Library Instruction West 2018

Incorporating critical librarianship into daily practice may initially seem daunting due to varying demands and constraints. Given these challenges, how can we help first-year students develop more complex understandings of social issues that they may be researching and writing about in their composition courses? How do we reach first-year students who may have overlapping identities find resources and support during their time at the university? Join two academic librarians who will introduce the efforts they have made to incorporate intersectional themes into instruction and educational programming on their respective campuses. Librarians attending this roundtable discussion will brainstorm and share ideas for engaging in first-year instruction and outreach efforts that promote intersectionality.

Close your eyes and imagine this: You check your email and there’s a request for a library session - maybe it’s from a new faculty member you haven’t worked with before. In their request, they drop all the right words – “research”, “exploration” “critical thinking” – and they remembered to attach the assignment. You’re impressed and start to get excited about this collaboration. You begin to jot down some ideas, but then you remember that you need to at least look at the assignment first, and that’s when your excitement fizzles. The assignment is mediocre, and now you have to plan an engaging, informative, and useful workshop based on it. Sound familiar?

The presenter, an ESL teacher-turned-librarian with ten years of college-level instruction experience, will use her unique perspective to give targeted, actionable ideas for staying sane and maintaining enthusiasm when planning one-shot sessions based on unexceptional assignments. The examples used will focus on first-year writing assignments, but the ideas will be applicable to other disciplines and levels as well. Participants will leave with ideas for turning second-rate assignments into fantastic one-shots.

Drawing on Piaget’s developmental psychology (1970) and Vygotsky’s sociocultural learning theories (1978), peer teaching has been shown to be successful not only for the peer teacher, but for the peer student as well (Howard, 2001; Soven, 2001). Nevertheless, implementing peer-to-peer (P2P) strategies at many institutions presents challenges of time, resources, and institutional support. To illustrate a variety of options for fostering P2P learning, this panel will share a range of experiences from both LIS and Writing across the Curriculum pedagogy. We will talk about a ready-to-launch, for-credit course designed to train undergraduates to become peer teachers at IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis) as well as a Writing Fellows program involving students who assist with disciplinary courses at UCCS (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. In addition, we will share strategies that any librarian can bring into the classroom to harness the power and benefits of peer learning. We will discuss the challenges, constraints, and outcomes of P2P approaches across institutions and contexts.

"Bias" is often invoked in the context of information literacy, namely that something is or is not "biased". This approach does little to communicate to students that bias is a complicated concept and that the factors that determine bias are varied and contextual.

With reference to the ACRL frame "Authority is Constructed and Contextual" this presentation will describe ways in which the common understanding and use of the term bias is problematic and limiting for our students as they seek to navigate a complex information landscape. In particular it will highlight work related to the study of bias from fields beyond librarianship such as philosophy and psychology in order to provide attendees with insight into how other areas of academia have worked to expand our collective understanding of the different dimensions of this topic. In doing so, attendees will have the opportunity to think critically about the ways in which their conceptions of bias compare and contrast with common modes of understanding bias as articulated in other areas of academia.

In this session attendees will consider how a broader, more nuanced approach to teaching the concept of bias could be applied in their instruction sessions. The presentation will include specific strategies for advancing students understanding of various types of bias relevant to information literacy, which include anchoring bias and confirmation bias. This presentation will focus on bias as it applies not just to information sources but also as it relates to the disposition within the "Authority is Constructed and Contextual" frame that references the responsibility that librarians have to support students in gaining "a self-awareness of their own biases and worldview".