David Smith Teaching Librarian

Genesis Elijah the young black British man speaking in this video, originally posted on the Bipolar UK site, explains how the stereotype threat (Spencer, et al, 2016))¹ he experiences as a black man – being seen as someone frightening and dangerous to others – interacts negatively with his mental health and significantly hampers his ability to reach out for support. Talking openly he notes the psychological strain this places on himself, expressed as a need to “mask” or “tone himself down”, both in is appearance and behavior, and to hopefully obviate this threat and make those around him feel more comfortable .

The intersection between Genesis’s identity as a black man and someone with bipolar disorder is fundamentally mediated by this racially manifested form of stereotype threat, creating for him an internalised state of self-stigma (Watson, et al, 2007)²; a mind-set that lowers self-esteem and resilience (Angermeyer and Matschinger 2009). Rather than accepting his mental health condition he seeks to hide its existence behind the facade he has already created for others, and in doing so increases the stressors that might initiate hypomanic, manic, mixed or depressive episode. Genesis’s heartfelt plea, which he counterpoints against the startling statistics relating to young black men’s mental health, is how hard it has been for him to disclose his condition, to talk openly and get help. His point being that young black man with serious mental health conditions are likely to be invisible to you and I , and more likely as a result to spiral into deeper crisis.

This spectral status carries over into the higher education context, and is reflected in the ineffectiveness of data collected for HESA returns and monitored by universities for regulatory and statistical assurance measures. UAL’s figures are a case in point, reducing disability down to a single category – distinctions between access, learning and mental health needs are noticeable by their absence. Secondly, the telling phrase “disclosed disability” only goes further to highlight how many individuals are absent from this discourse. To further nuance the case, when is disclosure made, and can disclosure be added to statistical returns midway through, or even retrospectively to study. There is a vacuum in these numbers where someone like Genesis should be heard but isn’t.

My own research has looked at the development of mental health literacy policy for students with bipolar in UK HEIs. Part of which included a nationwide survey (carried out with Bipolar UK) of bipolar students’ experiences at university³. It showed many were not diagnosed whilst at university, and that the pressure of university could initiate first onset conditions, and further bipolar students were often seen as disruptive and negative.

My work informs a belief and an ethical challenge we all face, that when it comes to complex intersectional cases, where we may be teaching young black men struggling to disclose mental health conditions, that we fight against stereotyping threat⁴. Just because a disability disclosure, hasn’t, can’t or won’t be made by the individual, doesn’t mean we should ignore its traces in our/their actions. As teachers we need to improve our mental health literacy and find ways to fill in the gaps in our knowledge – noticing cases made more challenging by interacting aspects of identity – to be able to open safe spaces where disclosure can happen. To help those who are currently silent… but that’s a topic for another post.

Footnotes

1. “Stereotype threat describes the situation in which there is a negative stereotype about a persons’ group, and he or she is concerned about being judged or treated negatively on the basis of this stereotype.” (Spencer and Davis, p.46, 2016) ↩︎
2. “… persons with mental illness may internalize mental illness stigma and experience diminished self-esteem and self-efficacy. We refer to this process as self-stigma. (Watson, et al, 2007) ↩︎
3. Over the last 5 years (beginning in 2021) only 27% of students with bipolar were diagnosed and known to the system. ↩︎
4. In the HE case, stereotype threat is less likely to be about fear as it is in Genesis’ description of urban London life, and more likely as shown in Spencer, et al’s (2016) case to be situated in prejudice around academic ability. ↩︎

References

Amy C. Watson, Patrick Corrigan, Jonathon E. Larson, Molly Sells, (2007) ‘Self-Stigma in People With Mental Illness’, Schizophrenia Bulletin, Volume 33, Issue 6, Pp1312–1318

Angermeyer, M.C., Matschinger, H., Corrigan, P.W., Calabrese, J.D., Penn, D.L., Griffiths, K.M., Christensen, H. and Jorm, A.F. (2009) Stigma and help-seeking. Clinical Psychology, 21, pp.400-413.

Spencer, S.J., Logel, C. and Davies (2016) ‘Stereotype Threat’, Annual Review of Psychology, (Volume 67), pp. 415-437. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-073115-103235.

Smith, D. (2021) Developing a mental health literacy programme for the support of UK undergraduate students with bipolar disorder, MA Thesis, UCL

Self disclosure

This blog is written in part as a response to my own work on furthering mental health literacy in the higher education sector, and personally as someone who survived higher education – some-how – before receiving a diagnosis for my own bipolar condition much later in life.

Links to blog contents

Action Research Project Unit

• Developing a research question and intervention from an action research approach
• Ethics Form and the development of the project
• Character Defining: game development and promotion (including participant material)
• Character Defining: curating the bibliography
• Character Defining: playing the game and participant observations
• Character Defining: analysing the participants’ character journals
• More games?: closing the action research loop, reflections and developments (including presentation PowerPoint)

Inclusive Practices Unit

• Intervention: Mental health library zine session
• Blog 3: critical race theory and educational policy
• Intervention: discussing mental health through zines (300 word outline)
• Blog 2: Faith – Exploring the intersections of race and faith as a way to create an inclusive welcome for new students joining UAL
• Blog 1: Disability – Reflections on stereotype threat and self-stigma in young black men with bipolar disorder

Theories, Policies and Practices Unit

• The Teacher-Librarian
• Case Study 1: Knowing and meeting the needs of diverse learners: BA Advertising induction session
• Case Study 2: Planning and teaching for effective learning: Literature review session
• Case Study 3: Assessing learning and exchanging feedback: 1-2-1 Library Tutorial
• Microteaching Task: using photobooks for inspiration
• Blog Post 1: Creative engagement with archives
• Blog Post 2: Embedding social justice opportunities into dissertation research training
• Blog Post 3: Reviewing and learning from a colleague’s session on careers in the film industry
• Blog Post 4: Reviewing an overloaded information literacy session
• Observation of a peer’s teaching practice
• Observation of my teaching practice by a tutor and a peer

Introduction & Background

New BA Advertising Students at UAL are invited to an induction session delivered by myself (a librarian) and a member of the Advertising teaching team. The session teaches a nervous/shy transnational cohort of students, library skills, as well as orientating them with the physical library space, and offering a shared forum for reflection/assessment on advertising focused library items/books.

Evaluation

The strategies used focus on reducing social-anxiety and fostering early interactions with peers at the same time as developing  library searching skills.  This approach follows well-researched practices in librarianship regarding how we introduce information literacy to creative arts students (Appleton, et al, 2017).  The activities in the session are designed to counter students developing doubts about their academic skills – a phenomena identified as imposter syndrome by Clance & Imes (1978) and more recently contextualised within the academic library sector by a range of theorists including Ramsey and Brown (2018).  To overcome this, the session avoids overloading, only introducing the necessary skills required to carry out the first searches.  Crucially these skills are immediately put into practice, with students sent on a treasure hunt to find advertising items/books that they find interesting or fun. This exercise following pedagogical practices set out by Whitton & Langan regarding the benefits of fun in academic teaching (2019).  As a ploy students are put into small groups, allowing peer support, and a chance to naturally break through initial social barriers, make friends and have fun; ticking many of Whitton & Langan’s thematic network boxes (see diagram) (2019).

Challenges and ways of moving forward

Large lecture theatre

Starting the session in a large lecture theatre can undermine the group activity and collaboration which ultimately make the session work and reduce anxiety. Again, referring to Ramsey & Brown, who identify secure and happy experiences in the library as a way to tackle imposter syndrome (2019), I would like to consider small friendly tours around the space prior to some of the necessary library skills scaffolding in the lecture theatre.

Making the most of the sharing exercise

There is already a lot of joy and fun in the sharing exercise, but ultimately it doesn’t let the students share aspects of who they are and where they have come from.  This is explored further in the next point.

Addressing the needs of the international cohort

Although the group activities more broadly support and settle the breadth of identities in the group (avoiding seeing the ‘international students’ as a homogenous other) it doesn’t help to share or celebrate the diversity of interests in the classroom.  I’ve been inspired by the survey of possible library activity in this area carried out by Collins & Garcia (2020), who in their moving forward statement suggest collection development and highlighting of fields that cover all of the national identities of their students, as a way of addressing this.  The library at UAL is already doing a great deal of this work, and I would like to think it might be highlighted in some way in the search exercise element of the session.

References

• Appleton, L., Grandal Montero, G., & Jones, A. (2017) Creative Approaches to Information Literacy for Creative Arts Students. Communications in Information Literacy, 11 (1), 147-167. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2017.11.1.39
• Collins, I.S. and Garcia, I.B. (2020) UK university libraries supporting transnational education (TNE) partnerships. Insights: the UKSG journal,  33(1), p.20.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.517
• Clance, P.R. and Imes, S.A. (1978) The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, research & practice, 15(3), p.241.
• Elizabeth Ramsey & Deana Brown. (2018) Feeling like a fraud: Helping students renegotiate their academic identities, College & Undergraduate Libraries, 25:1, 86-90, DOI: 10.1080/10691316.2017.1364080
• Nicola Whitton & Mark Langan. (2019) Fun and games in higher education: an analysis of UK student perspectives, Teaching in Higher Education, 24:8, 1000-1013, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2018.1541885

Contextual Background

As a librarian I deliver a sequence of repeating sessions, helping students develop search strategies for their literary reviews.  Structurally these involve an intro to search techniques, the carrying out of searches, followed by the testing of sources’ authority.  Challenges relate to the fact that these sessions service students across both post-graduate and undergraduate levels of study and across a wide range of disciplines. They follow a standardised lesson plan produced and designed by librarians which needs to be adjusted for each discrete class.

Evaluation

As a strategy to combat the generic feel of these sessions I build in a narrative through subject-focused searches that unpack an interesting research landscape related to the given students’ discipline.  Telling a story keeps the students’ interest and gets them thinking (Thuna & Szurmak, 2019). It is an established information literacy strategy found in a lot of IL research over the last 20 years that deal directly with the use of digital search environments.

Constructivist pedagogy (Grassian & Kaplowitz, 2009) is used throughout to get students engaged in learning through active doing.  Students personalise the experience by creatively developing their own keywords and then testing them.  Later looking at results and using an authority checklist, and assessing and sharing results.  It is a way to get research project specificity back into the classroom, and counter the greyness of delivering scaffolding around the use of multiple databases and catalogues.

The offer of follow-up 1-2-1 tutorials (see case study C) also indicates that the desired learning is not always achieved in the class space, requiring follow-ons.

Moving forwards

These sessions established and generic formulation have prevented them from being critically assessed or their objectives and learning outcomes tested.  Discussion held during the PgCert have got me thinking about a radical alternative.  Introducing a notion of a flipped classroom (Johnston & Karafotias, 2016), it might be possible to remove the scaffolding elements, which require so much reworking for each specialist class and which also potentially, even with narrative selection appear boring, and replace them with learning tasks prior to the class.  Online tutorials or videos, which are completed and undertaken at students own pace prior to the class will develop the skill necessary to run the session according to a different context.  Starting classes with these skills in place allow the sessions to be driven by activities created by and linked to the students’ research.  As a tutor, focused and supportive interjections as to how to nuance searches or suggest other databases can be made.  It would also provide a better basis and starting point for subsequent 1-2-1 sessions.

The issues related to this are associated to the shared ownership of the sessions.  Librarians work to a standard template, and before this is updated, would require a number of test sessions and reflection on success and feedback before considering more widespread change.  Equally, each session is delivered in conjunction and for a specific teaching team, and they too would need to assess how these changes impacted on the course’s overall delivery.

References  

• Grassian, E. S., & Kaplowitz, J. R. (Eds.). (2009) Information Literacy Instruction: Theory and Practice. UK, Neal-Schuman Publishers.
• Johnston, N. and Karafotias, T. (2016) Flipping the classroom to meet the diverse learning needs of library and information studies (LIS) students. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, 57(3), pp.226-238.
• Thuna, M. and Szurmak, J. (2019) Telling their stories: A study of librarians’ use of narrative in instruction. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 45(5), p.102048.

Introduction & Background

As a librarian I offer 1-2-1 tutorials for students on the BA in Magazine Journalism and Publishing as part of their final major project. These offer a space for students to make a self-assessment of their research strategy, and where I can then help them develop the independent critical research strategies needed to carry out a systematic literary review.

Evaluation

These student sessions begin from an understanding of self-assessment as reflection on personal practice (Race, p.4 2001); and build on this premise noting that self-reflection where linked to the development of specific skill – information literacy in this case – can provide foundations for life-long learning beyond a given project (Grantz & Gruber, p.23, 2014).  The tutorials start with the use of open questions – following standard library support protocols (Dunford, 2013) – asking the student to reflect and then assess the strengths and weakness of the material they have found; as well as identifying what they would like/need to find.  Reflection becoming a baton-handing moment in the information-searching process.  At this point I also introduce elements of critical information literacy (Elmborg, 2006) , asking students to assess the authority and socio-political meaning of the research sources they locate (Whitehorn, 2023). The aim being for them to critically assess a research landscape as they locate their sources, using skills and techniques I share with them.

Challenges and ways of moving forward                                       

Academic staff’s’ framing of librarian support

One of the biggest challenges is the expectation set by (some) academic staff colleagues, who inform their students that librarians will find them the material they need for their study. This stands in contrast to the learning outcomes of the final major projects which require students to develop independent research skills. Part of any initial discussion requires the reframing of my offer, noting that I will be helping them develop an information-search strategy. Moving forward I would like to implement a submission form to be completed prior to a 1-2-1 tutorial, which clarifies this.

Quiet and unconfident students

Some students are unwilling to take the lead in these circumstances, with the danger of me falling back into a leading role, effectively doing the searching for them. This is always a delicate balance as being too forceful may push vulnerable learners away.  Getting students to take control by driving the searches on their laptop, has proved to be a good transition method to enable students less willing or confident to engage with the task.

Talking too much

My biggest challenge though is to not get too excited or drawn into a project and instead keep quiet for large portions of the session. Students only achieve the results/learning if they reflect themselves on their searching strategy. 

References

• Boud, D. (1995) Enhancing learning through self assessment. Abingdon: Routledge Falmer.
• Dunford, H. (2013) Successful enquiry answering every time (6th ed., previously published as Success at the enquiry desk). Australian Library Journal 62 (1) p.83–83.
• Elmborg, J. (2006) Critical information literacy: Implications for instructional practice. The journal of academic librarianship, 32(2), pp.192-199.
• Grantz, RE & Gruber, R. (2014) ‘“How Well Did I Learn What I Learned?” The Art of Self Assessment’, Journal of the Academy of Business Education, vol. 15, pp. 23–40, viewed 26 February 2024, https://search-ebscohost-com.arts.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=101788627&site=ehost-live&scope=site .
• Race, P. (2001) A briefing on self, peer & group assessment. York: Learning and Teaching Support Network.
• Withorn, T. (2023) Critical Online Library Instruction: Opportunities and Challenges. Communications in Information Literacy, 17(2), pp. 332-352.

The micro-teach I decided on for the PgCert adapted a session previously delivered to MA Publishing students. This session investigated the structural formats (fold, panels, boxes, etc.) of the books brought to class and looked at how these design elements work in conjunction with their photographic content – reading from Carlin (2023) who argues that the structural elements of the photobook are crucial elements of its composition and meaning.

To adapt this session for my new audience, I altered the plan and its learning outcomes.  Rather than providing inspiration for a specific book making project, the aim was now to inspire the use of novel printed forms as vehicles for my teacher-participants’ wide-range of practice, using principles put forward by Barton and Willcocks, regarding object-based self-enquiry (2017). 

To start the session I provided scaffolding by way of a quote two of the authors of one of the books Albaran and Cabrera who made the book The World’s First Photobook Was Blue (2021), who say: “Photography is not the thing. It is the thing that gets us to the thing.”

It providing a way to explain how an object-photograph and then an object-book, helps approach topics from a new hyper-observational point of view – using the book and the photograph to see the world reframed.  The aim was to run with this idea, and chose one item as a way of not only of understandings its content but seeing potentially how it might inspire the participants’ practice.

To provide the best chance of inspiration I let the participants choose from six books, locating the one that attracted them most. 

Once selected each were given a worksheet (designed to provide a place to collect their observations using guiding questions).

Before receiving the participants’ responses, I realised that the timing of my session had over-run, mainly due to my misunderstanding that the discussion time was included in the object handling time, and not something discrete.  When the responses were received it became apparent that only half of the learning objectives had been addressed, with all showing a range of curious insight and analysis, but none commenting on the practical application of these observations for their own work. I tried to recover this by responding to each participant with my assessment of application, but in retrospect this may have been a mistake.

Feedback from the group noted three key observations, that they were unaware of the learning outcomes, that I should feel confident to let others’ views stand and not interject and that I didn’t need to be nervous. I agreed strongly with these, noting my missteps.  Crucially I noted to myself that you cannot transpose a teaching exercise from one context to another without really considering the new audience you are addressing. Second, that you cannot assume learning outcomes are clear, unless you properly spell them out

• Albarrán, A., Cabrera, A. and Rexer, L. (2021) The world’s first photobook was blue. Munich, Germany, Antwerp, Belgium, Paris, France: Ira Stehmann Fine Art, IBASHO, the(M) éditions.
• Barton, G. and Willcocks, J. (2017) ‘Object-based self-enquiry: A multi- and trans- disciplinary pedagogy for transformational learning’, Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal, 2(3), pp. 229–245.
• Carlin, B.A. (2023) Theorising encounters with contemporary photobooks: situation, materiality and plurality. In The photobook world (pp. 35-44). Manchester University Press.

Reading the article by Willcocks & Mahonon (2023) on the use of botanical illustrations from the archive collections at UAL to teach/reveal intersectional climate and post-colonial social justice occasions, was really inspiring and made me think about the ways in which my current practice might learn from this.  I thought specifically about a session I have with MA Publishing students where we learn how to carry out an analysis of a research field in preparation for carrying out similar authority work on the research field  of their dissertation.  Part of this class employs the use of fun to carry out such an analysis (Whitton & Langan, 2019).  In groups students are given a mystery file containing a range of articles, blog pieces, trade press stories etc. normally on a hot publishing topic – cancel culture in publishing for instance.  They then have to piece together the story of this research area, who, where, when and why are people writing on this topic.  Which voices are missing, who has dominance on this narrative and where would you go to get better coverage of all aspects of this topic. 

Looking at article’s case study I can see a real opportunity to ask these question in the framework of social justice question.  Adding in props such as map plotting (used by Willcocks & Mahon) as part of the investigative game could add a focused critical insight whilst remaining playful.  As a development it sits comfortably next to a sister librarian project I am working on with staff from the same course to  buy a range of new items for the collection related to non-western publishing industries.

References

• Nicola Whitton & Mark Langan. (2019) Fun and games in higher education: an analysis of UK student perspectives, Teaching in Higher Education, 24:8, 1000-1013, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2018.1541885
• Willcocks, J. & Mahon, K. (2023) The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education. art, design & communication in higher education, 22(2), pp.187-207.