Please note: All times listed below are in Eastern Daylight Time. Attendees will receive an e-mail each morning of the conference with a link to conference sessions.
Standard sessions will be 50 minutes long. Interactive and Roundtable sessions will be 60-75 minutes.
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The links below to each individual session provide a full description and access to slides/recordings as they are posted.
Monday, June 7
- 11 – 11:50 a.m. Communities of Practice as Space for Instructor Support and Development (Interactive) – Melissa Wong (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Laura Saunders (Simmons University): Communities of practice offer a participant-led approach to professional development and are particularly suitable for instruction librarians interested in creative pedagogy and inclusive teaching. In this interactive session, the presenters will provide guidance on creating an engaging, sustainable local community of practice; engage attendees in brainstorming topics related to pedagogy and inclusive teaching for community of practice dialogues; and explore how communities of practice can function as spaces that support instructor resilience.
- 1 – 2:15 p.m. Less Resilience, More Resistance: The Persistence of Ableism at Work (Interactive) – Brittni Ballard, Clare Kuntz Balcer, Hannah Krauss, and Claire Holmes (Towson University): Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we three chronically ill, dynamically disabled, early career full-time library workers regularly commuted to campus. This resulted in public management of anxiety, gastrointestinal flare ups, immobilizing pain, panic attacks, and migraines among other symptoms. Now, telework benefits our bodies, minds, and spirits as well as job performance and satisfaction. Unfortunately, the university has declared a return to pre-existing policies for Fall 2021. With this deadline, we—with our fourth member, supervisor, universal design for learning enthusiast, and inclusive education advocate plus mom—enter an imagination battle to articulate, shape, and live more viable futures. This presentation offers a collective coming together as disabled library workers and accomplices explore barriers to entering, staying in, and moving up in this field. After 50 minutes of guided inquiry into presenters’ lived experience and research, participants are invited into 25 minutes of reciprocal dialogue to envision an accessible dream destination.
- 3 – 3:50 p.m. Librarian as ‘Coach’: Using Peloton’s Motivational Pedagogy to Engage Students in Library Instruction (Standard) – Melissa Langridge (Niagara University) and Natalie Haber (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga): Are you looking for a way to refresh your pedagogical approach and increase student engagement and motivation? Join academic librarians Melissa Langridge and Natalie Haber in this session as they describe their various approaches to motivational pedagogy in the library instruction classroom, both in-person and online. Drawing inspiration from the popular Peloton fitness app, as well as scholarship in the field of sport education and coaching, this session will give you a crash course in the terminology and research surrounding motivation. You’ll leave with concrete examples for how to incorporate these strategies into your lesson plans.
Tuesday, June 8
- 11 – 11:50 a.m. Compassionate Consults: The Art of Human-centered Research Consultations with Online Adult Learners (Standard) – Sarah B. Stevenson (Vanderbilt University): Today’s adult learners face pressures from all sides of life, and learning how to conduct academic research is often just one more thing on their long list of new things to “get through” when they begin graduate school. Sometimes when students contact librarians, they just need what they need when they need it, and it can be discouraging for instruction librarians to have these transactional encounters with students when we have information literacy goals! Do we throw learning outcomes out the window for the sake of time? This presentation will demonstrate a framework for having it both ways: compassionately caring for the students’ holistic needs while also making strides toward information literacy goals—in a thirty-minute consult! Through compassionate listening, partnership in learning, and needs-based engagement with key sources, librarians can help students navigate the wealth of information resources and find where they contribute to the scholarly conversation.
- 1 – 2:15 p.m. Exploring Librarians’ Agency and Choice from a Sociological Perspective (Roundtable) – Andrea Baer (Rowan University): Agency, the ability to act with choice and purpose in one’s environment, is essential to remaining engaged in one’s work and to responding to challenges with resilience and creativity. Despite how essential a sense of agency is to sustainable and fulfilling work, in a service-oriented profession like librarianship there are far fewer conversations about agency than there are about how to serve others, how to “prove the library’s value,” and how to respond to stakeholders who hold a large amount of institutional power. In this roundtable participants will be introduced research and theories that take a sociological approach to agency, which acknowledges the intimate relationship between individuals and social structures. Participants will reflect on their own experiences of agency and will explore ways that librarians individually and collectively can foster experiences of agency that enable them to approach their work with purpose, human connection, and meaning.
- 3 – 3:50 p.m. Projects, Positions, and Persistence: Finding Identity and Focus in a Time of Transition (Standard) – Grace Therrell (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): Developing new projects, learning a new position, and solidifying professional identity can all be rewarding aspects of being an early-career teaching librarian and faculty member. Navigating all of these things at the same time, however, can be challenging. In this session, I’ll talk about my process for creating The Teaching Bridge, a virtual collaborative teaching space, while also navigating a new position for both myself and my library in a time of transition. I will share my personal experience as an early-career teaching librarian and how the Bridge project has informed my instructional and professional identity and vice versa. Participants will leave not only with a greater understanding of the Bridge project but also a perspective on what resilience and persistence look like in a time of learning and uncertainty.
Wednesday, June 9
- 10 – 10:45 a.m. Coffee Break: Join the LIT Steering Committee for a bit of coffee and chat about LIT and librarianship!
- 11 – 11:50 a.m. Ain’t No Mountain High Enough: Maintaining Small Campus Community in a Pandemic (Standard) – Linnea Minich, Heidi Syler, and Courtnay Zeitler (University of the South): Three librarians share their experiences with transitioning from our emergency online Spring 2020 to an online summer term and hybrid fall semester. The University of the South is a small liberal arts college in the mountains of Tennessee, focused on ideas of place and community. In order for the college to retain its identity, we worked to be “present” in many ways. Heidi worked with faculty technology coordinators to bring the academic side of the campus together on a new LMS, Brightspace. Linnea worked to introduce new students and faculty to the physical and personal University by creating videos and a new webpage for Research Help that focuses on connection. Courtnay held office hours through the summer term and taught an online information literacy course during Fall 2020. This presentation will reflect on how we learned to connect as colleagues and to examine our personal sacrifices through our “valley year.”
- 1 – 2:15 p.m. Embedded Librarianship: Past, Present, and Future (Roundtable) – Ruth Slagle (Jackson State Community College) and Mary Aquila (Athens State University): Reaching students in a digital landscape has become increasingly more important and essential to student success, especially as institutions expand their online course and degree offerings and increase their use of Learning Management Systems (LMS). The COVID 19 pandemic has pushed the need for providing online library services to students even more so into the forefront. Embedded librarians have a unique opportunity to play a vital role in providing point of need online services, by supporting information literacy and library resources in LMS courses. Due to the pandemic, some librarians had to start providing embedded services virtually overnight while others had to increase their already established embedded services. Participants will hear from both an early career and mid-career librarian about the challenges they faced and the successes and failures they experienced.
- 3 – 3:50 p.m. Compassionate Instruction: Building Support in Online Spaces (Standard) – Elena Rodriguez (College of Charleston): Teaching online can often feel impersonal and distant. Combined with the stress and anxiety that comes with ever-changing situations, educators and students alike can find themselves overwhelmed and without the support they feel they need in order to be successful. As the “new normal” the Covid-19 pandemic brought to the world continues to endure, there is an increased, worthy call to exhibit patience and compassion with students who are struggling. Despite the challenges 2020 brought to our door, the practice of sincere empathy in our teaching is one that we should maintain. This session will explore how safe, open communicative spaces were created during an asynchronous, one-credit library research elective course. While these suggestions are made with credit-bearing instruction in mind, they can also be applied to one-shot or embedded librarian instruction with obvious modification.
Thursday, June 10
- 11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. When One-Shots Won’t Work: Transforming Information Literacy Instruction into a Workshop Model (Interactive) – Charissa Powell, Amber Sewell, and Leah Valletta (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): The struggle against the constraints of a one-shot model are well known in academic libraries, but formulating alternatives can be a challenge. Come learn how our institution tried and failed, pre-COVID, to implement a workshop series, and hear how our second attempt during a remote learning environment met with success. Presenters will share their lessons learned in terms of the design and promotion of the workshop series, how our workshop model supported the self care of both instructors and students, and how this new approach allowed presenters to incorporate new topics such as information privilege and algorithmic bias. Attendees will leave with practical advice and actionable steps about how to implement a similar workshop model at their own institutions.
- 1 – 1:50 p.m. Engaging Faculty with Technology: Experiences from a Small University Library (Standard) – Ian Hughes and Joseph Coates (Purdue University Northwest): One of the challenges that we face at our institution is keeping both students and faculty engaged in the services and resources that are available through the library. In the past, we would construct information literacy sessions with classes, then faculty would tell students to ask us if they needed further assistance. Now that we are working in remote situations, due to COVID 19 restrictions, and using more technology, many of our faculty are ill equipped in not only what the library is currently offering, but they don’t understand a lot of the technology. How do we teach online when the instructors are unaware of how to use technology or online library assets?
- 3 – 3:50 p.m. Nevertheless, They Persisted: Outreach, Instruction, and Collections Strategies to Best Support Students in Unprecedented Times (Standard) – Katelyn Angell (Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus) and Eric Shannon (Keene State College): In this session two academic librarians will describe outreach, pedagogical, and engagement strategies they devised to optimize online teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. The presenters work in two different academic and geographic environments: one is a reference and instruction librarian at a health sciences-focused university in New York City and the other is a collections librarian at a small, public liberal arts college in New England. Three case studies will be discussed: a library-sponsored scholarships program for students who qualify as essential workers, a virtual library orientation for first year students centered on locating and evaluating medical information, and a creative reconfiguring of a collection development program amidst a budget crunch. The latter presentation will highlight tactics for providing teaching faculty with critical resources that are necessary for instruction in a virtual or hybrid environment, such as films for streaming and unlimited usage eBooks.
- Following the final session, join us for “Cocktail (or Mocktail) Hour”: Stay and share your LIT experience with the Steering Committee, and bring your beverage of choice! (A separate link for this session will be shared just before it begins at approximately 4 p.m Eastern.)
Library Instruction Together 