about this phenomenon are the implications it has for the students we teach and engage with in the library.

 

Reading the library catalog like a text

I have finally gotten around to filling in the citations on this paper I read at the GLBT Archives, Libraries, and Special Collections conference at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies last month (GLBT ALMS 2008, for short), and am posting it here: Pedagogical Implications of GLBT Cataloging Practice. The quick and dirty summary: What if we thought about and taught our students to think about the library catalog as provisional and made real only in the act of the researcher’s “reading” of it? What do you think?

 

The peril of promoting private products

I just finished switching our library news blog from Blogger to WordPress. The switch is absolutely the right thing to do. WP offers better integration of widgets like a displaying links from our del.icio.us account and potential embedding of Meebo (if that’s what we end up using for chat reference) and much better statistics-keeping (due to problems involved in setting up our Google Analytics, we’ve got no numbers for the annual report this year). I also think WordPress templates are just prettier, and the back end functionality feels a lot smoother to me.

But should I be promoting WordPress, made by a for-profit company, in my non-profit environment? Part of the appeal of libraries to me is the way we can maintain for the users a kind of space outside of capitalism, an oasis of free stuff and sharing and collective ownership. I know, I know, this is a fantasy–space is seamless, right, and there’s certainly no escape from the crushing totality of the late version of our global economic system. Still, I do want to steer clear of promoting products–that’s a value for me. If that’s the case, should I look for an open-source blogging tool? Is this any different from promoting a particular database because it suits a particular need? When am I fulfilling my role as a librarian–connecting users to appropriate resources–and when am I reduced to a corporate shill? Can I say I love the new Ebsco interface in public, or does that reduce me to a commercial advertisement?