Teaching Philosophy

Inclusive, accessible, and transformative information and digital literacy instruction

The foundations of my teaching philosophy can be found in works about critical pedagogy and critical librarianship. Traditional library instruction is heavily lecture and demonstration based. It can be dry and it can seem irrelevant to students who are not in a credit-bearing information literacy (IL)/ library course. To be a critical instruction librarian is to continually reflect on my teaching practice, creatively contextualizing IL and tailoring instruction to meet course goals, assessing students' prior knowledge, and scaffolding incredibly complex and troublesome concepts into (usually) fifty-minute teaching sessions. Through intentional lesson design, I have deconstructed information literacy and set realistic goals for my instruction given the onerous limitations of the “one-shot” structure. Utilizing the principles of backward design, I have identified goals for those one-shots, prioritizing experiential, practical pedagogy over content delivery.

Classroom instruction, research consultations, and reference transactions are opportunities to engage with students at points of need and transform them into points of inquiry. In so far as I can, I develop relationships with students based on approachability and the normalization of the challenges of research. De-centering my instruction - both in and outside of the classroom - is the core of my praxis. It's not easy and it's perpetually humbling. It's also incredibly rewarding.

Because my area of instruction extends far past the confines of a classroom, so must my instructional content. I facilitate instruction in the application of critical thinking and information processes toward the goal of empowering students to be independent lifelong learners. This means linking classroom research processes to real-life information processes. Students are not blank slates passively consuming content. They are agents within the information ecosystem - whether they are aware of it or not. They exist in various contexts and they engage with information in various ways within those contexts. The most important thing I can do is activate those prior and non-classroom experiences so that students can learn, retaining and applying critical information gathering and use skills.

Just as critical librarianship forces me to acknowledge my privilege in the classroom, it challenges dominant/ canonical voices in course content and in college spaces. Amplifying the voices and concerns of people in the margins is a core function of a critical educator, especially when those people include the community I serve. Advocating for inclusion of minority voices in course readings and other teaching content is one way I do this. Creating intentionally diverse, multicultural, multi-lingual, multi-sensory, and multiracial enrichment and co-curricular programming is another. Teaching and learning are not exclusive to a classroom environment; learning can and does take place in seminars, workshops, film discussions, etc. For the students at my college it is imperative that I provide them access to these spaces and opportunities.