Call for Proposals — Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship: Special Issue on The place of teaching in academic librarians’ work

September 21, 2022

The place of teaching in academic librarians’ work

“Librarians teach. It might not be what we planned to do when we entered the profession, or it may have been our secret hope all along. Either way, we teach.” (Oakleaf et al. 2012, 6)

Teaching has become a core activity in academic libraries over the last decades, but librarians may find their teaching role to be a complicated one. Formal instruction largely began in the 1960s and 1970s as a grassroots movement led by librarians rather than library administrators or library schools (Mellon 1987), and some librarians still feel their library administrations do not understand or value their teaching. New librarians may still feel their education has left them  unprepared for teaching. At the same time, some administrations are now creating dedicated teaching units and high-level administrative positions focused on teaching and learning, as well as providing greater support for learning to teach. Many librarians identify as teachers or educators as well as librarians, but may not consider themselves as teachers in the same way as faculty, and may not consistently define their work as teaching (Davis, Lundstrom, and Martin 2011). Some may feel anxious or ambiguous about the role (Lundstrom, Fagerheim, and Van Geen 2021; Mattson, Kirker, Oberlies, and Byrd 2017).

Information literacy remains a major focus for librarians’ teaching, although it has adapted over the years in response to a radically changing information environment. The Association of College and Research Libraries’ (2016) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education highlights issues such as the nature of the information ecosystem, the recognition of different literacies, and students as creators as well as consumers. Teaching information literacy in the disciplines has become a core function of liaison and subject librarianship. Other issues of concern today include “fake news,” misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories; political and ideological polarization; racism, particularly anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism; social justice issues; and debates about the neutrality of libraries and librarians. Librarians also teach in many other areas, such as scholarly communication, research data management, digital humanities and digital scholarship, data visualization, GIS software, entrepreneurship, and more.

Many librarians continue to rely on faculty for access to their classes and their students. We may find faculty who view us as partners; we may find faculty who ignore us. Ongoing advocacy for our teaching is an important part of the role. Librarians continue to work hard to create meaningful one-shot sessions even as we recognize the limits of one-shots (Pagowski 2021). We may work to integrate our teaching more closely with curriculum. We also look for alternative sites and methods of instruction. The COVID-19 pandemic of course had an impact here.

We invite authors to contribute to these ongoing conversations by submitting proposals for inclusion in this special issue of CJAL. Both big picture and narrow focus on specific contexts/topics are welcome, including conceptual pieces, empirical studies, and case studies of practice.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic
• New librarians’ experiences of the teaching role
• Creating/developing  a teacher identity
• Experiences working in/setting up a dedicated teaching unit
• Librarians’ place in the institution’s pedagogy, assessment, and curriculum
• Administrators’ perceptions of the librarians’ role
• Advocacy for the librarians’ role
• Teaching in emerging areas (RDM, scholarly communication, digital humanities etc.)
• Teaching in different settings and contexts, with different communities
• The Scholarship of Teaching Learning (SoTL) and librarians’ teaching
• How we use (or don’t use) the ACRL Framework
• Care work and teaching
• Critical theory/critical librarianship and our teaching
• Librarians’ teaching related to issues of:
  • racism and white supremacy
  • social justice
  • civic education
  • capitalism (e.g., racial capitalism, platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, neoliberalism)
  • power
  • feminized labour

Call for proposals

The Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship (CJAL) invites submissions to our special issue on The place of teaching academic librarians’ work. CJAL is an open access, peer-reviewed journal published by the Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians (CAPAL).

Authors interested in participating are asked to submit a proposal (maximum 800 words plus bibliography) as an email attachment (Word document or PDF) to can.j.acad.lib@gmail.com by December 20, 2021.

We welcome a wide variety of article types and methodologies, both traditional and non-traditional. These may include empirical studies and theoretical works. We encourage authors to draw on their personal experiences (e.g., program descriptions; autoethnography), but these should be contextualized in the broader environment and literature. Articles submitted for review must fit the journal’s Focus and Scope. The journal is bilingual (English/French); proposals may be submitted in either language. For more guidance, please see the journal’s Focus and Scope.

Deadline for proposal submission: Dec. 20, 2022

Notification of proposal acceptance: Jan. 30, 2023

Deadline for article submission: April 17, 2023

Anticipated special issue publication: December, 2023

The Special Issue Editors

Sandy Hervieux (she/her) is the Virtual Reference Coordinator and the Liaison Librarian for Political Science, Philosophy, and the School of Religious Studies at McGill University’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Her research interests include reference services, information literacy, and the impact of artificial intelligence on user services.

Eveline Houtman (she/her) recently retired from the University of Toronto Libraries. She currently teaches courses in information literacy and academic librarianship at the U of T iSchool. She completed a Ph.D. at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in 2020. Thesis title: What shapes academic librarians’ teaching practices?

Lindsay McNiff (she/her) is a Learning and Instruction Librarian and the liaison librarian for the Centre for Learning and Teaching, the English Department, and the School of Information Management at Dalhousie University. She also teaches graduate courses in the Dalhousie School of Information Management on information services and information literacy instruction. Her research interests include LIS education, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and labour in academic libraries.

Silvia Vong (she/her) is Associate Chief Librarian, Scholarly, Research and Creative Activities at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly X/Ryerson University). She has a MLIS (Western), and a M.Ed. with a focus on e-learning. Silvia is a Ph.D. candidate at OISE at the University of Toronto that looks at neoliberal conventions and their impact on equity, diversity, inclusion as well as anti-racism work in Canadian universities. Her professional research interests focus on critical practice in the profession, and teaching information literacy with special collections.

References

Association of College and Research Libraries. 2015. “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” http://acrl.ala.org/ilstandards/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Framework-MW15-Board-Docs.pdf.

Davis, Erin L., Kacy Lundstrom, and Pamela N. Martin. 2011. “Librarian Perceptions and Information Literacy Instruction Models.” Reference Services Review 39 (4): 686–702. https://doi.org/10.1108/00907321111186695.

Lundstrom, Kacy, Britt Fagerheim, and Stephen Van Geem. 2021. “Library Teaching Anxiety: Understanding and Supporting a Persistent Issue in Librarianship.” College and Research Libraries 82 (3): 389–409. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.82.3.389.

Mattson, Janna, Maoria J. Kirker, Mary K. Oberlies, and Jason Byrd. 2017. “Carving out a Space: Ambiguity and Librarian Teacher Identity in the Academy.” In The Self as Subject: Autoethnographic Research into Identity, Culture, and Academic Librarianship, edited by Anne-Marie Deitering, Robert Schroeder, and Richard Stoddart, 143–69. Chicago, IL: Association of College & Research Libraries.

Mellon, Constance A., ed. 1987. Bibliographic Instruction: The Second Generation. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

Oakleaf, Megan, Steven Hoover, Beth Woodard, Jennifer Corbin, Randy Hensley, Diana Wakimoto, Chrisotpher V. Hollister, Debra Gilchrist, Michelle Millet, and Patty Iannuzzi. 2012. “Notes from the Field: 10 Short Lessons on One-Shot Instruction.” Communications in Information Literacy 6 (1): 5–23. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2012.6.1.114.

Pagowsky, Nicole. 2021. “The Contested One-Shot: Deconstructing Power Structures to Imagine New Futures.” College and Research Libraries 82 (3): 300–309. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.82.3.300.

(Via Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship)