Pedagogy postcards exercise at LILAC23

 I did a playful postcard exercise at LILAC this year, asking people to write their top tips for teaching (or enabling) information literacy development in others on a postcard and posting it in a little red postbox! Those who left an address on a sticky label had a randomly selected postcard sent out to them. This is what they said, plus some comments and explanation from me :) 

Pedagogy Postcards for Practitioners, Andrew Walsh, LILAC 23.

Thank you everyone who submitted a tip! This PDF will list the tips (in italics), add a little commentary about the tips, plus give a very brief outline about the approach taken with this postcard exercise. Those of you receiving this PDF after submitting their email addresses via the QR code, I’ll delete them within the next few weeks.

The tips / commentary

The first few focus on something that librarians often struggle with. We might only see students once, probably for a relatively short amount of time, so there is a temptation to try and tell them “all the things”! I worry that this also tends to combine with an element of vocational awe where we see ourselves as the only people who can save students from poor information literacy and overinflate our importance (see Fobazi Ettarh’s work, e.g. VOCATIONAL AWE AND LIBRARIANSHIP: THE LIES WE TELL OURSELVES). Bombarding students with content isn’t good pedagogical practice though, as these tips suggest!

Bite sized resources available at the point of need. I record short-ish videos on different subjects and make them available to students (who study 100% online).

Don’t sacrifice understanding and deep learning in order to cover content – learning one thing well is better than learning lots superficially. (P.S. Read bell hooks!)

Less is more 😊 We don’t need to tell everything we know about IL in each lesson, people will be overwhelmed. Pick your highlights (learning outcomes) and stick to them. (Hugs from Bettina, Norway.)

I love the pedagogy hinted at behind these next few, but again many librarians struggle with this! It’s often tempting to think that the way we think an information literacy related task should be approached (e.g. searching for information for an assignment) is the best way of doing it. We’re the experts, so everyone should copy our examples. In practice, students are concerned with different things, have varying demands on their time and attention, and need to build strategies that work for them. They may care about different learning outcomes to those that we had in mind at the start, and these may even emerge, or change, during a session. These tips all try to shift the power dynamic towards the student, helping to give them ownership and an element of control, so we meet the students’ needs, not our own pre-determined outcomes. (This is part of the reason I personally take a playful learning approach!)

Give students ownership of their own learning – how can you involve them in co-creating material or learning activities?

Engage your students as collaborators / give them the power to steer their own learning directions & needs by checking their aims before you start teaching (LC Chung)

Tell students at the beginning of sessions that the goal is for them to learn rather than you to teach, so they should be encouraged to ask questions and lead / direct the conversation as they wish 😊

Ask student how they manage and organise information. What is their research information process. (Paul Newnham)

These next few are a mixture of slightly different things, but are all about contextualising the content. Information literacy varies by context and is often difficult for people to transfer from one setting to another – this contextualisation helps embed learning more effectively. It’s not a “library” session, it’s one relevant to their study, work, life, whatever… but a note of caution, be careful using pop-culture references unless you are genuinely up to date. Please don’t think you’re cool dropping references to TV shows that aired before your students were born (or from shows that didn’t air in countries that your students are from). :D 

Start with where your students are at… if they use Google Scholar – show them Google Scholar! If they use TikTok, demo the issues with that (Relete)

Use concrete, pop-culture examples and references = (1) Instant likeability factor (2) more engaging & though provoking (Anne-Lise Harding, House of Commons Library)

Making teaching relatable to your audience. They’ll be able to understand a real life example if its something they do / see every day.

Take the student’s discipline into account. Tie IL skills to a current assignment / theses / pm the students are working on to make it more relevant to them.

I like to use analogies and metaphors to explain things during IL sessions. Examples that relate to everyday activities / experiences.

Connect to what the student is working on and what problems they encounter.

Interactive suggestions cropped up several times in the tips below, but also in many of the other tips. I’ve written and spoken widely on Active Learning and playful learning that match these ideas, but lots of other teaching approaches also match it! These approaches can make it easier to build on the previous knowledge of students and avoid the hideous “banking model” of education (see Paulo Freire, particularly “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”). As a bonus, it can make it much more fun for you and your learners… and if you’re having fun you’re likely to do a much better job!  

Make your IL sessions interactive. Games, both online and physical make the sessions fun for you and the students and enhance engagement and motivation.

Ask learners to search for info online. E.g. “find an industry report on a particular company”. Next use this to springboard discussion on issues of searching for info online. I then follow this up with previous learners comments on this to encourage peer learning and engage the current group.

Connect your teaching to your audience’s needs and their context. Have fun, make it interactive and remember: often, less is more. Quality over quantity 😊

Matching language to meet your audience, which is where I try to avoid getting into arguments over what information literacy should be called! But that said, information literacy is a great term (IMHO) for us to use when talking about these things with other librarians. That doesn’t mean it’s the best term to use with your learners (or in Higher Education, your lecturers, higher management, etc.) – you can fit the concepts within whatever language makes sense to them. Use library jargon (like information literacy) with other librarians as it helps us be clear what we mean, but use the language of your audience to explain stuff to them.

Don’t call it information literacy or if you do, explain what that is in terms your audience will understand. i.e. what it means in their terms / vocabulary. “Info lit” is too librarian focussed.

Check your use of language and jargon - don’t assume that others will understand the terms and acronyms that you use every day.

Think about language and terminology! Sometimes, academics and students are a bit bewildered by what is meant by “information literacy” but if we try to speak their language (talking about research, articles, searching and so on it becomes easier to communicate) (Hope)

I love how these next two mention preparation from different angles! It’s also something that lots of librarians struggle with – teaching preparation for many people focusses on creating “perfect searches” that as Maria says, are fake… and to be honest, then get confusing to learners when they try to replicate them. Preparation should be around the elements of teaching you intend to use, the activities, the structures, etc that you can then confidently apply. Not the nitty gritty of those pre-prepared examples!

Perfectly practiced demos from a librarian are kinda fake. Make it messy! Hand the reins over to a student or use one of their questions o they know it isn’t prepped. (Maria O’Hara, @Meaohara, Kings College London)

Prepare-prepare-prepare!

These next few are slightly different, but grouped because they are about a mixture of confidence and self-development. Despite many of us having imposter syndrome sitting on our shoulders, telling us we don’t know what we are doing – you do. “You are enough.” There are things we can do to build that confidence, to develop ourselves (like observing others, taking risks, etc) and we should always be learning and developing. That doesn’t mean you are doing badly now! Embrace the fear and do it anyway 😉

Take at least one risk in every session. (Without taking risks your teaching won’t move forward! Don’t be scared) (Nigel Morgan)

Remember… You are an expert. You are enough. Mistakes make you relatable 😊

Talk less and don’t fear the silence!

Have confidence in yourself! Librarians, often introverts, can be a bit daunted by being in front of people, but its important for us to believe in our own expertise. We have a voice and its worth listening to! Good luck, you’re doing great.

Ask more experienced colleagues if you can observe their teaching, even if they are not in the same discipline.

Critical thinking can often be absent in library sessions, but it shouldn’t be! We don’t have absolute answers, but we can help our learners think critically about things and come to their own conclusions. For example, there are lots of frameworks to help people evaluate information sources – if they are used as checklists, they are all bad, if they are used as examples of the type of questions we should be answering and reflecting upon, they can be good. Resist the checklist and embrace the critical questioning!

Instruction should be presented in a value neutral way. There are no “good” and “bad” research tactics. Only more effective and less effective. This can help prevent / reduce embarrassment and open up a genuine dialogue. (Anna Nunn, University of Suffolk)

I always tell students (and others) to check the source. Who is the creator? What is their perspective? What is the purpose of the content the are delivering? (Susan Adkins)

Explore with students the why of things, not just the how.

This one is partly about an approach to teaching, but also about visual literacies. You can tap into different ways of viewing the world and understanding or representing information by using visual approaches – comics / cartoons are one, but there are plenty of others (collage anyone?) out there. Don’t feel hidebound by only using text!

Why not use comics and cartoons for information literacy – works for me!

Bonus tip, but an important one… we don’t teach in a vacuum! This could equally be “feed the IT person biscuits”, especially if you teach in building where you might need support! Anyone that does (or might) support you will appreciate your support in return!

Get to know your admin team and take them cake 😊 (Eva Garcia Grau)

 

A quick overview for this postcard approach!

I couldn’t be sure if this would work for the delegates in advance, but I got slightly more cards filled in than I was expecting and there are some lovely tips, so I think it did! For an all conference activity like this, 10% of attendees engaging is a good target to aim for and we managed more than that 😊 Using these approaches in a teaching session gets much better engagement, normally everyone would participate.

The postcard activity aimed to draw from the delegates skills and knowledge of teaching information skills, pull them together, group and comment on them (if appropriate), then share them back to the community that contributed.

It draws from a few ideas that I use in my own teaching:

·         Making items tactile so they are attractive to engage with. There is something about print items, especially handmade (I sometimes use items I Letterpress print myself), that naturally invite people to interact with them. A physical postcard tends to be more engaging than asking an equivalent question by circulating a short Google form around everyone (Alke’s work on Tactile Academia is great - https://tactileacademia.com/)

·        Related to tactility is physical representations that give cues towards what we expect – the postcards and the red phone box are directly familiar to UK based people of a certain age, but may also have familiar echoes with younger attendees that might not have directly experienced writing or receiving print postcards. Many people see a postcard and postbox and know what expectations exist around them, the objects themselves guide participants naturally towards doing the activity.

·         Restrictions / constraints can help enable creativity (and engagement with a task like this). The constraint of a small area on the postcard can help people complete the task in a way that a completely open invitation (submit an email or Word document?) does not. An open task can often be harder (and more intimidating) to complete than a constrained or restricted one. (Though I do offer alternatives that are more open, in this case an online form for people that might want to write longer form content, or who might struggle with handwriting a card.)

·         Gifting can invite people to take part in activities – this activity tries to take advantage of that both by the prospect of a small future gift for participants (a postcard delivered to them) AND their own tip turning into a gift for someone else.

 See https://gamesforlibraries.blogspot.com/ for occasional posts from me about library teaching, play, playfulness, workshops and other random bits and pieces. I’m bookable for workshops (online or in person) and sometimes run open workshops too (I’ve just run a few introductory Lego ones).

Andrew Walsh (a.p.walsh@hud.ac.uk / @PlayBrarian)