Information Literacy Instructors’ Experiences of the Teaching Role

1. Information Literacy Instructors’ Experiences of the Teaching Role Heidi Julien & Cameron Hoffman School of Library & Information Studies University of Alberta WILU 2006

2. Study Objectives • How do library staff with instructional roles experience and relate to those roles • What might be the implications of those self-understandings for instructional outcomes? • Motivated by previous findings suggesting perceived ambivalence about teaching role

3. Your Own Instructional Experience:‘Pre-Questions’ to Consider… • What role does instruction play in your professional identity? • Did you expect to instruct when you began your career? • How did you develop your instructional skills?

4. Methods • Pilot study in one province • Interviews with instructional staff in public and academic libraries • 26 face-to-face interviews completed • Preliminary analyses done on transcripts • Full national study to commence soon (SSHRC-funded) • Interviews across Canada • Instructors’ diaries (online) • National survey

5. Preliminary Results:Ambivalence vs. Investment Ambivalence • “I think we would probably be talking about helping customers as opposed to instructing them.” [public library] • “I have no real sense of us even talking about an instructional role…the issue is an open one.” [public library] Investment • “Instruction is core to my perception of the discipline.” [academic library] • “[Instruction] is one of the core foundations of our profession.” [academic library] • “In order to…extend my career in libraries, I realized [instruction] is what I had to learn how to do.” [academic library]

6. Joys of Instructional Work: Personal Satisfaction • “It’s the key personal satisfaction with my role.” [public library] • “It’s where I get my energy, it’s where I get my greatest reward.” [academic library] • “It’s what gets me to work everyday.” [academic library] • “It’s a joy…the connection…I enjoy our students…I find them quite exciting.” [academic library]

7. Joys of Instructional Work:When People Get It • “The greatest satisfaction is when somebody gets it.” [academic library] • “…it’s the look on people’s faces when they actually understand something, when you’ve actually helped someone.” [public library] • “I think just seeing the ‘WOW’ factor on students’ faces. Seeing them say, ‘Ah, I get that. Oh, that’s how it works, I didn’t even know we had this.’” [academic library]

8. Other Joys of Instructional Work Developing Faculty Relationships • “…developing relationships with faculty I find very, very rewarding because it takes a long time, and to … understand your colleagues.” [academic library] Creativity in Instructional Design • “… I enjoy writing quite a bit, so, … putting it together in a module that I and other people can use in the future is really gratifying.” [public library] Exploring Instructional Technology • “… this is part of the joy of it, right? You get some new tool.” [academic library] Ego Satisfaction • “I like to stand up in front of a group of people and tell them what to do. … There is an ego-satisfying thing in that that I still enjoy.” [public library]

9. Challenges: Day-to-day logistics and life in the library Lack of time to instruct properly “Time. I don’t have time. Time. Huge issue. Because, really it takes priority. I mean, if you’re committed to doing an instruction session, you are committed to the time it takes to carrying that off.” [academic library] Students who start assignments very close to deadline “This is going to be something that you hear all the time, is when you have patrons come in and they have something due the next day.” [academic library] Anticipating student/user needs “You know, challenging, I think, too, is … how do I really know what the learners don’t know?” [academic library] Diversity of users “We have a lot of ESL customers as well, … and so that’s always a challenge to communicate.” [public library]

10. Challenges: Trained yet feeling unprepared – an issue of confidence • “…you’re a pseudo-teacher, I guess. You know, I’m not a teacher, I’m not trained as a teacher…”[public library] • Despite training (as a teacher or in an instruction course in an MLIS program) some librarians still don’t feel prepared for instruction. “I don’t feel like a teacher. I felt like I had some grounding in some sense of, OK, I can plan a lesson. … but it’s not the same as somebody who has taught for years and years kind of coming into this role.” [academic library]

11. Challenges: Student Misperceptions of their Information Literacy skills Student Over-confidence with online searching • “…you get some students who really think … they can’t hide their attitude that they really do know more than you in terms of searching the Web…” [academic library] • “… I think there’s a tendency to say ‘oh well, everybody can find stuff on the Internet.’ … I don’t think they’re using the Internet well.” [academic library]

12. Other Challenges of Instructional Work Feelings of Servitude to Academic Faculty • “You know, we walk around just acting like handmaidens, and we get treated like [that], in an academic institution … it doesn’t serve the academic community for the library to be anything but servitudinal.” [academic library] • “I mean, slowly, it’s changing, and sometimes if you work, I don’t mean to be, with so many males … sometimes they’re the old kind … they have their own ideas about what a librarian should be and should do.” [academic library] Lack of Support or Ambivalence from Administration • “There are challenges in the fact that we’re never sure whether our admin understands this.” [academic library] • “I’ve had a couple of deans in my classes as well … Most of them were not exposed to that as students … so making the case…” [academic library]

13. Instruction: Inherent to Librarianship? • To what extent is instruction perceived as inherent to librarianship? • Do librarians come to their jobs expecting to instruct? • When asked to instruct, is that the first time they equate librarianship with instruction?

14. Ownership of the Instructional Role To what extent is the instructional role owned by the librarian (i.e. feeling a sense of responsibility for the work beyond fulfilling the job description)? Ownership may correlate to experience. • Initially, some librarians may feel that instruction was foisted on them but now feel a sense of ownership over their instructional work. Ownership affects identity/faculty relationships. • Librarians who take ownership feel slighted by faculty who consider IL instruction similar to “babysitting” students.

15. How are instructional skills developed? • “I go to [conferences] … and I do lots of reading.” [academic library] • “I did attend a lot of workshops.” [public library] • “Learn by doing, learn by watching, learn by experimenting.” [academic library] • “The biggest way that I’ve been involved in professional development is just by hearing what others have had to say when they’ve gone [to workshops and conferences].” [academic library] • Instructional workshops intended for teaching faculty [academic library] • Further university education (e.g. second master’s degree)

16. Instructional Roles:Academic vs. Public Libraries • Differences between academic/public instructional contexts are complex • Inaccurate to assume that academic libraries and public libraries have fundamentally different perspectives on instruction. • Issue of ambivalence may arise from individual attitudes • “It’s an integral part of what I do. … We’re the people’s university.” [public library] • “I’m actually hoping to get out of it.” [academic library]

17. Metacognition: Instructors’ inclination to reflect on their role & work Personal reflection • Some interviewees found this difficult to do. • Especially difficult: separating the importance of their instructional work from its meaning to them as professionals. Organizational role in reflection? • Librarians in some organizations seemed more able/more willing to reflect than practitioners in other libraries. • Does organizational role/culture affect reflective capacity?

18. Metacognition: Issues for Instructors Interesting question raised: What is practice in the absence of reflection? “It’s hard to … I don’t think I’m that great of a teacher, but other people have observed me and, you know, they gave me different comments and that. So I think it’s kind of, it’s hard to perceive your own teaching, because you’re actually up there and you’re not really watching yourself.” [academic library]

19. Greater institutional support affects individual instructional attitudes Preliminary finding: “… it’s never been something that I particularly enjoy. … But we’ve done a lot of talking about moving towards information literacy curriculum, and if we did that, and that became a course, I’d be much more enthusiastic about it, and I would be interested in participating in that that kind of thing.” [academic library]

20. In the Future: How instructors see their role “I see more instruction developing, more instruction abilities, doing more research…” [academic library] “My prediction would be that we would be doing more of it [instruction] in the form of online tutorials.” [academic library] Acknowledgement by some librarians that while excellent IL instruction is done by individuals, improvements are needed within institutions to develop a stronger team approach. “…we need to come together and learn to do it in a more organized way, so we could do better marketing and education on a larger level, rather than on an individual level, because that’s how we’ve mostly been doing it.” [academic library]

21. Questions Raised • Do these results resonate with what you understand about yourself and/or your colleagues? • What might be the implications of • “hit and miss” instructional development • ambivalence towards instructional work • What roles does instructional work play in librarians’ professional identity?

22. Acknowledgements • Canadian Centre for Research on Literacy (Research Fellowship) • University of Alberta’s Endowment Fund for the Future--Support for the Advancement of Scholarship Program • Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada • Assistants: Sarah Polkinghorne and Claire Banton

23. Discussion Questions? Comments? Suggestions?