This is Chiba.
Today I found out she is very, very unwell.
I have a few decisions to make.
I am very sad.
No more blogging tonight.
I pat the cat.
— Kathryn Greenhill (@Infoventurer) November 21, 2021
The cat pats me.
Seems fair. pic.twitter.com/xQvF8BS0He
Thank you to those already signed up for the Blogjune 2022 JuneQuestions .
Not too late to grab a nice juicy question to think about for a while before posting. Just under half the days have peoples’ names next to them.
I signed up for the very first question, which means I start with the three questions EVERYONE answers, before going on to the main event, which is:
” What is the most useful advice you have had from a mentor?”
I work fulltime as a Lecturer in Information Management at the University of South Australia. I took over teaching three courses from the State Library of South Australia at the start of 2021. I spent last year totally revamping two courses, before designing a brand new course this year to replace the other one.
For each course I teach, I give students two key questions to stick above their computers in case they get a bit lost with why they are reading or doing an activity. They also work well to explain to you what I teach.
I see my role as helping students ask better questions about the topics covered, know the key concepts and vocabulary, know where to look and who to ask, and how to keep finding out for the rest of their careers. I give them content and activities that I think will help them get closer, then encourage, guide and give feedback as they go further and learn more than I know.
… and… I signed up for three #JuneQuestions questions, so I am going to leave the other two questions (about my role and my biggest achievement) for the start of the other two.
So…
1. Focus on the “strategic few”.
This is just as simple as it sounds. And works in most situations. You can never do, know or finish it all. Some of it is more important than other bits. Do those.
The tricky part is working out what “important” means. This is where the idea of the “strategic” few, rather than just the “few because you are only a human of limited capacity” comes in.
I have been well-mentored by the profession, and am extremely grateful to the people before me who shared. This advice was part of a group mentoring activity. The same people talked about considering time frames:
For me, considering the “strategic few” only works because I have been encouraged to do a LOT of reflection and to think about the type of professional (and person!) I want to be, AND TO TAKE TIME TO ARTICULATE IT.
Right now, it is Week Nine of the ten week study periods that I teach. It is coming up to the very last component of continuous assessment for students. It is ALWAYS a reflective task. In the last week I have been trying to communicate to students just why it is important to do that reflective work now. How it is important to spend the lull times, or the times where your mind is freshly engaged with a topic, articulating carefully what it means to you. To think about what about it is valuable for how you will do life. What bits you need to develop, what to discard…and to write them down formally.
Why? Because it is very likely you will have to make a decision about those “strategic few” on the fly and under pressure. When you don’t have time or capacity for reflection and careful weighing up. If you have previously taken the lull times to write your own little guidebook of values and what aspects of a topic you find significant, you have a really useful tool up your sleeve when it does become time-critical.
I STILL find myself gravitating to “most interesting” and “most shiny” and “most likely to help someone else” few. BUT, with my mantra of “strategic few, strategic few”, and my own goals and values quite firmly understood (although frequently revised), I find it easier to walk away from the impossible and talk a bit more kindly to myself when I do.
(Why the nastursiums? Because every post deserves an image. The iStockPhotos ones that I was going to use were just too unintentionally funny or ridiculously stereotyped.
My blog. What I like. I like the wonderful variant that grew in my garden five years ago đ )
Right up – I am tagging Con, snail, Fiona, Peta, Sam, Kim, Cath, Fiona, Michelle, Graeme, Ruth, Tony, Penny, Hugh, Karen, Steph, Sally, Kate, Tania, Andrew and John.
About ten years ago, my friend Con and I launched a blog for BlogJune called Fortnight Question.
We both wanted to blog more and got a lot out of the public introspection. We figured we could commit to blogging once a month.
The idea was that I would choose a question to ask Con. She would answer it, then send it back to me, with a new question attached. Two weeks later, I would answer both questions, then send the newest question back to Con to answer in a fortnight, along with a brand new question. And so on.
We had a section for public submissions, and were happy to answer anything that people added.
It lasted. For a while.
Now – we have a whole bunch of questions left over, and BlogJune 2022 staring us in the face… so…
SHALL WE PLAY A GAME ?
(Yes – you… reader-you…you!)
Con started it all again, by sending me a few questions after a bunch of us posted on Twitter about maybe doing a round robin set of interviews for Blogjune 2022.
We are not going to hog all the fun this time, though… We hope. You can join in. For just a single day, just a single question. All we need are 30 people willing to blog once in June. Or even twice or three times – answer as many questions as you want but:
What list? The Google Doc Blogjune 2022 JuneQuestions.
How to play:
Answer these three questions:
5. Answer the question you signed up for.
6. Publish your response on your blog
7. Use the hashtag #blogjune and #junequestions
8. Tag someone anytime… on your blog, via Twitter, text them.. And ask them to sign up for a question.
9. Sign up for as many days as you want
I made some changes to the foundational course studied by Masters students in our Information Management program, updating it to better match the Australian Library and Information Association’s Foundational Knowledge for Library and Information Professionals at entry level and working within the profession.
I was chatting to some of the ALIA folk about it and they invited me to write an article for the INCITE magazine Workforce Diversity supplement July/August 2021.
This lead to an “In Conversation” webinar between Kirsten Thorpe, Andrew Finegan and myself to discuss diversifying LIS education in July 2021.
Kirsten is an Indigenous researcher who has shown leadership in policies and actions in the library and archives sector in Australia for the last decade or so. You can read more of her work at her ORCiD page, or her page at the Jumbanna Institute. She generously shared her knowledge with my students as a guest lecturer in April.
Below is the text of the article I wrote, then an embedded movie of our chat.
ACKNOWLEDGING, VALUING AND MAKING SPACE FOR DIVERSITY IN LIS EDUCATION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA
Librarians, records managers and archivists serve diverse people and keep diverse stories. LIS students vary in Indigeneity, language spoken at home, country of origin, physical ability, sexuality, economic background and life experience and choices.
Traditionally, university courses have not reflected this diversity. The voices students hear, the things they read and the topics they cover, all tend to normalise a white middle-class, middle-aged, able-bodied English-speaking perspective.
In 2021, the foundational course for University of South Australiaâs information management postgraduates was re-designed. This provided opportunity to align the course with the Universityâs Enterprise25 Strategic Plan 2018-2025 which values diversity and social justice.
Here are some things I implemented:
PROMOTING AND MAKING SPACE FOR INDIGENOUS VOICES AND KNOWLEDGEFOREGROUNDING MISSING VOICES
- Two Indigenous professionals, Kirsten Thorpe and Kim Tairi, provided guest lectures. They were invited to talk on whatever they believed foundational students needed to know, whether it fitted the curriculum or not.
- Where possible, Indigenous perspective is provided, using work by an Indigenous creator. For example, in the history topic, students are reminded that historical accounts of libraries in Australia value settler knowledge not Indigenous knowledge. They also read about current impact of historic collecting of Indigenous knowledge by libraries worldwide.
- âKaya Nganyang kwerl Kathryn Greenhillâ. My first words to my students are a greeting in language of the Noongar people from South Western Australia where I was born.
- When logging on to our course page, the first thing that students now see is Acknowledgement of Country.
ACKNOWLEDGING DIVERSITY AND INCORPORATING IT AS STRENGTH
- In Week 1, students read the ALIA Workforce Diversity Trend Report 2019. Statistics showing extreme lack of diversity are discussed. Students are invited to consider in future course readings who is speaking, the presumed audience, who is being represented and who is being excluded.
- Topics covered in the course now include human rights, the Sustainable Development Goals, equity, antidiscrimination, diversity, inclusion, non-neutrality, decolonisation, codesign, Indigenous cultural protocols, universal design, care, self-care ethics and critical librarianship. Where possible, students read work by people impacted. For example, work by Nikki Anderson, a librarian who lives with disability, in the inclusion topic.
- Diversity is not just a specialist, separate topic, to be trotted out for special weeks. I try to select readings and voices that are diverse for all topics, favouring Indigenous voices first, then the work of people of colour, women and economically excluded geographical areas.
- My introduction movie lets students know I value the diversity that they bring to the course. I invite them to share this to strengthen the learning environment.
- I acknowledge that students have different backgrounds and time or ability to study, mentioning that readings and assessments are âone size fits mostâ, which may not always work for them.
- I specifically name anxiety and depression as something extremely common in university students, not their fault, and suggest strategies and support for this.
- The first assessment students submit includes their learning goals for the course. Students are rarely asked their aims, with tutors and students treating everyone as though they are there to get high marks. Some students only want, or have capacity, to pass. This approach acknowledges people with family responsibilities, economic issues, dealing with health issues or discrimination at the same time as they study.
Increasing coverage of diversity in university coursework is both a social justice issue and a smart way to strengthen and improve student knowledge and outcomes.
Movie in discussion with Kirsten Thorpe and Andrew Finegan, INCITE in Conversation – July 2021 . You can see it embedded here:
Itâs the first week of the Study Period, which means the first Zoom session with a new class. Itâs not only about giving studentsâ brains an outline of the subject, and providing a practical walkthrough of the online site.
Whatever I say or do in that first session will help them to work out whether they can trust me, whether I can support their learning, whether I have unreasonable expectations, whether I will help them see perspectives they did not consider, will share freely or even whether I will be boring and ramble. (SPOILER ALERT: All of the above).
I am doing three different sessions for three different courses this Study Period. Today was the intro for students just starting in the degree who probably had not been in my class before. Tomorrow it is with a lovely and engaged bunch, the majority who just completed a course with me last study period. They will know most of my party tricks and greatest hits already (like â I will give you lots of instructions about the things I DONâT care about, so that where you make the choices is the thinky work that we all care aboutâ). I still need to explain the basics for students who have not completed my courses before⌠but what do we do, all pretend it is fresh?
As I gear up for introductory sessions with new students in a new Study Period, usually two scenes from films keep haunting me. Because I am nothing like them⌠reallyâŚ.although it is really tempting to tell students that they will have to pay for their degrees in SWEAT! ..
The first is from Alan Parkerâs 1980 movie Fame, following the school years of high school kids at New Yorkâs School of Performing Arts. The dance teacher outlines her expectations of her class.
The second, from James Bridgeâs 1973 The Paper Chase, which follows law students through Harvard. The professor launches into an explanation of how his classroom runs, insults his students, and condescendingly tells them they will never have the right answer⌠Which is way, way away from what I would dream of doingâŚ
Except, exceptâŚ.watching it back for the first time in forever, some of his ideas, some of the ideas about learning, are actually very similar to what comes out of my mouth, and I genuinely think this clip⌠first seen when I was in primary school (OK⌠it was a TV series too) has influenced my educational philosophy. Eeeep!
I donât use the Socratic Method, where I ask questions on question on question to show up studentsâ lack of knowledge⌠but âI am helping you to learn how to teach yourself this subjectâ, and âyou will learn how to ask questionsâ , âif you come out thinking there is far more to find out about, then we will have been successfulâ, and âmy aim is for you to come out thinking like a lâŚibrarianâ all cross my lips during my intro sessions. I do not, would not, tell students, however, that they are coming in with a skull full of mush.
But these two clips make me feel like the Zoom sessions this week are kind of portentous, like I should make it a meaningful and memorable transition into something new and exciting and different âŚ. like I will only be doing it right if I go big, set a stern and stony face, scare instead of inspire and enunciate. Every. Word.
Note to self: these commencement sessions are ONLY done right if your hands are kept totally still and clasped together, either behind your back or wrapped around a very big stick.
Busy day today, so just sharing a movie of Chiba imitating a dolphin this afternoon.
(You need to click to make the movie appear in most browsers)
The story is a little more grisly. A pigeon on the neighbourâs roof, so she was practicing her death bite by moving her jaws in the way she would, if only it would come closer.
(Or maybe she was frustrated or excited )
After 20 years, I finally added solar panels to the roof of my house in October last year.
Just before that, I used the pandemic lockdown to spend a lot of time finally turning that old bathtub, pre-dating my now-adult children, into a fabulous garden pond. I bought a series of Gedde compost bins and established a system for cleaning under the chookâs night perch and mixing in pond weed and extras from the now-revamped vege garden to get a really nice regular composting system going.
I was harvesting my own food and enjoying the colours and textures and freshness.
Iâd bought and assembled a special reading bench, and added a waterproof cushion, so I could sit in the sun in front of the vege garden and watch the parrots on the sunflowers.
In November last year, I was flung into quite a different trajectory. One where my chooks, and their tiny house with ingeniously accessible egg-collecting, would no longer be part of my life. One that was exactly the right path for me, although it was not what I had ever planned.
If you have a kid with any kind of difference, you have probably been given the âWelcome to Hollandâ essay, attributed to Emily Perl Kingsley.
It is not one-size fits all. I share some of the reservations that Kirsten Groseclose mentions when she suggests that sometimes this Haiku from Mizuta Masahide seems more appropriate, especially when you are coping with marriage breakdown or trying to find support, or even work out what to do, when you have a violent child who you love with all your life and are also scared of being hurt by.
My barn having burned down, I can see the moon.
Expectations and plans go sideways all the time. I loved my garden that I had finally transformed after 20 years of looking out the lounge window and planning to. A 20 year plan finally realised.
I am also pretty happy with my new garden, which is a series of containers I will be able to take with me elsewhere as things settle. A totally unexpected and adaptive arrangement. One that is only blossoming so well because of the skills I learned with things planned and unplanned in the last 25 or so years.
The first container is peppermint, common mint, perpetual spinach, broccoli and marigold.
The second container is broccoli, pak choi, five types of lettuce and perpetual spinach.
I like where I live. I like the people I have met and am settling into step with.
Same little group of women growing stronger together in the gym way too early in the cold mornings; the old Kuarna bloke who sits outside the coffee shop every morning and tells me the best places to spot dolphins; the other jetty-walkers, rugged up, purposeful and surprisingly regular – the same people turning up within a few minutes each day. Workmates, and students, and neighbours, and I am making a couple of friends slowly.
Every so often, though, I am reminded how different this interstate move is to anything I could have imagined a couple of years ago. That anyone could have imagined.
I caught up with Andrew this morning for coffee in a cafe at work, after he flew in last night. Lovely to chitter and chatter, to try to work out when we had last caught up in person, have an idea of some of each othersâ back story. Reminded me of catch-ups past…in St Kilda with cake and my little kids in tow while on a family holiday just before I started a new job, seeing some random Melbourne International Comedy Festival shows one night when I was there facilitating a library Master Class, and discovered that being from a time zone 3 hours behind gave me a superpower when it came to attending really late shows without flagging.
[ Oh Good Grief! I found this pic on Flickr, and realised that not only does Andrew know my backstory, he had even met the coat that I wore today … I think I had had it for just one day in the photo, but it was obviously a keeper]
Driving home, I realised that Andrew was the fourth person I had seen in the last six months, who I had met before December.
Two of those people live here and we caught up again since I moved. One was another interstate visitor at coffee at work. But, otherwise, the move has been a rather blunt and extreme relocation.
Even this afternoon, planes coming in to the Adelaide airport just a few hours after Andrew’s landed are full of people who will now need to quarantine. South Australia has shut its border with NSW. New Zealand has paused travel with Sydney again.
I had my eye on what looks like a wonderful GLAMR community event Lake Mac GLAM 2021 , in a few weeks, but had decided I would be too busy in the middle of Study Period to attend. In previous years my curiousity and sociability would have overruled prudence, and I know I would have ended up buying a last minute ticket and somehow shuffling things about to make it work.
But now, the risk of getting stuck somewhere and not being able to move freely stops me from even thinking about it. And I will not be fully-vaccinated by then – another consideration that really spins me out.
I get to catch up with my kids when we game together remotely each week, chat and email with people interstate I have known more than six months⌠but as for physically sitting with people, chatting⌠there is really no back story, every person I meet has not known me before I was this me, at this age, in these circumstances.
Bringing beanies back into it (because it always comes back to beanies for me in the last couple of weeks), I told somebody from “back home” that I had decided I would wear beanies until August to stay warm, and I shouldn’t get any stares or feel self-conscious, because for all anyone here knows, I have been doing this since I was five years old.
There is quite a gap to totally re-make myself, or conversely, to be truer to myself as layers of other peoples’ daily expectations have been ripped away.
Whatever it is, it certainly is a far wider and more significant gap between my new life and my old one, compared to what I would have expected, or experienced, if I did this a couple of years ago.
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:
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:
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…
So. Very. Tired. And. Not. Finished. Yet.
Great whooshing deadline whooshed past this morning, and I am consoling myself that I am doing the university teaching equivalent of living in a house while renovating.
The roof was already leaking, and the fix I am doing will stop us all getting quite so soggy. My choice is between staying soggy for another few months, or getting something that I had patched at the start of the year re-patched. We wait a couple of days longer than I would like, but we will all have drier feet for the rest of Study Period.
Translation : An assessment that I part fixed in January ..during university closedown while I was camping in the middle of moving boxesâŚ.had pain points for everyone, and re-writing it before publishing my course outline that was due this morning means that it will be easier and more useful for student learning, easier to mark and more relevant to the course material. But there is a LOT of double-checking and anticipating what students will ask about if it is not specified. Word counts for everything. Checking for any ambiguities. Spelling it all out clearly, then doing so in French, German and Swahili just in case it was not clear. Doing database searches to ensure the library has access to resources to support it.
Still feel bad not to be Super Duper Woman.
Anyhow, in the middle of head down, bum up, the postie delivered this amazingly coloured, lightweight, super-warm red woolly beanie/muffler/mittenette set from my friend and lifebuoy TaniaâŚ.
Cannot say how grateful and delighted I am⌠lots!!! Just what I need to fuel my new beanie addiction.