In this Issue

I still remember the first time I taught. I was lucky enough to land a job straight out of my graduate program, but I was not lucky enough to have ever entered a classroom before. I prepared by nervously practicing the lesson in my head ad infinitum until I reached a level of overly rehearsed but passingly competent. The minute I walked in the room the plan I had meticulously prepared was immediately abandoned when faced with the reality of teaching actual students. The most I could say for that experience was I learned a lot.

The design process I used for that class was not sustainable and I immediately questioned my credentials. Did I miss a day in my graduate program? I thought it was a personal failing that I was not ready to teach. The ink barely dry on my degree, I spent a few months doing a deep dive into the literature just to perform the day-to-day responsibilities of my job.

There is a lot of literature on this topic that I couldn’t possibly hope to synthesize all of it, but the more reading I did, the more I understood this wasn’t a ‘me’ problem, this was a problem the field had been grappling with for decades. My path to feeling confident as a teacher eventually led me to another degree, but you shouldn’t need a Ph.D. to be a librarian. And you shouldn’t need extra degrees to feel comfortable doing your job. Despite extensive conversations, conference presentations, research articles, and professional development training that has sprouted in the absence of iSchool curriculum, the progress to improve teaching preparation has been slow and inadequate.

My PIL Provocation essay, “The iSchool Equation,” asks the same question we’ve been asking ourselves for awhile: Are we learning the right stuff? What makes this different is that we’re asking the question in a moment when the field is dealing with provocative issues that attract a spotlight. The illumination has highlighted the deficiencies in our training that have always existed, but now there is leverage to negotiate change.

For the record, I don’t think librarians can save us, nor do I think it’s necessarily our role to do so. But the field does intersect with disciplines like education, journalism, and social science, among others, that ideally position librarians as cross-campus collaborators, and the more prepared we are to be a part of these conversations, the more effective we will be.

I hope this essay raises more questions for readers. What innovations will librarians bring to the classroom as better-prepared teachers? How will we challenge the structures like one-shots that we’ve always been constrained by to develop more robust, effective library instruction? How will we encourage students to go beyond navigating information ecosystems as they currently exist in order to reflect on, critique, and challenge those systems? But we have to start with iSchools providing future librarians the foundational skills to build on. I for one can’t wait to see what librarians come up with when they don’t have to waste so much energy playing catch up and can enter the classroom prepared to teach.

Sponsored by the School of Information at the University of Arizona*