Transcript from October 29 Conversation
Learning to Teach in MLIS Programs: Research, Experiences, & Ways Forward Friday Oct 29, 10-11 am PDST/Arizona – Hosted by the University of Arizona School of Information.
An online conversation with Kirsten Hostetler of Project Information Literacy, hosted by the University of Arizona’s School of Information. The conversation is based in Dr. Hostetler’s PIL Provocation Series essay, “The iSchool Equation.”
This transcript has been edited for readability, and includes links from the accompanying text chat. To see the full, close-captioned video of the Zoom webinar, please visit
Nicole Pagowsky, Moderator
Kirsten Hostetler, Author
Yvonne Mery, Guest
Monica Lourenco, Guest
Sarah O’Hare, Guest
00:00:01.000 –> 00:00:09.000
Nicole Pagowsky: Okay, so we’re set there, so welcome everyone, thanks for joining us today.
This is “Learning to Teach in MLIS Programs: Research, Experience, and Ways Forward, and the topic of learning how to teach often strikes a chord for instruction librarians. So we are all excited to talk about this, and this talk is a collaboration between Project Information Literacy and the University of Arizona School of Information. So we thank both groups for making this happen, and also including, who you won’t see, Margy MacMillan and Holly Brown, who’ve been doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes work that would otherwise fall under invisible labor. And speaking of which we have automatic closed-captioning set up during the session, and after, we will make a transcript available.
As you can see on our slide our hashtag, if you’d like to interact on Twitter, is #MLISTeach, and we all will have a hard time looking at Twitter and the chat and everything while we’re speaking so we probably won’t be there until later but feel free to use that if you’d like.
So, I am Nicole Pagowsky, and I will be moderating today. I’m an Associate Librarian at the University of Arizona. And I’m also Adjunct Faculty with our iSchool where I teach LIS 581 Information Literacy Pedagogy.
Before I introduce our panelists today and we officially get started, we wanted to do a land acknowledgement.
Because the University of Arizona is hosting the Zoom we’re using our university’s new land acknowledgement, which is on the slide. Acknowledgments is plural because panelists might choose to say their own land acknowledgement when they speak, since many of us are in different locations.
So I will read our acknowledgement. We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples. Today Arizona is home to 22 federally recognized tribes, with Tucson being home to the O’odham and the Yaqui. Committed to diversity and inclusion, the University strives to build sustainable relationships with sovereign Native nations and Indigenous communities through education offerings, partnerships and community service.
And we hope to make the land acknowledgement more actionable than simply reciting it and moving on. So there’s a bit more information on this slide. I put up a non-comprehensive list1 of some organizations to learn more and donate to so that we can acknowledge that more is at stake beyond just knowing which land we occupy, such as dismantling white supremacy, working toward Land Back and more that you’ll see listed in some of these resources. And so, since it’s not comprehensive, if you have more resources about learning about this or taking action please feel free to share them in the chat.
Okay, so we have four panelists today and I will be moderating.
So Kirsten Hostetler, actually Dr. Hostetler, is Instruction and Outreach Faculty at Central Oregon Community College, and a PIL Research Analyst, and has recently completed her PhD.
Yvonne Mery is Associate Librarian and leads the Instructional Design and E-learning unit at the University of Arizona Libraries. She’s also Adjunct Professor in the iSchool and co-founder of Sidecar Learning.
Monica Lourenco started her career teaching in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As an adult she moved to the States, obtained her doctorate in education, and taught special needs students for 17 years. She graduated in May of 2021. This is her second year as a high school librarian in Phoenix, Arizona.
And Sarah O’Hare is the Librarian at the Business Services team with the Spokane County Library District and as a recent MLIS graduate from U Arizona. She also holds an MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research from the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Before we get into the plan for today.
We’re going to ask you a question [using polling software]: If you took an instruction class in library school – and we realized maybe not everyone here has gone to library school – but if you have, please answer this poll question, just give you a minute then – It’s neck and neck.
Okay, so a little bit, well quite a bit more ‘no’ than ‘yes.’
And of course this probably doesn’t demonstrate if it was by choice, or if there was an option for an instruction class and you didn’t take one, or if it wasn’t offered, but that’s interesting to see 39% have and 61% have not.
So the plan for today is first Kirsten and I will have about a 20 minute conversation, discussing her research and just this issue, in general, and then Yvonne Mery will speak next to give a very short review of the UArizona iSchool teaching certificate, just because Kirsten had used it as an example in her research so we can just tell you a little bit about what has been going on here. And then two recent graduates from the program will share their experiences, who both have recently gotten jobs and just talk about, the classes they took and what the job search experience was like, and then just starting on the job, and knowing how to teach.
We welcome your questions and comments. We are in the webinar format of Zoom, so that means we can’t, I don’t think we can really unmute people, maybe we can, but it would just be it would be kind of messy, so we’re hoping you can use the Q and A box to send us your questions. If you use the chat we might miss it because there’s a lot going on. So if you have a question you want to be asked to any of the panelists please use the Q and A box.
One more poll: Did you feel prepared for your job search, and or your current job from your library school’s teaching preparation?
So, kind of actually the same breakdown, as the previous question. 61% did not feel prepared 39% felt prepared. And it’s hard to know because a lot of people, you can be attending this talk because you were not prepared and it was frustrating, or you did have a library class, and you’re interested in talking about instruction courses in library programs. So, hard to know how that’s influencing the results, but interesting to see that – so most people did not feel prepared.
7:59.000
Okay so Kirsten, let’s talk about your research, and I prepared, just some general question – this is more of a conversation – but just to structure this a bit.
Thanks again for your essay, pointing to what a lot of those of us who teach might resonate with on the importance, or lack thereof, of teaching courses available in library school. And in case anyone is joining us who hasn’t had a chance to read your essay yet, would you just give us a short summary, and also give us a little bit of insight into what prompted you to write about this.
Kirsten Hostetler: Thank you. I first want to start by thanking you Nicole, and the University of Arizona for organizing this conversation that you put a lot of work into making this happen so I’m happy to be here this morning. I also want to share my land acknowledgement.
I’m located in Bend Oregon at Central Oregon Community College, which resides on the original homelands of the Wasco and Warm Springs people. And it’s also important to note that the Klamath Trail ran through this area as trading grounds and the Klamath people did not reside in this territory, but they claim it as their own. So, the original people are still here today and they are thriving members of our community. So we always want to acknowledge and thank the stewards of the land.
I also want to acknowledge that I have a cough this morning, so bear with me, it is a non-covid cough.
So, after all of that, a quick, or somewhat quick, synopsis of the essay. Conversations about how the MLIS curriculum prepares future librarians for the responsibilities of the job, are not new conversations. As the field has changed it’s always important to continue to have these conversations about how responsive our collective training has been. So, really, many MLIS programs have dragged their feet a bit on updating instructional preparation that librarians receive. So again this conversation is long standing, and as early as 1993, librarians were looking into the teaching preparation of academic librarians and did a survey and respondents reported that essential competencies like knowledge of learning theory and pedagogy, as well as expertise in instructional design, were learned on the job, even though they would have preferred to have learned those concepts in their grad program.
And that’s not the, the only analysis there, there’s people have done more recent analysis of MLIS course offerings that revealed that instruction courses are still pretty limited as our very non-scientific poll showed this morning – that not everyone has access to a course, sometimes it’s just one course that’s in a program. And this is true, even as employers cite instruction as essential, and a majority of entry-level positions and academic libraries, call it a required responsibility.
So, again, I’m not, I’m not the only one talking about this. This conversation started long before me. But where I jump in in the essay that I wrote with PIL, is that librarians are are having a little bit of a moment right now, we’re getting some attention, and not for the resources we provide – valuable though they may be, but for the potential that our instructional interventions can have on students’ critical thinking and on their information consumption habits. So, with the spotlight, I argue that it becomes even clearer that librarians, they’re being called upon to design innovative, pedagogically sound instruction, and therefore, our professional credential should reflect those growing demands. And in the essay, I offer some ways forward that I’m sure we’ll get into in our conversation.
In terms of what prompted me to write this. I have been thinking about this for a long time. I’ve been thinking about this since I first entered the classroom. Because when I first entered the classroom, it was literally the first time I had ever taught. And I will not go into all of the gory details of every mistake I made during that class session, but rest assured, it was not a pleasant experience for me or for the students. It was a big learning curve for me. And in that moment, I really felt like there was something wrong with me; that I had a degree that qualified me to do the job, but somehow I still wasn’t qualified.
And I was thinking,”Was there a class that I missed? Did I not pay enough attention in school?”
And there is definitely a lot of literature out there about the issues that librarians, among other professions, face with imposter syndrome, with teaching anxiety. And in response to that, our field really hasn’t done much structural change, right? We’ve built up these more ‘resilience narratives’ that that roots our profession in our own sense of identity, and that any identified fault becomes an individual responsibility. So that framing, that resilience framing, asks us to look for individual solutions rather than looking for more structural solutions.
So when I first started teaching, I was like, Okay, so I chance my way into this role I was drastically under-qualified for, and the only possible solution was, I had to teach myself to teach before anyone found out that I couldn’t do it. So, I felt like if I just worked hard enough, if I just linked to enough webinars, if I did enough trainings, I could fix it.
And, you know, I didn’t decide in that moment – it was a little too early – that I needed another degree, but it was pretty inevitable for me that that was going to be the path that I pursued after just one day in the classroom. And I don’t think that should be a necessary feature of being a librarian who teaches, to get another degree. But for me it was an individual solution because again at that time I thought it was just a ‘me problem’ and not something bigger than me.
So I guess, cut to me working on my dissertation research in spring 20202. In the interim period between when I first taught and that time, I had become involved with Project Information Literacy as a research analyst. I started my PhD program at Old Dominion University in Instructional Design, and I have of course discovered that my lack of training was not immediately, not a ‘me issue,’ it was a larger issue, but I was still kind of looking at individual solutions.
So I did an exploratory study that looked at librarians’ design practices, how they learned those practices, where they got their models from. And one thing that kept coming up in my participant responses, was their exposure to design models was primarily learned on the job. And that finding really stood out to me. So, when PIL approached me about writing an essay in their Provocation Series about a provocative issue and information literacy. That was what I wanted to expand on, while focusing on more structural solutions. So, PIL had a really lovely editorial process with internal reviews amongst the team members, and external reviews as well. And then once the essay was completed, someone on the team approached you all at Arizona about sponsoring the essay, so that we could have this larger conversation about how the MLIS can better meet the needs of the field.
00:16:11.000
Nicole Pagowsky: Yeah, thank you for… I’m sure many of us can relate to that. It was trial by fire for me, the first time I taught, oh god, I remember just sweating through my shirt is so awful.
Kirsten Hostetler: Yes, my wardrobe changed so that I could hide the sweat.
Nicole Pagowsky: So yeah I can definitely relate and it does feel like, of course, you know this conversation has been going on for a while and it just, it feels like yelling into the void. So having a more focused and collective effort toward talking about this and trying to make something happen is great and thinking about also what you’re saying – just the amount of time and money I spent trying to catch myself up to where I felt like I should have been, graduating, to be able to do instruction. And the other thing that I made a note to myself was what you were saying about feeling like it’s you, feeling isolated, and the resilience narrative – and it’s essentially privatizing stress and it feels like gaslighting, and it just makes starting out in your very first job where you’re already, you know, stressed, even more stressful. So, Yes, thank you for saying all of that.
So next, the next question I have for you, was to just go a little deeper into the background of the research you had done. Could you tell us a little bit about the methodology, the results and reflections and just a heads up, I have two, three more slightly longer questions after that.
00:17:47.000
Kirsten Hostetler: Okay, so I’ll try not to get too in the weeds for time’s sake but also because no one cares about your dissertation research as much as you do. But as I mentioned in my essay, it’s somewhat informed by my dissertation. My PhD was in Instructional Design. So the main focus of my research was reviewing librarians’ teaching habits, through that instructional design lens. And I was really interested in the design processes that librarians use when approaching one-shot instruction, and where they learned about their different design models.
So I used a Delphi method, which is a technique for consensus building. It’s used in a lot of different research types, it’s used in the military and fields like allied health and business, but I actually became familiar with Delphi because it was the method used by Townsend et al.3, when they identified threshold concepts as part of the development of the information literacy framework. So, generally it’s just a pretty established way of gathering experts, getting them to come to an agreement which is hard to do, and controlling for power dynamics, because it uses a smallish sample size, and then it re-samples that same group multiple times so that that consensus can emerge from the collective.
So three quick things that stood out to me that kind of informed some of the things that I talked about in my essay:
The first was that there was really a very clear and direct consensus that emerged immediately from the first round of data collection that librarians strongly relied on backward design for practically all instructional purposes. And that makes really perfect sense – so you’re talking about the time and effort and money it takes to learn new things when you’re already learning a bunch of new stuff on a job anyway, and backward design is really fast to learn. It’s fast to use, and especially in a one-shot, there is a really clear through-line between what you want students to learn, and what you expect them to demonstrate by the end of the hour or the session, so they liked this model; they used it. But there was also this to go further, This was an acceptable framework to use, but they wanted to develop and learn about other approaches, with more advanced instructional design techniques, and that was kind of missing and lacking and once they kind of got into the habit of using backward design, it was hard to expand beyond that.
The second thing that stood out to me was when it came to professional development, the values that participants identified as important were collaborative. They were observational, and they were experiential. So they really made a significant effort to observe their peers in the classroom. They really wanted to collaborate with colleagues both internal to their institution, internal to their department, but not just their department, as well as external. And they engaged pretty heavily with listserv discussions to stay on top of trends and methods. So they really felt like just even being in the classroom and learning from their own successes and failures, was essential to the development of that teaching persona, that teaching identity. And so the professional development really stood out as just so significant, so important for participants for improving their instruction, for improving their understanding of pedagogy, but it was also a type of training that was really time intensive; so significant to their work, but it took up and ate up a significant portion of their time.
And then the last finding that really, again intrigued me the most, and was the initial inkling for the PIL essay was that participants had mixed feelings about their instructional preparation. And it was interesting to me because I had this very, definitive, ‘of course everyone’s going to agree with me and say, they didn’t feel prepared to teach when they left their school’ but it was not an immediate consensus. It actually kind of took a couple rounds before it emerged as a consensus. So, there were some cut and dry responses like mine like, ‘Yeah, I absolutely was not prepared to teach.’ ‘I did not learn anything about teaching in my MLIS.’ But then there were other responses like, ‘I did have a class on Information Literacy, it was informative. But, I could have gone through my program without it.’ And, you know, I didn’t, not everyone benefited from this important class. So, participants recognized that programs did have instructional offerings, but they were limited, and they weren’t necessarily emphasized as an important part of entering into the library profession. And so as a result, they entered the profession, and they really had to build those skills on their own. And so that was really kind of the heart of some of the questions I asked in my essay.
00:23:07.000
Nicole Pagowsky: Great, thank you, that’s interesting to see those different aspects of how people feel prepared, or how their programs works for them, and thinking about, if there was a class offered, maybe it wasn’t a great class, maybe it didn’t actually help them. So just because the class is offered doesn’t mean it’s going to prepare students for teaching in the field.
My next question is kind of about value. A question you posed in the essay that really struck me was, so if instruction isn’t emphasized in iSchools, what does that say about how the qualifying credential for librarians is valued? And then what does that say about value regarding the librarian role as a teacher? And this, I feel, is a huge factor in the dissonance between instruction labor being valued by all stakeholders, so you know how the students see it during their education – students in library programs – and also how students that we are teaching view our work, and then also how library schools frame and present their emphasis on it, and then last how, you know, potentially, how library employers perceive this work and value it.
So could you delve into this a little bit more, so we get kind of a multifaceted view of the issue?
Kirsten Hostetler: Yeah, yeah. And I’ll even add one more layer to it, about how professional librarians, working librarians, see themselves as in this role and how they embrace it or they don’t embrace the status. There’s a long standing internal debate within the profession about whether or not we should identify as teachers. And I focus on academic librarians in this essay, because that’s my current environment, it’s the environment I studied in my research, but I do call out that there are about 6000 graduates, every year from US MLIS programs, and only about 25% of those graduates go to work in an academic library. So for those of us in an academic library, grappling with this issue of whether or not we’re teachers is more obvious because we are surrounded by other self-identified teachers, we have opportunities to teach credit courses, along with other things. It’s kind of a more natural beginning to start exploring that identity as a teacher. But that’s just a small percentage of the library world, and many of our colleagues enter a public library environment instead, where their teaching responsibilities aren’t as visible. But I have also worked in a public library environment and there were many opportunities for both formal and informal teaching4. So saying that this improvement to the curriculum is only valued in higher education is really missing how applicable instructional training can be beyond just academic libraries. So, yeah, that’s a little bit of a tangent but going back to your question.
When it comes to employers, it’s clear that they want, and they demonstrate that they somewhat value, librarians who can teach. So, a 2012 analysis from Detmering and Sproles5 that I cited in the essay, I believe it was about 97% of job postings for entry level reference positions required instructional responsibilities. So it’s something that they’re expecting of librarians, but it’s unclear how much they’re willing to invest in librarians without these skills, and orient them on the job as part of the job.
So just last year, Widdersheim et al.6 conducted a survey that included library employers and they were asked where instructional librarians acquire the skills necessary to perform their job duties, and the majority of the respondents said that it was on the job. Which I think shows a belief that teaching ‘can just occur naturally” it’s something that’s like, ‘oh, I’ll just do it’ and there’s like a natural persona that emerges as a teacher, for those with the temperament for it. And, my experience early on, that, as librarians, we’re just going to work, and fix it ourselves, right? And I think both of those beliefs can be damaging.
There was a pretty good article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed7 last week, that talks about the myth of the natural teacher across all disciplines, not just library work, and it’s real work that goes into doing this job well. And so, saying that it’s going to come naturally, or that we just have that type of personality is not going to produce good results in the classroom. And if we’re expected to learn about this, while we’re on the job performing other duties we’re expected to, like teach ourselves a whole field of educational theories and pedagogy, we’re just asking for, for burnout, that’s really prevalent and seen in our field. So, it’s hard not to look at that and see that expectation is more a value of helping professions, or service-oriented professions, which is really heavily gendered and our very female dominated field as well as placing even a larger burden for systematically marginalized library workers. So that I think is one issue that I think that can’t help but find its way into the classroom and shape students’ perceptions of libraries. Surveys of students8 have shown that there’s some uncertainty about our role, which is totally understandable, because the field itself is a little uncertain about what our teaching identity is, and that students view us primarily as more of a student service than an academic unit.
And I think all of this comes back to library schools, because we have seen library schools be responsive to the evolution of our field when it comes to things like information management and data curation, and we’ve all seen the shifts in programs to information schools. So, you know, while higher ed is a slow-moving ship.There is precedent for change, when there is demand there. And I think that the demand is clearly there, so to demonstrate that this work is needed, that it’s valuable, that it has a plays a significant role in our future as a profession – I think it starts with library schools, demonstrating that value and making an investment, so that you know that the infrastructure is in place to support more instructional offerings.
So there are programs that are making good progress in this area, but if it’s going to be a movement in the field, if it’s going to be a value of our field, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of just individual programs. There should be more of a collective push for that type of change.
00:30:46.000
Nicole Pagowsky: Yes, thank you, everything you have said has felt very cathartic. I agree, and I’m sure many of us think these things. And just to hear it formalized in research and in a Project Information Literacy article helps to center things a bit. But the systemic [solution] – attributing value to this through all programs, maybe in the accreditation process for library schools, things like tha, and not, again, privatizing stress or privatizing this burden to individuals.
I touched on this a little bit before, and you’ve talked about this – the planning and the labor to put on instruction librarians to catch themselves up, to teach ourselves how to teach, while on the job after completing the degree, spending all this time, and spending all this money,… For instruction librarians who are involved in heavy one-shot models, there’s the experience of time poverty, where you don’t have the available time to learn how to teach yet. It’s an ongoing expectation, which can lead to burnout but we won’t go there right now.
So for more context, before you respond, I don’t know if everybody has seen the presentation or read the article on In the Library with the Lead Pipe, “The Service Ceiling: The high cost of professional development for academic librarians”9 by Bridget Comanda et al., basically discussing the trap that librarians can find themselves in, being required to do service and scholarship to keep or succeed in their jobs, but then also being required to pay out-of-pocket for service and scholarship for that job security, mostly in tenure-track type faculty positions, but it could be anywhere or it could just be the individual anxiety, feeling like you need to catch up.
So could you expand on this, particularly when there’s so many ‘learn how to teach’ trainings being offered – we see them on the listservs all the time, they’re promoted everywhere. I actually did one for ALA like a number of years ago on instructional design that people would have to pay for. Not that teaching those things should be free labor, but also, you just got your library degree, and you just paid all this money, and now you’re paying for more classes.
So maybe this is a leading question, but could you speak to how having more instruction in MLIS programs could have offset this issue?
00:33:34.000
Kirsten Hostetler: Yeah, so this is actually something that I wanted to pursue in my essay, but I didn’t have the space to do it justice, so I’m really glad you brought it up. And I’m glad that it invokes those feelings for you, because that was my intention.
And I, I can’t really improve on the work that that team did so if you haven’t read the Lead Pipe article, I’m glad you shared it in the chat, because it’s definitely worth the read, because of how this impacts the direction of our field, on on who speaks at conferences, who’s able to publish. And it really does further highlight inequities in our field. Because of course, when a librarian graduates from their master’s program, it’s very possible that they’ll join the ranks of those of us with massive student loan debts – welcome – right? It’s a billion dollar industry that probably most of us are familiar with. And I believe that Service Ceiling article mentions that about a third of academic librarians start their career with debt that’s basically in tune with half of their salary. So, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation that when you’re so invested in this profession, both literally and figuratively, that you should feel reasonably prepared for a known responsibility, that’s required for so many entry level positions, not even advanced positions, but to get started in the field. It’s a known requirement.
And when you don’t, that leads to that achievement culture, imposter syndrome, the burnout, it’s just so prevalent in our field, and has been just exacerbated by, I think the pandemic.
It’s really hard when discussing this, not to mention Etttarh’s, very impactful work on Vocational Awe10, because it just feels like such an ingrained part of our profession at this point, which makes it really difficult to critique, and it calls upon us to make these self-sacrifices, because the work that we do is like ‘capital I’ important, right? So, you know, Farkas has written about11 and presented12 on Slow Librarianship as one way to resist that, that and that push towards like resilience and achievement culture, I would very much encourage people to look into her work in that area.
But back to your leading question so I will take the bait. And I will say yes! I think it is a good start to finding more structural solutions to support professionals, by providing these opportunities at the beginning, so that you’re feeling confident, you’re feeling secure and you’re, you’re feeling prepared, when you enter your teaching role. Because it takes a burden off of librarians when they first start, and it also doesn’t immediately set a tone for our field that the profession expects you to constantly kind of dig yourself out of these knowledge gaps through self- improvement, self-funded, time-intensive, labor-intensive professional development.
I will say I’m not naïve enough to think that this is a cure-all. I don’t realistically think that it’s going to fix all the problems that we’ve mentioned. There are, of course, much larger issues at play, some underlying white supremacist values that are part of our profession, and part of higher education more generally, that are not going to be changed by a fixes to the MLIS curriculum. But I do think that it is a good start for expanding instructional opportunities. It is a plus for decreasing this burden on new professionals.
00:37:25.000
Nicole Pagowsky: Great, thank you and we are starting to get short on time, so here’s a great challenge for you: in one and a half to two minutes, so we can get to Yvonne, and then Monica and Sarah next, could you just give us a very brief sense of how this can all come together? You talked about it a little bit, but ways forward you suggest, and also of course how feasible are these suggestions.
Kirsten Hostetler: I mentioned four ways forward with this. I’m definitely not the be all, end all, know all of this topic, but I think that these are great places to start. One of which is incorporating lessons from the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, or SoTL13. I won’t summarize SoTL here but I encourage you to look into it if you haven’t. Integrating that into our classrooms as MLIS students can be a great way of teaching us an interdisciplinary language that we can bring to faculty and recruit more faculty. SoTL is a great gateway drug for creating partnerships with disciplinary faculty, so that the burden of information literacy instruction doesn’t all just fall on us. So, SoTL, integrating those lessons, looking at teaching through that lens of like, research and scholarly inquiry is, it would be a great way forward. and an easy thing to incorporate in the classroom.
The second thing I talked about is mandating academic advising. Some MLIS students enter their program14, knowing that they want to be an academic librarian, they want to be a public librarian, they have this goal in mind, but that’s not true of all students. I had no experience in a library before coming into my master’s program, and I was going to take whatever job I could get when I graduated, so I didn’t have that endgame in mind. I was interested in a lot of it. And that’s true of surveys of MLIS students across the board; sometimes when asked why they were motivated to pursue their degree, they say because they love books or because they had a good experience with the library.
So, you know it’s a kind of mixed bag, and good advising provides a connection to the program, but also a connection to the profession, so that there is a place to discuss through all of the different options, and help you navigate the bureaucracy that is higher education. Advising already exists in MLIS programs. It just needs to be bolstered so that students who might not otherwise, seek out academic advising when it’s optional, are kind of having…. they’re more on the radar, checking in, and that could not just necessarily be one-on-one appointments, that could be group advising – anything to get them thinking about their future and thinking about how they’re going to navigate the course offerings.
My third solution is pretty straightforward: offer more experiential learning opportunities. There’s no better way of getting a feel for classroom management, improving things on the fly, developing that teaching persona, let alone figuring out if this is like something you actually want to do in your life after you graduate, than getting in front of students and actually teaching. So it’s going to require some creative ways of thinking, in terms of developing partnerships, community partners like public libraries, internal partners like disciplinary departments, the institutional library, so the MLIS students have access to those authentic learners.
Programs like San Jose, are doing some great things with co-teaching with subject liaison teams15. The University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign is doing things, allowing MLIS students to teach in workshop series16. These are important partnerships17 to develop, and it needs to be a programmatic partnership, rather than asking individual faculty to create those. We don’t want to increase the labor of already overworked faculty, and then that way it stays, the partnership stays within the program versus leaving when it’s just connected to a single person.
The last solution has some overlap with all of these. And it’s the most logical solution when my thesis is: ‘the MLIS programs don’t offer enough instructional training.’ It’s to increase the instructional, increase the credit offerings that are included in MLIS curriculum. Now, it’s not as straightforward as that, right? I know that 36 semester hours in a two-year degree does not leave much wiggle room, so it can’t be all things to all people, and I am not advocating for increasing the length of the degree either. But I do think that increasing elective offerings is a really good place to start. So that we can look at a program like what you all are doing at the University of Arizona18, with your teaching certificate, and say it’s a great example for how a standalone certificate can reach practitioners who are already in a teaching position, who might have missed that in their MLIS program. It increases instruction track offerings for students who know that they want to pursue an academic library environment, and it also just increases the offerings available to all students who might not necessarily know if they want to pursue an academic library role or teaching role, but they want to be exposed to more in-depth pedagogy instructional design, teaching methods, culturally competent classrooms, things like that, beyond what can be contained in one class.
And that also ties in all my other recommendations so if there are more credit offerings for instruction, then there’s more opportunities to integrate SoTL lessons. There’s more opportunities for students who are doing experiential learning to contextualize that learning in the theory and philosophy in the instructional classes that they’re taking. It gives more options that advisors can push students towards if that’s something that they’re considering. So, when it comes to the feasibility of that, there are already programs out there doing some of these things so I do think it’s, it’s reasonable expectation, I think it’s manageable. It does require an investment on the part of programs so that additional faculty can be hired for teaching and advising for and for research purposes. It requires necessary infrastructure to be created to ensure that this is thought-out and sustainable. But I do think if there is a demand and a need, and a better way to serve our profession moving forward, then I, I like to think that this type of change is attainable and feasible.
That took more than… it was as quick as I could be.
Nicole Pagowsky: That’s okay, so what we’ll do is, I think most of us can stay after the hour if people have questions, so we can do that, we won’t make everybody rush to the end. So if you want to do the Q and A, if you have questions or comments, stick around a little bit after 11, also many of us are on Twitter so you can also interact with us there.
Now, that’s a great segue to turn it over to Yvonne to talk about the teaching certificate here at the University of Arizona iSchool.
00:45:22.000
Yvonne Mery: Okay, well I was, I had maybe like 5, 10 minutes so I’m going to just put a link to the certificate, where you can get a lot of the information, because I was going to go over like a history of it and some of the outcomes, but you can see all of that on the website19 so let me go ahead and put links to that there.
But I will echo a little bit of what Kirsten said that we started this certificate because Carla and I also did like a little mini survey of job ads – we found out that like something between 40 and 60% of job ads we looked at did include some type of instruction, and that was across types of libraries, so like you said, both formal and informal, so it might be a school librarian, it might be an academic library but also might be, you know, like a GIS librarian has put together a workshop. So, a public librarian, you know, who’s doing like a children’s hour. So really instruction goes across different kinds of libraries, and that’s something that we push for in the certificate. It is not just for academic librarians, not at all. Monica took it. She’s a school librarian, I’ve had public librarians in the courses, too.
And I will tell you there’s, it’s 12 credit hours, there’s three courses plus a practicum. We really push the practicum because we want students to really get that hands-on experience.
So there’s the different courses that you have. Nicole and her information literacy pedagogy chorus is more of a discussion type seminar style, right, in your course Nicole? Where a lot of the learning takes place to discussions.
My E-learning for librarians is really focused on creating tutorials and the kind of like online materials that you have to create a lot, LIS 586 is taught by Angela Gudner and that’s really more of an instructional design course, and then the internship practicum, that is run by the program so there’s no extra work there for adjuncts or anything.
So I had more, but you know we’re over time so that’s an overview, and you can take a look at it, at the certificate in the chat.
Nicole Pagowsky: Thanks Yvonne. I think it was unique to the [program]. We’re full time librarians at the library and adjuncts, and we were invited to help create the certificate from the ground up, so I thought that was great. And you worked with Carla on that background research to develop the why and the how about it.
Yvonne Mery: One more thing on that, Carla and I also took a look at all the different programs. And I think there were about 30 programs that had one instructional class, and almost no programs that had two, and then there were one or two programs that had a certificate. So like Kirsten said, it really gives the message that this is ‘something that you’ve picked up along the way’ and in my experience, I don’t know, all our admins I think in my experience of my library, think ‘anyone can teach,’ and ‘it is something that you just walk into a class and anyone can do it.’ It’s an afterthought, definitely.
00:48:31.000
Nicole Pagowsky: Thank you. Okay, so let’s turn it over then, to Monica and Sarah.
00:48:40.000
Monica Lourenco: Hi guys. Thank you. I’m just going to apologize if you hear music in my background, the library has been very very busy today, especially being a Friday before Halloween, and apparently everyone decided to reserve the library for something, some kind of event, so I apologize, right now for any, you know, soundtrack that you might hear behind me.
I just want to do my land acknowledgment, that’s something important to me. I do teach and work with many students who also belong to Native American tribes.
So I live and work in central Phoenix bordering Scottsdale, so I am on ancestral lands of Salt River, Pima, Akimel O’odham, and also the Maricopa Indian community. And actually just yesterday, I was actually talking to the Native American advisor for school about things that we can do, to promote and just do some work.
Just about my experience, I graduated right now, May, 2021, and I came to the program with over 20 years of teaching, either in Brazil or here – I’ve been living in United States for, like for almost 20 years, so I’ve been teaching since I came here. And one of the first things that I did when I first moved was volunteer in a middle school library, and then I also volunteered in the public library 10 years ago or so.
And I kind of came to the program knowing what I wanted. I kind of knew that I wanted to be an education, or maybe public librarianship, or maybe academic librarianship.I knew I was in that area. And just taking the classes to be very honest, the three electives plus my internship, were the best classes I took for my job, because they were totally related to what I wanted to do. Some classes, I’m going to be really honest, were ‘meh,’ but I had to take them. And I’m being honest, I had to take one or two that I don’t really use for anything. But I think that’s life, I learned things that I might not use now, but it was important for me to know because I believe that, it’s important to be knowledgeable and knowledge is power. So it was really important.
Another thing that I think is very important is your internship. I did mine with Professor Mery, and it was super useful in my life. I was able to learn about a tutorial tool, I was able to create a database tutorial – I teach databases and to my students. So I was able to develop and learn how to do, and keep doing that, if, if you know, if I want to do or not, but that gave me a lot of experience and and learning to apply in my, in my job.
Yes, I’m learning a lot ‘as doing’, in my first year as a school librarian – I’m a school librarian in a high school, here in Phoenix, Arizona. And my first year was pretty much online, almost the whole year as a first-year librarian. So I just had to get creative and count on other librarians – yes other librarians helped me all the time to kind of learn the system, and things that we don’t learn when you’re doing our classes, like how to check out/check in books using Destiny Discover or, whatever you use as a catalog, online catalog, and things like that.
But definitely, I think that choosing a good internship, that will help you. I think that’s the key. At first I wanted to do my internship in a public library because I wanted to know more about working in a public library but because of Covid, I couldn’t. And then I thought ‘okay well what else is very close that I think I’m going to like it?’ and another student actually referred me to the E-learning internship that I did. And that was the best thing that I could have done during my degree. And all the three classes, the LIS three that we take, they just reinforced all my educational background, but it also taught me things that I needed to learn, so I do believe I wish I had more classes like that. That’s something that I just want to finalize saying, that I would like to have more electives, like, I think, Kirsten was saying about having more elective offers – Yes. I maybe wanted more time, I was a full time online student but I was also working full time, managing my son, and things like that, family. So I wish I had more time to take classes that I was more interested in, and I missed that just because I had to take some of the mandatory classes. Oh well, but it was one or two, the rest was really good.
So, yes, I would like more electives but besides that, I think that’s what I can say about my experience. If you guys have any questions, please put them on the chat. As I said, the library’s really busy today, so I don’t think I can stay much longer than our time, but thank you for listening and I appreciate, and I can share also my contact information if anyone wants to chat, later. Thank you.
Nicole Pagowsky: Thanks, Monica. Yeah, if you’d like to put your contact information in the chat that’d be great, since we know you have to go on the hour, I think everybody else can stay so if people have questions, hang out a little longer and I will turn it over to Sarah now.
00:54:31.000
Sarah O’Hare: Oh Greetings, I’ll try to not make mine too long, just to respect everyone’s time, a little bit but, well, if people can stay, I’ll probably be going over the 3 minutes that I have here, but thank you for having me today. My name is Sarah O’Hare. I am a business librarian with the Spokane County Library District, a public library.
Our 11 libraries are located on unceded land of the Spokane people in Spokane Washington – for other people around the country that’s in eastern Washington. The Spokane tribe are one of the Interior Salish speaking tribes.
I did want to share a resource, the Spokane Tribal Network20 is an independent nonprofit. They provide a system resource collaboration for the tribal community and the surrounding communities and their mission is to nurture intergenerational wellbeing and provide healing-centered engagement, so I just wanted to share that in the chat with everybody there. So I’m happy to be coming to you from this beautiful part of the world. Thank you for having me.
So a little bit briefly about my schooling experience and then sort of what it’s meant to me. I graduated in May of 2020, as you can imagine – what a time to graduate! So, the job search is going to be a more unique situation than most, as things were actually closed, and everyone was trying to adjust to the situation that we were confronted with. But that was when I graduated.
And the coursework that I focused on at the University of Arizona was largely academic course load focused, I did only get to take one instruction literacy course. I only had one elective space. So the elective conversation really hit home with me. I would have liked to have more space to include more of those things. So, I mean having more time to do more of that would have been great. I tried to incorporate it on my own time. I did two different internships, one for credit and one for not, at an academic institution.
I can’t speak enough to doing those things, if you feel like you have an interest, go and try it out. And then if you still feel like you have an interest, go and try it again, and again, and again, and so if you are checking that box every time you have that experience where you’re reflecting and saying this feels right. This feels right. That’s great, because if you catch yourself and you’re having some thoughts like this doesn’t feel right maybe this isn’t for me. Those are going to be the most important experiences, they’re going to, you know, inform your trajectory moving forward.
One thing I didn’t get to do during those internship experiences was actually teach. I tried to sort of cultivate that into, you know, the internship that I created on my own, but unfortunately the school wasn’t able to provide that for me, so I think if the internship for instruction has more more of a structure there to help create those partnerships, like, Kirsten was mentioning at the beginning, that might be able to help students like me who are in a weird power dynamic situation, not really able to demand that I have teaching time in my internship. If we’re able to, to make those partnerships a little more strong and create an understanding that that’s an expectation, that might help students as well.
I do work in a public library, so again, as we’ve mentioned a few times, my opportunities for teaching are different than an academic librarian and that was my goal and we had a pandemic. And, you know, now I’m in a public library so things happen, life happens, you just kind of roll with the punches.
But my more informal moments of teaching are most impacted by the coursework I did in instruction, because every time I’m reminded to meet my patron where they’re at, and not where society expects them to be, particularly with gaps in digital literacy. I helped a woman the other day who – she wanted help editing her, her letter that she wanted to send someone, and she was attempting to use her mouse, like a TV remote. So that really tells you where a person is, sort of on their trajectory of where we need to start, and it helps you, just having that instructional background, and the structural design in the background, helps me not only be a more compassionate teacher in the moment, but also help this person in a way that’s going to be most effective for them. So that’s maybe an example of my more informal, on the spur of the moment kind of teaching.
And I do some more formal teaching, in the terms of business programming. We have programming where we teach patrons and business community partners how to use our business databases. So that’s straightforward, kind of one-shot instruction literacy right there, just for the community and not for a student. I’m also responsible for creating the curriculum and teaching all of our new employees that come through the Public Library District about our digital databases. Many people who come in to join the library staff and the public facing side, haven’t done any library schooling, or possibly haven’t used a database in a long time, maybe they used them when they went to college, or maybe they didn’t get their own instructional one shot. So it’s important for me to get everybody a little bit up to speed when they join us to make sure that they’re able to help our patrons in the best way that they can. Those are some of the examples of the way that I use instruction in my job.
I would just echo a lot of the points that Kirsten already made that, you know, people often talk about the lack of a rigor, rigorous degree program with library degrees. And I do think that really impacts how people see the value of librarians and what we bring to the table, too. So if we can just create some more structure within the degree, that’s going to do better service to your, to your students before they graduate, because otherwise you just have to enter into a situation that’s …perhaps you are given very good structured on the job training and it’s wonderful and you have check-ins and there’s great training opportunities there, but sometimes that’s not always there for you. You join an institution and there’s not so structured training or there’s no training at all, and you just, you’re just sort of cast out to sea. So, anything we can do, I think, to help students before they get to that point, it should be the goal. Absolutely.
I have more to say too, but that can be covered at a different time. Like Nicole said I’m on Twitter, you can message me there if you have any questions. I think, graduating in a global emergency makes my situation a little nuanced and unique, maybe not going to apply, hopefully, for the rest of you in our MLIS future, but it has been an interesting experience and I did very much enjoy my course with Nicole on instructional pedagogy, so much philosophy for my little philosophy nerdiness there, but thank you. Thank you for having me as well, feel free to reach out again I can put my information in the chat too.
01:01:42.000
Nicole Pagowsky: Thanks so much Monica and Sarah, that was great, and thank you for, for liking my class. I like that, I like that a lot.
So, I see we have a question in the Q and A, and thanks everybody for sticking around, Yvonne had to go, I know Monica probably has to go any minute. I can answer questions on behalf of our program, the certificate if anybody has those.
But if you see the Q and A box, if you can put your question in there so that it’s separated out from the discussion going on in the chat, it makes it easier for us to see.
So, okay, okay, yes, we got a request to put our Twitter handles in the chat. Sure. Let’s do that.
Okay, I think I did see a question earlier. Erin asks, “I don’t have an MLIS program at my university but I love the idea of providing opportunities to MLIS students to get into the classroom. Do you have any ideas of the best way to develop a workshop program that specifically invites and allows students to do online workshops on different topics for my university community, and thinking about how it’s equitable and useful for students, particularly when it’s unlikely my dean will give me money to offer an honorarium.”
Big question.
Kirsten Hostetler:I guess the question I would have is, is there an MLIS program nearby, at least, or would it be something that you would need to offer as a remote option? But [ responding to comment in chat] four hours away). Yeah, I mean, I guess it would be a matter of contacting MLIS programs, because so many of them do have remote options. I mean I went to the University of Washington, but I stayed in Bend, Oregon, the whole time. And a lot of the internship organizing stuff fell on my shoulders as a student who was also working full time, to reach out to people in my community to try to find opportunities to work,
So, at the very least, reaching out to programs and letting them know that you’re an option. Even if they.. even if you don’t have a program nearby, you might have students in your city that you don’t know about that are going to a remote program. Yeah, that’s a big question I think because you could post that across the country, really, to make that an opportunity.
I like your thought about the idea of an honorarium, valuing students for their time, because if they’re offering that service to you. It is a good idea to even if they’re in an internship, to… I like this movement of paying interns. So, if it is a possibility to offer some type of financial incentive as well, that would be lovely.
I think that it would just be a matter of finding programs who have these instructional opportunities and advertising your location as an option. In the chat someone said Emporia is, is a big remote program that would be great.
01:05:58.000
Nicole Pagowsky: So, why don’t we since we’re over and you know people need to get going, I’m not seeing any questions pop up right away. Um, we’ll take any other questions over Twitter or if you want to contact people directly, that would be great.
The panelists shared their contact information in the chat
Nicole Pagowsky: Twitter @nope4evr
Kirsten Hostetler: Twitter @Kirsten_Clair khostetler@cocc.edu
Monica Lourenco: monicalou30@gmail.com, Instagram: @camelbacklibrarian
Sarah O’Hare: Twitter @Sarah_OHare, sarahannohare@gmail.com
Yvonne Mery : Twitter@Merylibrarian
1 First Nations Development Institute https://www.firstnations.org/
Resource Generation https://resourcegeneration.org/
Land Back https://landback.org/
Tohono O’odham Community College (donate) https://toccedu.presencehost.net/
Labriola National American Indian Data Center https://lib.asu.edu/labriola
2 Kirsten Hostetler (2020), Designing for the one-shot: Building consensus on design processes for academic librarians. Old Dominion University STEM and Professional Studies. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/stemps_etds/112
3 Lori Townsend, Amy R. Hofer, Silvia Lin Hanick, & Korey Brunetti (2016), “Identifying threshold concepts for information literacy: A Delphi study.” Communications in Information Literacy. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/comminfolit/vol10/iss1/1/
4 James K. Elmborg, J (2002), “Teaching at the desk: Toward a reference pedagogy.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 2(3), 455-464, https://www.academia.edu/2608646/Teaching_at_the_desk_Toward_a_reference_pedagogy
5 Robert Detmering, & Claudene Sproles(2012), “Forget the desk job: Current roles and responsibilities in entry-level reference job advertisements,” College & Research Libraries, 73(6), 543-555, https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16265
6 Michael Widdersheim, Brendan Fay, Brady Lund, & Ting Wang (2020), “Bridging the gap: Employer, librarian, and educator perspectives on instructional librarianship,” ALISE 2020 Juried Papers, http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108832
7 Beth McMurtrie, (October 20, 2021), “The damaging myth of the natural teacher,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-damaging-myth-of-the-natural-teacher
8 Rachel Bickley & Sheila Corral (2011), “Student perceptions of staff in the information commons: A survey at the University of Sheffield,” Reference Services Review, 39(2), 223-243, https://doi.org/10.1108/00907321111135466
9 Bridgett Comanda, Jaci Wilkinson, Faith Bradham, Amanda Koziura, & Maura Seale (2021), “Service ceiling: The high cost of professional development for academic librarians,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2021/service-ceiling/
10 Fobazi Ettarh (2018), “Vocational awe and librarianship: The lies we tell ourselves,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/
11 Meredith Farkas (September 8, 2021), “Slow life, slow librarianship,” Information Wants to Be Free, https://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2021/09/08/slow-life-slow-librarianship/
12 Meredith Farkas (2020), Resisting achievement culture with slow librarianship. YouTube. https://youtu.be/g980DnibndI
13 Lindsay McNiff & Lauren Hays (2017), “SoTL in the LIS classroom: Helping future academic librarians become more engaged teachers,” Communications in Information Literacy, 11(2), 366-377. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2017.11.2.8; Melissa Mallon, Lauren Hays, Cara Bradley, Rhonda Huisman, & Jackie Belanger (2019), The grounded instruction librarian: Participating in the scholarship of teaching and learning, ACRL, https://www.worldcat.org/title/grounded-instruction-librarian-participating-in-the-scholarship-of-teaching-and-learning/oclc/1220921502&referer=brief_results
14 Stephanie D. Taylor, R. Alexander Perry, Jessica L. Barton, & Brett Spencer (2010), “A follow-up study of the factors shaping the career choices of library school students at the University of Alabama,” Reference & User Services Quarterly, 50(1), 35-47. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20865334
15 Sargent, A.R., Becker, B.W., & Klingberg, S. (2011). Incorporating library school interns on academic library subject teams. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 37(1), 28-33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2010.10.004
16 About the Savvy Researcher Workshop Series. (2020). Illinois Library Scholarly Commons. https://www.library.illinois.edu/sc/workshops/about-workshops/
17 The Research & Teaching Fellowship at UMD College Park is another partnership between an iSchool & the university library https://www.lib.umd.edu/tl/fellowship
18 Carla Stoffle, Nicole Pagowsky, & Yvonne Mery (2020), “Teaching future librarian educators using the ACRL framework: A new graduate-level iSchool teaching certificate,” In Heidi Julien, Melissa Gross, & Don Latham (Eds.) Information Literacy Framework: Case studies of successful implementation, Rowman & Littlefield. https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/636753
19 The Information School at the University of Arizona (2021), Graduate Certificate: Instruction and Teaching for Librarians and Information Professionals https://ischool.arizona.edu/graduate-certificates//instruction-and-teaching
20 Spokane Tribal Network https://www.spokanetribalnetwork.org/