#acrl2015 reflection: experiences of academic librarians of color

Before #acrl2015 might become a blur, I wanted to reflect on the conference, and one session in particular, From the Individual to the Institution: Exploring the Experiences of Academic Librarians of Color with panelists Juleah Swanson, Isabel Gonzalez-Smith, Azusa Tanaka, Ione Damasco, Dracine Hodges, Todd Honma, and Isabel Espinal. You can find the Storify from the session here. I'm parsing my ideas together still, so apologies if this is a little messy...

One of the main takeaways from this session for me was that we need to stop framing diversity as a problem that needs to be solved, and that diversity is everyone's responsibility. This drives home the point for me even further that diversity and inclusivity research and other work should be woven into, and encouraged in, day-to-day work as well as in the tenure and promotion process. Something I wrote about over the summer was related to hiring for diversity and this panel made me think even more about the burden of responsibility we put on those who are diverse to do this work. We should all be doing this work, we should be doing this research as tied to our "regular" work. As Isabel Gonzalez-Smith noted during the panel, our students' diversity is skyrocketing, but diversity of librarians is crawling along at 0.5%. Why is that? If we're concerned with how people use our resources, how we do instruction, and the value of the library, shouldn't we be spending as much time on figuring out why we haven't been able to improve our diversity and how that affects our field and our constituents? I feel like I might still be framing it as a problem here, and it's a hard rhetoric to get away from, something that many of us could probably change our perspective on.

The other thing this panel made me realize is how we talk about diversity in regards to "types" of diversity. When we say we need "all types" of diversity equally, that brings to mind the conversation around #BlackLivesMatter vs #AllLivesMatter. It's this misconception that "colorblindness" affects positive change by imagining everyone as the same, when it winds up being detrimental by not acknowledging specific, very problematic issues. Here is a tweet for some context:

If we don't focus in on specific diversity and instead just lump it all together, we can't really address what we are lacking and what needs to change. And just saying finding people with "different viewpoints" is equivalent to diversity that speaks to systemic structures, such as racism, classism, sexism, etc. is problematic, particularly if these people with different viewpoints also happen to always be white males or white middle class white women. Of course, finding people with different perspectives is important, but it doesn't stand in for addressing other issues surrounding diversity.

The other thing we should be taking about is that diversity isn't a numbers game. Filling all the lower-level positions with diverse candidates still doesn't address who holds the power. There is a highly skewed percentage toward white men holding administrative positions, so even if we get the "right" number of diverse candidates, how does that change the culture?

And the last thing I want to touch on from this panel that really made me think was the idea of "institutional fit" that a couple panelists brought up. The fact that this nebulous idea of fit when we're looking for candidates can harm our moves toward diversity by discounting certain people who we don't feel are like us. And we can say that we really don't do that, but when we think of fit it winds up being people we get along with, or people who have a similar mindset to the institutional mindset already in place. It can reinforce hegemonic structures.

So I think we have a ways to go, but it's so heartening to see more critical sessions accepted at ACRL and that there is a bigger interest in talking about these things. I'm certainly still learning and thinking about what privilege I have, but I hope we can have these larger discussions with our institutions and as a profession.

--Check out the session link above for their list of resources / bibliography, and also see Gonzalez-Smith, Swanson, and Tanaka's chapter in The Librarian Stereotype: Desconstructing Perceptions and Presentations of Information Work. The Pho & Masland chapter might be of interest as well.

#acrlilrevisions Next Steps

It seems like we are almost at the final version of the ACRL Framework revisions. I submitted my feedback a couple weeks ago through the ACRL Student Learning & Information Literacy committee that I'm on (we are sending it collectively) and feel for the most part that I have a decent grasp on how we might use these at the University of Arizona. Even though it's not finalized yet, we've been needing to work with the draft as is for projects here, such as badging, programmatic instruction, and constructing our department's IL plan and philosophy not too long after we had a restructuring. I'm helping coordinate our plans for programmatic instruction here so I keep thinking and re-thinking about these frames.

When designing instruction, I like to come up with "big questions" or "understandings," as Wiggins and McTighe refer to. From looking at the frames and trying to think about how can librarians and teaching faculty collaboratively understand these concepts and work toward shared goals, I put some big questions together to try and capture broader thoughts. From there, a colleague and I also worked on writing some outcomes we could map through curriculum mapping once everything becomes finalized. I'm also using these in other work that can't wait for the final draft. I thought I'd share some of this here as some librarians in my department are also sharing this with librarians at ASU and NAU tomorrow at a joint mini-conference that I can't attend since I will actually be presenting our version of the framework so far with big questions and outcomes to general education faculty for their feedback.

Below is our draft thus far. I thought I'd share it in the hopes that it might help others grappling with this stuff. I changed "searching is strategic" back to "searching is exploration" for our purposes because we all liked that version better here. We are also trying to think of more simple frame names that we could use. Even with our bigger additions and small adjustments, it's not perfect, but we're getting there.

Since it seems there is/was some disagreement via Twitter about whether "conversation" or "discourse" might be better wording for the first frame... I am on the side of conversation. If we're talking about opening up the act of research and having students become creators, I think discourse is limiting. Discourses set rules and restrictions, not really inviting in great diversity. As Aleman (2014) says, "Those in power or in control of the discourse normalize certain principles and ways of being through discourse to perpetuate norms, and to demand compliance, conformity, and submission to these norms" (p. 113). Discourse limits diversity in perspective and often in mode of publication. I also love this quote from Ball in Egea that I shared not too long ago: 

discourse, problems, neoliberalism via Egea, O.M., 2013 pic.twitter.com/cIyP6Qb25o
— Nicole Pagowsky (@pumpedlibrarian) October 9, 2014

So I say keep it "conversation." Ok and now here are our frames and outcomes:

Frame 1: Scholarship is a Conversation

Scholarship is a conversation refers to the idea of ongoing discourse within a community of scholars who create, consume, and critique new insights and discoveries occurring over time as a result of competing perspectives and interpretations, building on each other.

Big Questions:

Ø  What barriers exist when entering into the “conversation” of scholarship?

Ø  How can we gain greater understanding of topics by examining the connections and ongoing narratives between different scholarly pieces?

Ø  How do our responsibilities shift when moving from just consumers of information to critics and/or creators of it?

Students should be able to:

·         Recognize the metaphor of “conversation” to describe the purpose of research

·         Identify the contribution of specific scholarly pieces and varying perspectives to a disciplinary knowledge “conversation”

·         Contribute to the scholarly conversation at an appropriate level, through the lens of becoming a creator/critic

Frame 2: Research as Inquiry

Research as inquiry means that research is an ongoing exploration, depending on continuous questioning where answers develop new questions or new lines of interest in any field.

Big Questions:

Ø  How could understanding of a topic be improved through uncertainty in the process of research?

Ø  How can varying needs shape the importance of certain types of information?

Ø  How can we know what we don’t know? How do we go about figuring out what is not there instead of only what is visible by finding gaps in thought or content?

Students should be able to:

·         Formulate research questions based on curiosity and gaps in information or data available

·         Describe via reflection how the research process is iterative, requiring persistence

·         Apply research methods that are appropriate for the need, context, and type of inquiry

Frame 3:  Authority is Contextual and Constructed

Authority of information depends on where the source came from, the information need, and how the information will be used. It is constructed and contextual. Authority should be viewed with an attitude of informed skepticism and openness to new perspectives.

Big Questions:

Ø  How or why do we decide if someone has “authority” on a topic?

Ø  What might be expected of us as we become authorities ourselves?

Ø  How might biases privilege some sources of authority and silence others, especially in terms of others’ worldviews, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, etc.?

Students should be able to:

·         Determine attributes of authoritative information for different needs, with the understanding that context plays a role in authority-based attributes

·         Recognize that traditional notions of granting authority might hinder diverse ideas and world views

·         Acknowledge that oneself may be seen as an authority in a particular area, and recognize the responsibilities entailed

Frame 4: Information Creation is a Process

Knowledge can be expressed in different styles, which has an impact on how information is used and shared. It is important to look to the underlying processes of creation as well as the final product to critically evaluate the usefulness of the information.

Big Questions:

Ø  How might information be perceived differently based on how it’s packaged? E.g., why might there be an expectation to use scholarly sources in a college paper?

Ø  Why do certain types of information automatically seem to have credibility where others might not?

Students should be able to:

·         Articulate the purposes of various types of information as well as their distinguishing characteristics

·         Distinguish between format and method of access, understanding that these are separate entities

·         Identify which types of information best meet particular information needs

Frame 5: Searching is Exploration

Locating information requires a combination of curiosity, discovery, and luck. There is no one size fits all source for the needed information. Finding information is nonlinear and iterative, requiring the use of a broad range of information sources, flexibility, and the willingness to make mistakes and try again.

Big Questions:

Ø  How can we best determine what we’re looking for so that we can identify an effective search strategy?

Ø  How might differing information needs change an approach to searching?

Ø  How can failure and mistakes help us in finding information?

Students should be able to:

·         Make connections between the importance of matching information needs and search strategies to appropriate search tools

·         Implement more advanced searching skills to respond to a discipline-based information need

·         Reflect on the usefulness of making mistakes in the search process and how searching is not solely transactional

Frame 6: Information has Value

Information has value means that information possesses several dimensions of value, including as a commodity, as a means of education, as a means to influence, and as a means of negotiating and understanding the world. The flow of information through systems of production and dissemination is impacted by legal, sociopolitical, and economic interests.

Big Questions:

Ø  How could value of information be wielded by powerful interests in ways that marginalize certain voices?

Ø  How might the use or absence of citations impact the conversation of research?

Ø  How could something like open access change creation, publishing, and learning?

Students should be able to:

·         Distinguish between plagiarism and copyright violations

·         Identify scholarly publication practices and their related implications for access to scholarly information

·         Identify why some groups/individuals may be underrepresented or systematically marginalized within the systems that produce and disseminate information

More on threshold concepts and #ACRLILRevisions

The three threshold concepts in the new ACRL draft Framework for Information Literacy (Higher Ed) are noted as:

• Scholarship as a conversation
• Research as inquiry
• Format as process

From conversations on Twitter, Andy Burkhardt made a great post about how he has implemented "Research as inquiry" in his instruction. These practical examples are so helpful in understanding such a theoretical framework. Since I have been pushing research as conversation, or "Scholarship as conversation," in my own teaching, I thought I would share what I have done as well (for reference, I wrote about my initial thoughts on the new draft framework in a previous post).

Credit course and scaffolding

We have since paused our for-credit courses at the library, but in the last two sessions, I scaffolded research as conversation throughout the semester. I started off with introducing the concept, then made greater analogies to other modules, and in the end, had students create a short, animated video or comic strip (or script if they were not feeling visuals) illustrating a facet of research as conversation. (And this course is where we initially started using digital badges, as a side-note).

Searching online communities

In the fall, I had two additional opportunities of note to use scholarship as conversation, but also the other two threshold concepts. In a course in the UA's new eSociety program, my colleague, Leslie Sult, and I collaborated with the instructor to develop an in class activity and assignment. Students were researching a current event in a variety of formats/online communities (social media, local news, national/international news, news blogs, etc.), and the instructor wanted her students to do some critical thinking in groups to evaluate information and think about bias and point-of-view. I came up with the worksheet below, and we wound up having some great conversations as each group presented on their resource (YouTube and Twitter were especially interesting):

And additional questions we asked to coincide with the worksheet, after a brief lecture on related issues was delivered, included:

• Open versus closed community: impact? E.g., Facebook closed vs Twitter open – algorithms on Fbook and Google search when signed in (stay in the echo chamber)
• Primary versus secondary sources: what is the difference and when might you use either?
• How are messages changed/altered when they are retweeted or shared? Is anything lost? (like playing telephone), how do you account for this in searching? How do you know what part of the message is accurate? Methods for this
• Search strategies and tools: hashtags, groups, slang, memes, etc.
• Trolling: how does it affect communities and how might it change your search strategy?
• How do you know if someone is trolling a group or a topic discussion? Does trolling have significance in your search? Should you seek it out or ignore it?
• Back to whose voices are heard? What might the effect of being in the “echo chamber” do to whose voices you hear personally? What search strategies could you use to get out of the echo chamber?

The learning outcomes based on the instructor's course learning outcomes in conjunction with Leslie's and my goals for library instruction were the following:

1. Engage in a focused process of inquiry within an assigned online community in order to articulate the ways in which online communities function across contexts in contemporary life
2. Strategically access and evaluate information via search in an assigned online community in order to recognize various perspectives including rhetorical, philosophical, historical, sociological, and psychological viewpoints
3. Develop insight into the ethical aspects of information creation, use, access, and durability in order to be conscious of many group-related issues and practices relative to the use of computing technologies to facilitate group collaboration

Student athletes and avoiding plagiarism

When working with student athletes later in the semester, I more literally included scholarship as a conversation into my instructional design for a session I collaborated on with the Director of the athletes' writing center and my colleague, Niamh Wallace. I started the session talking about the process of research to frame positive uses of citations (how they help a conversation) and the negative effects of plagiarism, accidental or not (how they harm a conversation). To illustrate the concept in their minds first, I read them Burke's Unending Conversation Metaphor that I slightly adapted to more modern language they could relate to. I asked them to close their eyes and....

Imagine that you enter a party. You come late. When you arrive, others have been there long before you, and are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and fill you in. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you get the gist of the argument and join in. Someone answers; you respond; another comes to your defense; another aligns against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending on the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is endless. It’s getting late, so you have to take off. And you leave, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

Marisa (Director of writing center) incorporated a short lecture on how to write well when using other people's ideas, and as a hands-on activity had students write about their thoughts based on what we had presented to them (having them cite us). Then, using game design for this session, the theme was the "Citation Olympics," and we had students compete in groups for prizes as they learned content. Our format was introduce concept > practice > compete in the Citation Olympics at the end. Each module was a "sport," essentially. Here is a copy of the PPT we used to guide the session for a better idea (though much detail still gets left out from not including lecture notes).

Workshop on avoiding plagiarism for student athletes from Nicole Pagowsky


Anyhow, thought it might be helpful to share, and I hope to see how others have been teaching these concepts to gain a better understanding of how the new framework can be put into practice.

Thoughts on ACRL's New Draft Framework for ILCSHE

Image from goleansixsigma.com/bottleneck/

I've finally had a chance to read through the draft framework from ACRL, for Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (ILCSHE), as well as some good blog posts reflecting on the draft from Barbara Fister, Jacob Berg, and Andy Burkhardt. After attending ACRL Immersion - Program Track this last summer and also recently reading Susanna Cowan's, "Information literacy: The battle won won that we lost?" it seems like at least the existentialist part of the conversation on information literacy has been brewing for quite awhile. Cowan asks, "at what point does trying to interrupt the research process with the intrusion of instruction sessions, consultations, and tutorials become anachronistic, out of touch, and eventually irrelevant?" (2014, p. 29). And quoting Sugata Mitra, Cowan says we should "let learning happen," instead of essentially forcing/inserting ourselves into the process (p. 30). So the question then it seems many of us are asking ourselves is what does "information literacy" (IL) really mean, and if librarians don't "own" information literacy, what will our role be?

The draft framework focuses on three threshold concepts that would help advise our path, more so than define. Since others have taken a more theoretical perspective on their reflections, I am going to speak more practically:

• Scholarship is a conversation: I am so happy this concept is being included, as I have been pushing it in my own instruction for awhile, yet have found it more difficult to plan and assess (though assessment is a murky area, even more so with this new framework). This notion can inspire students to see themselves as creators of information, having a greater stake in the research they are doing (as the framework notes). One thing I wonder here is how can libraries better enable this, regardless of if we own IL or not. Libraries including student output might be one way to encourage students to perceive themselves in this way, to show their work is worth something in the world beyond a class grade and that they are truly a part of the "conversation." One issue Barbara Fister brings up that I'd like to echo is that "we need to bear in mind how these thresholds we define are cultural constructs and avoid assuming upper-middle-class white American experiences that might seem hostile or exclusionary to those who don't fit that assumed identity." Who will determine what these universal threshold concepts are, and how?

• Research as inquiry: Again, I think it's great this is included as a major concept. The framework talks about this meaning students understand that research is an iterative process and that "reflecting on errors or mistakes leads to new insights and discoveries" (p. 13). A major thought here seems to be teaching through failure, which research has shown to be effective. I'm just going to quote something I wrote in a previous post addressing this:

"Kluger and DeNisi (1996) support this notion of learning through failure by arguing that after doing an enormous meta-analysis of feedback interventions research, the conclusion is that the feedback literature is inconclusive and highly variable based on situations and learners involved. They explain that learners are most successful in learning through discovery, rather than feedback, particularly controlling feedback (ahem, grades)." via October 31, 2013

This also certainly mucks us up, as mentioned above, in regards to assessment. Though, as we partner more with faculty outside of the library, we will likely find more opportunities for reinvention and different ways to express our instructional "value."

• Format as process: This last concept, although I think it is going in a good direction, is the one I feel is missing the most. Overall, I would like to see the framework be a bit more radical, and I think this is an example of one excellent spot to invoke critical pedagogy in a very specific way. In looking at how information is produced and considering the peer-review process, medium as message, and the value of information, I was hoping to see a discussion on marginalized groups and whose voices get to be heard in traditional publishing and media (and why). These are important conversations to have with students, and particularly so when we are encouraging them to be creators of information, joining the conversation themselves. What impact might avenues of publishing have on their ability to be vocal when considering their perspective and identity? How is privilege intertwined in format and volume? 

Overall, I am pleased with the draft and am keeping in mind that it is just that: a draft. Other issues I have echo what others have stated, including that the framework set out to rid itself of jargon, but wound up only replacing old jargon with new jargon (metaliteracy, knowledge practices, etc.). I think not only do we want faculty and administrators to implicitly understand what we're talking about with this framework, but it would be great if students could read it and quickly, easily understand our objectives. Tomorrow, I am meeting with other instruction and research services librarians at my library to discuss the new framework as a group (as well as Cowan's article), so I am interested to see what my colleagues will say. I'll be leaving my own feedback to the draft soon after that and am also curious to see other points of view and engage in more conversations on the future of information literacy and library instruction.

Edit: Adding an additional thought as I work through my perspective on this, but I'm wondering what effect the theory of cognitive development, or rather, Perry's theory of cognitive/moral development will have on the success of this framework, particularly with early undergraduate students. When students are freshmen especially, they tend to think in duality, black vs white, and the instructor as absolute authority figure, having difficulty to move outside the box. With the framework being so flexible to student exploration, will it in fact improve learning for these students? Here is a good resource to color this in a bit: http://home.ubalt.edu/ub02Z36/Perry_Stages_ACRL-MD.pdf