As a recently qualified librarian – I made a mid-life career change three-years ago – I have been getting to grips with the exciting teaching opportunities this offer me in my new role as Academic Support Librarian at LCC. Some of this work relates to my previous practice as an associate lecturer teaching a course on Samuel Beckett and philosophy for close to ten-years, some things have proved to be completely new and have utterly changed my pedagogical perspective.
As part of my Masters in librarianship I studied information literacy, and it burgeoning sub-discipline of critical literacy. The work helped me expand my understanding of what a teacher-librarian is; of course we demonstrate and equip others with the ability to use databases and information resources, but we also engage with a whole other critical dialogue that looks deeply and tries to understand the information sources it uncovers. I help with the reading and analysis of published fields, empowering the creative and critical faculties of my students to stitch together sources in innovative, unexpected and revelatory ways. In pursuit of this I’ve developed scoping sessions themed around activities, which encourage ways of approaching common research topics such as literature reviews, in ways that play with both detective work and intuition.
The other great joy I’ve found working as a teacher-librarian has been the use of our amazing collections here at UAL. Bringing books as objects to the classroom for analysis inspiration and discussion. Building sessions around this material and finding ways to help connect it with students creative practice has been so rewarding. Viewing students competed work and seeing the traces of those objects in the finished pieces has been especially rewarding.