This document discusses critical pedagogy and its application to student employment in libraries. It addresses four key areas: recruitment, training, development, and reflection/assessment. The goal is to provide authentic learning experiences for student employees that challenge them and incorporate meaningful reflection. When implemented effectively through a community of practice model, critical pedagogy can help students learn how to learn and empower them to act from a place of reflective knowledge. Supervising student staff in this way allows them to gain skills while also being a rewarding experience for supervisors.

3. Where are
we going?
Role of Critical Pedagogy
Student Employment
& Learning
Four Areas of Application
Why Does It Matter?

4. “Many university
departments could not
survive without students
to provide assistance in
the daily operation of
facilities, programs,
services and projects.”
Scrogham & McGuire, Enhancing Student Learning through
College Employment

5. What is
Critical
Pedagogy?

6. “Critical pedagogy…
affords students the opportunity
to read, write and learn from a
position of agency-to engage in
a culture of questions…
imagining literacy
as a mode of intervention,
a way of learning
about the word as a basis
for intervening in the world….”
Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy

7. Three
Reasons
for
Critical Pedagogy

8. “…whole
human beings in
search of meaning.”
Liston and Garrison, Teaching, Learning, and Loving

9. “…the experience of the learning self
is invented in and through
its engagement
with pedagogy’s force.”
Elizabeth Ellsworth, Places of Learning

10. Critical pedagogy provides a
meaningful tradition
in which to
develop and participate
with students
in their search for meaning.

11. How do we
deliberately integrate
experience
and reflection
into the
student staff process?

12. “To learn meaningfully, student
employees must be challenged by
activities, tasks and projects that
are authentic to their position and
involve a certain amount of
reflection.”
Brett Perozzi, Enhancing Student Learning through College
Employment

13. “…a transitional object becomes
pedagogical when we use it to
discover and creatively work and
play at our own limits as
participants in the world.”
Elizabeth Ellsworth, Places of Learning

14. Can
library
employment
serve as a
transitional
object?

15. “Students need a general,
critical education that
teaches them to learn,
how to learn,
to question,
to do research,
to work alone and in groups,
and to act from reflective knowledge.”
Ira Shor, Empowering Education

16. Four Areas
of
Application
Recruitment
Training
Development
Reflection/Assessment

17. Recruitment
“Recruitment consists of
advertising, identifying
employees for
consideration,
and interviewing the
prospective employees.”
Scrogham & McGuire, Enhancing Student
Learning through College Employment

18. Training
Training “…as the
education or
instruction that occurs
during a worker’s
introductory or
transitional period.”
Scrogham & McGuire, Enhancing Student
Learning through College Employment

19. Initiate Observant Apprentice
Guided
Practice
Expert
peripheral participation
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 
core membership
McMichael and Dimmitt LOEX 2016

20. Development
Training as ongoing process
Interacting in a community of
practice
“…the focus ultimately should
be on the well-being of the
group of people working
together, so that common
interests and goals can
emerge.”
Scrogham & McGuire, Enhancing Student
Learning through College Employment

22. Reflection
&
Assessment
Informal
Formal
Recognition & Reward

23. Learning
Objectives
• To practice and apply critical
thinking and problem solving.
• To understand and utilize library
services and tools.
• To strive for patron satisfaction.
• To value dependability and
reliability.
• To practice effective communication
skills.
• To realize and apply administrative
and organizational skills.
• To embrace a team dynamic and
contribute to it.

24. Why
Does It
Matter?

25. “Supervising student staff is an
amazing, exhausting, and
exhilarating experience.”
Scrogham & McGuire, Enhancing Student Learning through College
Employment

26. References
• Ariew, Susan. “How We Got Here: A Historical Look at
the Academic Teaching Library and the Role of the
Teaching Librarian.” Communications in Information
Literacy 8.2 (2014): 208–224.
• Blum, Susan. “I Love Learning; I Hate School” : An
Anthropology of College. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2016.
• Day, Mark Tyler. “Transformational Discourse:
Ideologies of Organizational Change in the Academic
Library and Information Science Literature.” Library
Trends 46.4 (1998): 635–667.
• Drabinski, Emily. “Becoming Librarians, Becoming
Teachers: Kairos and Professional Identity.” Canadian
Journal of Information and Library Science 40.1
(2016): 27–36. [paywalled]
• ---. “Information Literacy Summit.” Blog. Emily
Drabinski. N.p., 3 May 2016. Web. 18 May 2016.
• Ellsworth, Elizabeth. Places of Learning: Media,
Architecture, Pedagogy. New York: RoutledgeFalmer,
2005.

27. References,
cont.
• Giroux, Henry A. On Critical Pedagogy. New York:
Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011.
Print.
• Hicks, Alison. “Drinking on the Job: Integrating
Workplace Information Literacy into the
Curriculum.” LOEX Quarterly (2015): 9–15.
• Liston, Daniel Patrick, and James W Garrison.
Teaching, Learning, and Loving: Reclaiming
Passion in Educational Practice. New York:
RoutledgeFalmer, 2004.
• Nicholson, Karen P. “The McDonaldization of
Academic Libraries and the Values of
Transformational Change.” College & Research
Libraries 76.3 (2015): 328–338. crl.acrl.org.
• Perozzi, Brett. Enhancing Student Learning
through College Employment. Indianapolis, IN:
Dog Ear, 2009.
• Shor, Ira. Empowering Education: Critical
Teaching for Social Change. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992.
• Warner, John. “Just Visiting.” Blog. Inside Higher
Ed. N.p., 31 Mar. 2016. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.