Librarians play an important teaching role by providing information literacy instruction to students. They teach students the skills needed to find, evaluate, and effectively use information. These skills include knowing how to locate information through searches, understand the types of information sources available, and recognize how knowledge is organized in subject areas. While librarians may experience some anxiety about their teaching responsibilities, providing information literacy lessons helps reduce student anxiety and allows them to succeed academically.
Will be ready by the end of the week – sorry it is taking me longer than anticipated
Anybody want to talk about career day
Our guest speaker is sick and can’t attend this evening. I am going to record her lecture for you to watch another time
Spring break next week!!!!
What do you think? What teaching roles do librarians serve?
Information literacy
Bibliographic instruction
Reference
Roaming reference
Embedded librarians
Do you want to teach? Why or why not?
How many of you want to teach? Expected to teach? Are teachers? Have teacher education?
How do you feel that role is played out in the library?
Kaetrena Davis – librarians tend to be happy teaching (based on her research) and to experience teaching anxiety throughout their career…it is a hard thing to overcome (and maybe a little anxiety is a good thing).
Anxiety…library anxiety…what is your experience? We also have to factor in technology anxiety…how do we make the library a better place for students? How can you empower users?
Put yourself in their shoes…remember the anxiety you have when you are starting something new…multiply that by the assignment plus library anxiety the students are facing…
What can we do to alleviate student anxiety about using our library? What about some of what we discussed last week – making the library more inviting to students…friendlier, a place people want to visit and use….does the library do any good to students who are afraid to ask questions?
This is discussed a lot in academic libraries…in QEP planning, schools are creating credit courses for information literacy. What does it mean? How does it affect your job? What about tenure?
ALA states that info lit is
This is not just for college students but all of us, as professionals, in the workplace and in our personal lives. Being information literate ultimately improves our quality of life as we make informed decisions when buying a house, choosing a school, hiring staff, making an investment, voting for our representatives, and so much more. Information Literacy is, in fact, the basis of a sound democracy.
Community colleges, professional schools, public libraries, adults are all in need of information literacy skills
Anecdotally this is common – info lit classes are on the rise…
Information literacy is also used in online tutorials
How to do the basics of libraries then you go into a “flipped classroom” – this is a classroom where the students watch any videos or do any tutorials before class…the librarian then focuses on hands-on work, essentially it is a lab environment with the librarians acting as facilitators while students do real searches on their topic.
Behaviorists deal with observable behavior, behavior is environmentally controlled, active participation, move at your own pace, tested for mastery…Skinner did a lot of the work…trail and error…reminds me of “learning on the job” or a lot of computer tasks….
Cognitive realm deals with elements, ideas, concepts and how they all fit together…constructivism – learning in context – how we learn is shaped by the situation, the need, our context…knowledge is constructed within the learner – the learner is not a vessel a professor fills up with ideas, instead the learner takes the information and constructs ideas…making connections between old knowledge with new information causes more complex ideas and knowledge to form…the learner wants to learn and feels rewarded upon success (will this work with someone who is extrinsically motivated?) Reflexivity is key – being able to write (or communicate) your learning process is an important part of knowledge creation…
Feelings are as important as thinking and behaving…Maslow’s heirarchy – your basic needs must be fulfilled before you can begin to learn (switch to next slide)
I want to touch on Maslow just one more sec…and tell you about an experience my colleague had…
…a colleague of mine at a CC mentioned that a student didn’t have their book for the last 2 classes…they had to sell it to buy gas to get to school and work…how do you teach to that?
How should librarians/teachers address these situations? Is it a part of understanding the students? Is it a part of the school mission?
No matter what else this story illustrates that learning does not occur in a vacuum!!!!!!
