You can see, or at least I can see, that I’ve been spending a lot of time lately reading Plato. I’m newly-enamored with the pedagogical potential of analogies. Plato uses them a lot, taking something concrete like medicine or cooking to explain something more abstract, like philosophy or rhetoric. A couple thousand years out, and I think he might be onto something. Library classification structures have the virtue of being material; how might we use them to help students see and articulate structures of economic class, often much harder to see?

So that’s the general gist of the presentation, which I’ll link to here if you’re interested in having a look.

Julia’s work involved travelling all over the country exploring discards and booksales, repurposing them into a few different installation works. Andrew’s Reanimation Library collects discards with compelling images, making them available to artists and deploying the collection for site specific shows. I was struck by how much contexts matter. One of the things working in libraries has done for me is turn me into a staunch materialist when it comes to books. They’re no longer fetish objects or ideal forms to me. They matter only to the extent that some reader can engage with them, and the moment that becomes unimaginable with a text, I cease to care about it. Andrew’s work in particular inaugurates new engagements, making work possible that would not happen if those books were left in a general collection. Not much use for a 1989 psych textbook, unless you’re an artist, in which case the book is a revelation.

So we weed, and those weeded materials can take on new creative life. Any art in these dire times seems like a triumph, so that was politics enough out of the conversation for me.

*I didn’t come up with the title of this event, but I want to kiss whoever did. Shelf Life. Ha!

Alycia Sellie gives a great run down of Shor’s talk on her blog, so I’ll just pull out a few things that interested me from the day.

I was glad to hear Shor talk about discourse as a material force–what and how we talk about things in the classroom makes us subjects, and altering that discourse can significantly change the subjects that are produced. In other words, I might be vested in making myself a high-status professional academic, which requires me to talk a lot and use heavy words like discourse. Or I can be vested in making myself some other kind of subject, one who enables more, talks less, and listens a lot. I think there’s a cost in critical teaching that this helpfully points out–if we’re marginal in the academy as librarians (and I feel like I am, for sure), we risk making this more true by backing away from the production of truth statements in the classroom. Maybe. Or maybe we can do that discursive work in our publications and leave it at the lab door when we go to teach. There’s a tension here that I’d like to tease out a bit, especially as someone who falls in love with high-status discourse, and believes in the necessity of complex languages to explain complex ideas.

Shor’s a composition teacher, and much of what he had to say related directly to what we do as library instructors, reaffirming for me that the strongest connection between our practice and our pedagogy might be mined from the literature of composition studies. The difference being that the composition teacher gets a class for an entire semester, has a chance to cultivate power-sharing and multivocal learning groups. We get students for a session, maybe two. So I continue to struggle with how or even whether the insights of critical pedagogy/teaching apply in that fifty minute block. Robert Farrell, coordinator of instruction at Lehman College, offered up the argument that we absolutely can have the kind of dialogic engagement Shor talked about if we let go of the demand to teach every last technical skill and embrace the conversation. He said he starts classes by asking “Why are you doing a research paper?” and lets the answers to that guide up to half the session, an approach that sounded very interesting to me. (I often begin with a question like that, but give it two or three minutes before diving in to database particulars.) Is that something you could do in your sessions, or would you risk the wrath of the classroom faculty, or would you fear, as I might, that students would not learn the necessary skills to complete their assignments?

Though the crowd was smaller than I expected, the level of interest and engagement with these ideas was incredible. I had so many interesting conversations, about apprenticeship models in higher ed, database searching as demystification, about dialogism and faculty collaboration and mash-ups and agenda-setting, about how reinvigorating it is to take critical ideas and think them through our library instruction practice. Super-thanks to the folks at LACUNY for pulling this together, and I’m excited to keep the conversations going.

Maria will be sorely missed–when will tech enable us to just wish folks places?–but we’re very much looking forward to meeting and talking with like-minded librarians in the area. I’ll be spending lots of time at the pitch table. Come say hi!

I’m curious, are any of you using presentation tools in ways that extend beyond the basic  — the projection of what’s going on on your computer screen during a library instruction session? Can we imagine ways we might work with some of the ideas Poole presents?

And…here is where I panic.

I tell him, “I’m sorry, could you hold on for just one second please?”  And I dash to two different librarians’ offices, hoping to pawn this kid off on someone else.  But alas!  I couldn’t find anyone!  And I couldn’t keep this student waiting forever!  I took a deep breath, resumed my position at the desk, and began to help him.

I asked him what kind of searching he’s done so far.  I asked him where he had looked, and what keywords he used.  He told me that he had found some articles online but his teacher wanted him to find peer-reviewed material.  I directed him to Gender Watch.  I instructed him on keyword selection and search query construction.  I showed him how to find the full text of an article and how to check the “scholarly” box to make sure he’s getting peer-reviewed sources.  I did all of the correct librarianly things.

But I couldn’t help but question him a bit further about his point of view.  Here is where it devolved from neutral reference interview to the personal.  I asked him in my politest, most I’m just curious voice:  “Do you really think gay people shouldn’t be on television?”

“No,” he said, “I just don’t think homosexuals should be portrayed in such a positive light, like there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“So you think it’s a bad thing for gay people to be portrayed positively?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.  “It’s treated like it’s not even an issue.  I just think it’s wrong to be a homosexual.”

Dear reader, I couldn’t help myself.  I said, “Well, you’re talking to a gay librarian.”

He looked momentarily stunned, but quickly regained his footing.  “I’m not trying to be rude or anything,” he said.

“And neither am I,” I said.

“I mean, I’m a Christian,” he said.

“You know what?  So am I.” I told him.

He looked at me.  “Really?” he asked incredulously.

“Yes, really,” I said.  A few seconds pass.

“Anyway,” I said, redirecting our attention to my computer screen.  “Do you think that this database will help you?”

The reference exchange continued and concluded without further incident.  I showed him once again how to access the database, and he took notes.  I reminded him what I told him about keywords, and he took some more notes.  And then he walked away.

It took me awhile to stop trembling.   I chatted at Emily, telling her what happened.  My library director walked by and I told him.  And I might have cried a little bit.

Did I do the right thing?  Professionally, I think I did.  I showed him how to find information on his topic.  But beyond that, beyond the most basic reference transaction level, I think I did the right thing in a critical, moral sense.  Coming out is one of the best tools to combat homophobia and bigotry.  By telling this kid that he was talking to an actual gay person, I think I pretty much blew his mind.  Maybe he’ll rethink his position on gays.  Maybe he won’t.  Maybe he’ll rethink his position when he is totally unable to find reputable scholarly research that supports his point of view.  Or maybe not.

What would you do?

We do hope you’ll all join us in critical conversation. One of the issues we talk about in that conversation and in the book is exactly what we mean when we say critical library instruction. What does that phrase mean to you? Is it a method, a theoretical approach, a political position? Please share with us in the comments section–we’d love to hear your thoughts.

And I don’t wanna. I can’t wait for it to be over, can’t wait for the semester and the year to be over, if I never see another smartboard or malformed database query again in my life it will be too soon.

Slight exaggeration, but also kind of true. I want to be a good, critical, reflective instructor. But I really struggle with burnout, too. There’s a great chapter in Critical Library Instruction by Troy Swanson that tackles the question How do we employ critical teaching methods when students would rather be banking? Banking education can be easy for students and teachers, especially for those of us who know how to do it and do it well. Reflective engagement, willingness to fail and learn from failure, critical attention to the praxis moment in the classroom, all these things sometimes feel pleasurable, but also feel exhausting, particularly at this point in the semester.

So, how do y’all stay inspired and engaged? How do we recharge and refresh? How do we keep instruction, especially in courses that we’ve taught again and again, from getting old and stale? Who has tricks?

(I teach in three hours, so anything you can suggest between now and then would be helpful!)