Southern California Instruction Librarians (SCIL) will be hosting SCIL Works on Friday, February 2, 2024 as a remote half-day mini-conference. This annual mini-conference offers librarians the opportunity to hear best practices, innovative pedagogy, and creative solutions with colleagues. SCIL Works 2024 will focus on ways librarians have incorporated effective communication strategies such as active listening, empathetic instruction, and more, into library instruction.
Communication is key to effective library instruction. Everything from coordinating with course instructors, students, and peers, to the types of learning objects we create, depends on communication that engages all participants. Many of us do not come to library instruction with formal training in communication, education, or public speaking, and yet these and related skills are often required to effectively engage and empathize with our learners. We have had to learn, often through trial and error, how best to listen, when to say "yes, and...," how to say no, and other strategies that have helped us connect with students, staff, faculty, other library workers, and ourselves with kindness and compassion.
Presentations
Research and Practice
(20 minutes followed by 5 minute Q&A)
Natalie Tagge
(University of California, San Diego)
Don't Worry, You Don't Have to Be Funny: Five Things I Use from Improv in Library Instruction
You don't have to ever take an improv comedy class to incorporate some of the basic tenets into your academic library work. There are always moments in instruction and reference work where you will be asked to improvise. In this presentation, I will review 5 basic Improv tenets, including "yes, and" and "always accept the base reality" that I hope everyone will consider incorporating into their instruction and other public services work. In my experience using these has helped me become more confident and create a more participatory and empathetic learning environment.
Mohsin Ali
(University of California, Los Angeles)
Librarian-Faculty Teamwork: How Understanding Constraints Led to Critical Literacy Breakthrough
Fostering genuine student engagement with complex texts can feel like an uphill battle in large undergraduate courses, where instructors juggle limited time, diverse needs, and research demands. This presentation delves into a case study of how two library liaisons partnered with the teaching team of a large public university's writing course to transform student response papers from rote summaries into springboards for critical analysis. This successful collaboration was the result of the library team understanding the constraints that the instructors faced.
Initially, the course structure seemed set in stone: weekly readings, short response papers, and a longer final essay based on sources selected by the instructors. The library team proposed a series of social annotation assignments. Students would grapple with the assigned readings together on an online platform, highlighting passages, posing questions, and building on each other's insights. To bridge the gap between annotation and written analysis, we suggested that instead of demanding essays on specific readings, students should be encouraged to leverage their annotation activity, expanding on their online comments and questions to craft richer, more nuanced analyses.
The quality of response papers improved. Teaching assistants reported that students did a better job of engaging specific parts of the readings than they had in previous years. Importantly, the changes we introduced did not significantly add to the TAs weekly workload. By understanding instructor constraints and building trust through open communication, librarians can become invaluable partners in the quest to equip students with the critical literacy skills they need.
Magaly Salas
(University of San Francisco)
Gleeson "Time Ma-zine" Workshop: Enhancing Student Success through Primary Sources and Zines
This presentation showcases the impact of zine-making and self-reflection for first-year students transitioning to living on campus and conducting academic-level research. A Student Success Librarian forged a partnership with USF101, a designed course for first-semester undergraduate students new to the University of San Francisco. The Student Success Librarian designed an information literacy course that introduces first-year students to primary sources, USF's Gleeson Library Digital Collections, and zine-making. Students work with the library's primary sources to create a zine that reflects the goals and connections they hope to make during their undergraduate experience. As a result, students leave the library session with an understanding of how to navigate digital collections databases and how to conduct primary research. Most importantly, students are provided a space to reflect on their feelings and goals for this new chapter, while challenging mainstream media through the creation of alternate sources. This session will include tips for any academic librarian interested in incorporating this strategy into their work. This session will consist of a step-by-step tutorial for creating successful peer collaborations in library instruction and unconventional tools that enhance library instruction.
Karen Tinajero-Vazquez
(California State University, San Marcos)
Prioritizing Self-Care as a New Librarian: A BIPOC Perspective and Guide
At the core of librarianship is the widely accepted persona of a caring and nurturing librarian. We often emphasize our caring role when communicating with students and faculty; however, we rarely examine how damaging this approach can be to a new librarian. New BIPOC librarians are particularly vulnerable to burnout as they are socialized to play their role as a caretaker without regard for their well-being. Before we learn how to care for others, we first need to learn how to care for ourselves. This presentation provides applicable communication and self-care tips for the new and emerging instruction librarian and practical advice for setting boundaries, developing professional and teaching identities, resisting self-doubt, and finding support. This discussion is also relevant for current librarians working with or mentoring recent graduates, students, or early career librarians. Most importantly, this presentation will be told from the perspective of a recent graduate and newly hired academic librarian.
Elizabeth Galoozis
(The Claremont Colleges Library)
Don't Take it Personally: Practicing Effective Feedback Using a Fictional Teacher
Clear, actionable feedback can be difficult to give, especially when we want to maintain good relationships with colleagues. It's hard to be vulnerable as both a giver and recipient of feedback, to go beyond "It went great!" or "I didn't like it."
In this presentation, I'll describe an exercise I used with teaching librarians to give more effective and specific feedback on teaching (as part of our library's peer observation program). I'll describe the exercise, in which we reviewed aspects of effective feedback, many taken from Eleanor Drago-Severson and Jessica Blum-DeStefano's book Tell Me So I Can Hear You: A Developmental Approach to Feedback for Educators. We then watched a short classroom scene from Saved By the Bell, wrote feedback for the teacher, and commented on how each piece of feedback reflected best practices. Using a scene that included many "bad" teaching practices helped us to craft constructive feedback, while at the same time focusing on best practices rather than relationships or assumptions about the teacher. I'll reflect on what went well and what didn't, and invite participants to reflect on which aspects of the exercise might work in their own contexts.
Lightning Rounds
(5 minutes each, 10 min Question and Answer at the end of all lightning presentations)
Nick D'Andrea and Mia McGee
(Pepperdine University)
I'm Here, Now What?: Easing First-Year Anxieties Among Librarians and Students in the Classroom
In this presentation, we will discuss how we have used the fear cards activity to help us better understand first year undergraduates to, create more meaningful instructional sessions, assist us in moderating our own anxieties as first-year librarians, and collaborate with peers. The activity consists of asking students to anonymously write down what they fear most about research or using the library. After reading the responses, the librarian groups them thematically and addresses them directly in the session. This approach has allowed us to teach on relevant information which creates a more personalized connection with the students and increases engagement. These responses have also offered us insight into what concerns them about interacting with the library and multiple uses of this activity have revealed how these concerns evolved throughout the semester. Additionally, we, as first-year librarians, have assuaged some of our anxieties about our new profession and found a new avenue to collaborate with our peers through our use of fear cards. Utilizing this activity has provided us more guidance in our instruction, helping us overcome our fears of failure in the one-shot. Using fear cards in multiple classes has also fostered communication between us as we can compare student responses and discuss our findings. Overall, fear cards can contribute to building trust and fostering a culture of self-kindness in the library.
Mark W. Duncan
(Christian Brothers University)
Using Minute Papers and Follow-Up Surveys to Receive and Give Feedback After First-Year Composition Library Instruction
As librarians who do instruction, we need to know the concepts students understand and the areas in which they struggle. At Christian Brothers University, we use minute papers and a follow-up survey to aid in the collaboration between the library and the first-year composition (FYC) program and ensure that both the library and FYC instructors understand students' comprehension of the library material. After each course-integrated library instruction session, the librarian hands out minute paper slips for students to reflect on what they learned and where they might still be unsure. This feedback is then shared with the FYC instructor so that both the librarian and instructor understand the students' levels of comprehension. A couple weeks after each library instruction session, the librarian sends a LibWizard follow-up survey for the instructor to send to students in order to help the librarian and FYC instructor understand how students have applied the lesson material and where they might still be unsure. After the librarian receives the follow-up survey responses, the responses are analyzed and the librarian sends the FYC course instructor the areas about which students are still unsure, along with an extended explanation to help clarify any remaining misunderstandings. Through this collaborative formative assessment, all faculty and librarians involved with the first-year composition program can better help students who may not reach out for help on their own
Josh Rose
(College of Alameda)
Exploring Peer-reviewed Research Through Collaborative Group Work
Librarians often promote peer-reviewed journal articles as the scholarly sources needed for the completion of successful research assignments. However, the audience for these important sources of knowledge are experts in disciplines with years of experience, training and specialized vocabulary, which can make peer-reviewed research difficult to read and summarize for undergraduate or two-year college students. This lightening talk describes how using collaborative group work to analyze, summarize, and talk about peer-reviewed journal articles can be one way to scaffold students' understanding of and facility with peer-reviewed literature while also being kind of fun.
- College of Alameda Lightning Presentation: PDF (217 KB)
- College of Alameda Lightning Presentation supplement: Anatomy of a Journal Article: PDF (242 KB)
- College of Alameda Lightning Presentation supplement: Selected Articles by Discipline: PDF (90 KB)
- Collaborative Notes
