Can we really do it all? OLA Conference 2012
Supplementary materials to accompany our session at the OLA 2012 Annual Conference, April 25, 2012. Can we really do it all? The challenges we face as librarians who teach. By Anne-Marie Deitering and Kate Gronemyer.
- We started this project three years ago, with a survey sent out to a whole bunch of instruction librarians. The survey was designed to gather practice stories -- stories about what we do. This blog post summarizes that project.
mental debrief from WILUThere's something about spring term that's always crazy. Last week was my last presentation obligation of the term - the WILU conference ...- After that, we followed up with about 22 of the people who had responded to the survey -- they agreed to do in-depth interviews, on Skype, which we recorded, transcribed and analyzed.
- This book is an important piece of the puzzle. When we identify as teachers, there are certain assumptions about what that means - what it means to be "a teacher." Brookfield talks about the importance of constantly questioning those assumptions. The questions we asked about a "good day as a teacher," when we "feel like a teacher" and characteristics of "the best teacher I know" were designed to get at these assumptions.
teaching, reflection and hegemonySo apparently the first signs of spring inspire book reading. But in this case I had another reason to read this book - some upcoming pre...- Meanwhile, while we were revisiting these texts for this presentation - so were a lot of other people. Dozens of hits a day, coming in from different Google searches. I asked about it on Twitter.
- And was surprised to wake up the next day to an answer! Challenge those hegemonic assumptions!
@amlibrarian I'm one of those, we have a college essay to do about hegemonic assumptions, nobody has a clue, hence some furious googling!- The other piece (other than our assumptions about being a teacher) that we looked at was the development of our practice knowledge. We asked people to tell stories about how their practice has changed over time.One of our conversations led to a discussion challenging constructivism - a core theory underlying a lot of our practice assumptions. That is what started us on this path today.
- Here's an overview of constructivism and the key theorists in that arena:
theoristsJean Piaget is a Swiss psychologist who began to study human development in the 1920s. His proposed a development theory has been widely ...- Looking for other models led us to the training literature, to coaching (life coaching not football coaching), tutoring and finally, in an unexplored way, to therapy. Here's some of the resources we'll reference along the way:
- This article in Human Resource Development Quarterly is locked up behind a paywall. I was writing up this analysis of it at exactly the same time that Kate was reading it and emailing me about it. So, despite it's dull title, it's really pretty spot-on. Here's my summary. There's a link to the DOI in the post if you have access to the journal
Peer-Reviewed Friday: Either/or editionAS in "hard skills" or "soft skills" Or, to dig down a little deeper to another question - "teaching" or "training" So, I have been worki...- This article from the tutoring field is focused on the life sciences, but the ideas have more applicability. Our colleague Hannah Gascho Rempel pointed us here.
The Role of the Lecturer as Tutor: Doing What Effective Tutors Do in a Large Lecture ClassINSIGHTS FROM RESEARCH ON WHAT EFFECTIVE TUTORS DO Research on effective approaches to human tutoring is broad and extensive. In this pap...- This book is a good overview of the transfer process in training, which we think might have direct applicability to what we do.
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