I was hoping to have made several posts about the concept of “voice” in university study before I posted this info about a session that Kirsten Thorpe and I are doing with Andrew Finegan from ALIA on 8 July at 1:30pm ACST. You can register here.

The fortnight between Study Periods, finalising marks and creating new course outlines, materials and sites, is not the time to write anything fully formed, though…

I have spent a lot of time thinking about whose voice is represented in LIS education, and how we can do better. I put it into practice when I re-designed the foundational course for the UniSA Information Management degrees last Study Period… yes, as I was delivering it. I still have a long way to go. I wrote about some of the ways I made space for diversity, when I redesigned the course, for the July ALIA Incite supplement.

As I said a few posts back, by voice, I mean when an individual communicates:

• information and knowledge
• how they understand that knowledge
• how they use it
• how they express themselves and live their lives through their knowledge
• how they take up space, both in the conversation and in the room where conversation is happening

It’s metaphorical. In this case, the room is the learning space of the course I am teaching.

All sorts of voices are there.

Mine, as lecturer, is traditionally the focus. I want to do all I can to change this. Even the job title – lecturer – implies “talking at”. Historically, lecturers were the people who had three things; access to printed texts that others did not have, a literacy level allowing them to read them, a platform (literally, a raised wooden dias) where they could read these texts out loud. Students were there to take notes of the texts that were read aloud.

With a literate set of students, and a focus on critical thinking and application of knowledge, my voice as lecturer to communicate knowledge should take a back seat to other voices. There is no reason for me to summarise and read aloud the works by others who are speaking in their own voices.

Helping with meaning-making around those voices? Yes. Condensing what I read into a number of bullet points, pre-digesting them, popping them on a Powerpoint slide, then spitting them out one after the other at passive students? No.

I see my role not as being a performative “sage on the stage”, no matter how much my students expect me to rain down wisdom from on high and fill them like empty vessels.

I want to explore how to help students find and develop their own voices as professionals, within a discipline, and as people with the graduate qualities my university aims to instill.

Anyone who has spent more than half an hour with me, or been taught by me, will know that my focus is not on stuffing student heads with facts, but on making sure students have a better set of questions at the end. That they realise there is so much more to know about the topic, but they come out with basic concepts, vocabulary to find out more. They know where to look. What the disciplinary discussion has been about, the main conversations, what has been covered, tried, thought about, argued about. Why the topic is important. How it fits in with the rest of the discipline.

But, this Study Period, I realised I could be doing far more to also help students to ask:

• Whose voice is not here?
• What damage have we done by the way we have been doing things as a discipline?
• What do the voices of those impacted by this damage sound like? What are they saying?
• What can we do to make that better ?

That is what I have written about in Incite and will be chatting about with Kirsten and Andrew.

If you have any questions or talking points you would like us to raise, the feel free to comment, ping me on Twitter, use the contact form on the blog…then I can take those with me into the (what will be too short!) 30 minute session.

Unless you think that LIS courses do have enough space for diversity, and have absolutely no suggestions about what we could be doing better…. No need to add your voice then…