Call for chapters on Library Pedagogies

A call for chapter submissions from library workers on their pedagogies and pedagogical approaches.

Andrew and Sam welcome short (250-500 words) proposals for chapters to feature in this book, provisionally called “Library Pedagogies”. Proposals should include a short summary of the author’s pedagogical approach, how this connects with their teaching philosophy and an outline of the key factors that have influenced that approach. Please include a brief professional biography of no more than 3 or 4 sentences.

Each chapter should focus upon how the author’s wider approaches to teaching within libraries influence their pedagogy: individual teaching interventions could feature but are less important. Your chapter should be reflective in style and share those underlying beliefs in the purpose behind your teaching, how students learn in your settings, and how your approaches are informed by learning theories and the wider literature. Tell the story of the journey you have taken to evolve your pedagogy, and the internal and external influences that have shaped your practice. Your final chapters should be between 4,000 - 8,000 words long.

Deadlines for proposals: 24th January 2020 

First draft: 24th June 2020 

Reviewers comments returned by: August 2020

Final version of chapters: 6th November 2020

Publication: Early 2021

A wide range of pedagogical approaches could be covered, which may include but are not limited to any of the following:

• Critical pedagogies
• Feminist pedagogies
• Pedagogies from under-represented groups 
• Enquiry based learning
• Problem based learning
• Team based learning
• Active Learning
• Lecturing
• Playful or game based Learning 
• Creativity and learning
• Visual approaches
• Improvisation approaches
• Using Drama techniques
• Psychogeography / space exploration
• Rhizomatic Learning 
• Gonzo education 
• Punk / anarchist education

Andrew and Sam will offer a supportive and collaborative approach for chapter authors and would like to hear a range of voices, mainstream and under-represented, whether or not you have written for publication previously. We will encourage, but not impose, the use of collaborative writing tools so that authors can share their chapters with each other and offer informal review and support. We intend to also offer a two day writing retreat (in the North of England) for UK chapter authors to spend time writing their chapters together with the editors. 

Note on licencing: Contributors will retain full copyright over their work. All authors / contributors will sign a simple agreement to allow rights to publish their contribution and to permit others to use the contents of the book under a CC licence. 

From the Editors,

Sam Aston (@manclibrarian) & Andrew Walsh (@PlayBrarian)

Please send proposals to a.p.walsh@hud.ac.uk 

Permission to play research interviews

I've been thinking about the idea of "permission to play" a lot recently, putting some of those early thoughts into a paper for the HEaD conference.

More recently I've been interviewing people who use play with adults about how they use play, trying to dig a little into how they enable people to play, or help to give "permission to play" to them. I've talked to a series of fascination people (15 of them?) and it's been brilliant hearing the amazing range of things happening and the different approaches that people take. It's also wonderful how generous they've been in offering up their time to talk about these things - the play community is full of great people.

As soon as possible I'll be transcribing, analysing, and generally puzzling over all the stuff that people told me about and trying to work it into a journal article (or a short book if I think I can justify it).  I'm sure I'll present it to at least one conference as well, though not 100% sure where (except perhaps Counterplay).

So thank you to everyone I interviewed and watch out for outputs at some point in 2019!

Moar books! 2nd Edition of The Mini Book of Teaching Tips for Librarians

Another book due out at the start of September!

I created the Mini Book of Teaching Tips for Librarians as an experiment - it 60+ pages of teaching tips and ideas, most of which on one page, in a mini A6 format.

This is the 2nd edition, expanded to 100 pages long. It's due out early September, but if pre-ordered will probably arrive before then!

ISBN: 978-1911500117 - only £9.95

I've just okayed the final proofs of "The librarians' book on teaching through games and play", so it'll be appearing on bibliographic databases over the next few weeks (already on Amazon!) to pre-order. Officially out on 3rd September, pre-orders should ship pretty much straight away!

At some point after publication I'll update the free / OA first draft version so it's available online as a PDF too.

New (early release) book, The librarians’ book on teaching through games and play

I've just finished the first draft of a new book, "The librarians’ book on teaching through games and play". It contains lots of materials aimed at librarians and information professionals to use games and play in their teaching.

As an experiment, I'm releasing it in a fairly raw* state. It still needs editing, plus some content is likely to be added over the next couple of months (and some edited out!). Sections may also move around to make more sense. BUT, the content is roughly complete. So take a look please! When the final version is ready it will be released as a print book (aiming for September 2018), but I'll also update the Open Access PDF too.

Please don't save and share this version elsewhere as it will be updated before too long, share the link to this blog, or the repository page instead so people will be able to access the most up to date version!

Full text, including updated files as they become available: https://osf.io/6xhrp/

* Note: This is the “early release” PDF version – it has not yet been edited and some content may still be missing. The final versions (print and PDF) will vary from this early version. 29th June 2018.

Playful publishing ponder

A general (but short) ponder coming up!

I've tried to do some playful things with publishing books for library & related staff... starting with "Only Connect..." where we messed about with format quite a bit (and made it open access). I also wrote a book chapter in comic format that I was allowed to release OA too. Last year I tried writing and publishing a book in a pocket sized format (Mini book of teaching tips for librarians) to try and make it easy to dip into and very cheap to buy, with less of the "padding" you might get in a typical professional development book.

So... I was wondering whether we could do something else a tad playful that might be fun to create AND useful for people to access afterwards. Perhaps getting a bunch of people together to write something in 1 day (maybe 2)? If we had a bunch of people come together for a day, we could easily sketch out a structure and create a few pages worth of something in that day. If we want, that could be very informal (a zine?) that would then be pulled together immediately afterwards and made available primarily in electronic format (with a handful of paper copies for the attendees / writers). Slightly more ambitiously, if we're all locked in a room, it should be possible to write at least the first draft of a book chapter each (which would require coming ready to write, plan already in place). So could write a full edited book if we agreed a structure beforehand, came ready to write, then polished afterwards. Though realistically, "proper" chapters for a book might take a couple of days with some space in between the two days... plus decent amount of communication beforehand / between sessions online.

I'd be open to pretty much any subject matter to try out the idea, but here are a few possible ideas that might be suitable for the "library" world, but also up for wider education / learning support / fun stuff:

For a zine:

Information Literacy teaching ideas (of various flavours? Referencing? Searching? Critical reading?)
Found poetry
A selection of library walks (Psychogeographical style)
Playing in libraries (how to make libraries more "playful")
Cheap & free professional development ideas
Critical librarianship for beginners

For a book:

Information Literacy teaching ideas (of various flavours? Referencing? Searching? Critical reading?)
Playing in libraries (how to make libraries more "playful")
"Workbooks" for improving IL in particular student groups (e.g. IL for education students)
Critical librarianship examples  / studies / how to...
Getting diverse voices into librarianship

Also open to anonymising contributions / editors if people wanted to do something they felt might be controversial or career limiting as long as the topic had value.

To do something short & sweet (zine style) we could agree a topic online, meet somewhere free or cheap on a weekend(?) and create everything from scratch then.
To do something like a "proper" book (but as random / playful as people were up for), we'd probably have to agree a topic online, assign chapter authors / write abstracts and collect material for those chapters, meet for at least one day on a weekend somewhere free or cheap, then edit / tweak material afterwards. Plenty of online tools we could use to communicate for it... Slack maybe?

Would anyone be up for these sort of ideas? If so, talk about it on Twitter / whatever initially under #bookdisrupt hashtag? Then we'll see if we can make it happen if there is enough interest...

New book chapter - Reasons to Play in Higher Education

I've a new book chapter available: Reasons to Play in Higher Education*.
It is in a book pulled together by Matthias as part of the Counterplay festival and associated playful goodness :)
I pitched something on why play should be part of HE, including matching what Government and employers wanted out of HE and graduates when the call for papers came out. When I started writing it, I started to feel it all sounded a bit too serious, and not at all playful. So I scrapped everything I wrote, went to Collabhub (where people can pitch collaborative projects with students) and asked if anyone would be up for turning my ideas into a more visual form. Jonny Clementson came on board and I paid him to create a short comic based on my ideas... a bit of bouncing backwards and forwards with ideas and text, and we ended up with a 6 page comic!
So it's now in "The Power of Play", which has been printed, but I don't think it's available to buy yet! I've put my chapter online to download though, so I hope some people like it :)


*Full reference: Walsh, Andrew and Clementson, Jonny (2017) Reasons to play in Higher Education. In: The Power of Play - Voices from the Play Community. CounterPlay, Aarhus, Denmark, pp. 181-187. ISBN 9788799975204

A couple of experimental books

I've just created a couple of experimental books, both will be deliberately short and cheap, first is available through my website from the 2nd week of January.

The first book is a small (A6) sized, spiral bound book, printed on a heavy paper stock. It contains over 50 teaching tips and teaching ideas for librarians. Originally intended as a collection of (large sized) playing cards, I thought I'd try it in this format to see if people found it useful - a similar size to a large, Tarot sized, card, in spiral bound format it works out much cheaper to buy! This will only be available for a limited time, then revised based on feedback - I particularly want people to tell me if they like the size (A6) or would like it larger (A5?)! Because I *really* want feedback on this, the first few copies will be free P&P (in UK), and it will just cost £9.95 in total to your door...

The second will be based around creating escape rooms for educational purposes... not sure when this will be available, or if I will do a Kickstarter or not (creating a limited edition 1st of all, before releasing it in an alternative format?), around escape rooms with this workbook as a reward. More news when I decide!!!

Plotting and pondering…a games 4 libraries book.

Less than 24 hours after finishing work until the New Year I started pondering a possible project for 2013…

I’ve written a couple of books now via traditional Library and Information Science type publishers and get a bit depressed at how expensive they are – especially my first book which is essentially lots of practical active learning tips that can get dropped into a session when we’re teaching information skills.

I’d like to do a similar practical book for games that can help support information literacy, but I don’t want it to be expensive, plus I’d quite like it to have photo-copiable / printable resources in it.

So, was pondering creating quite a short book and self-publishing it through a service such as LULU.com…

There could be a free eBook version, plus a fairly cheap print on demand version in a format that is easy to copy. It would include an outline (in a standard format) of some games to enable people to adapt them to their own needs and create something themselves. In addition, it could include the print and play versions of any generic games I’ve already got ready to go (such as SEEK!) or could create in the next 6 months– so librarians could photocopy those pages onto card (or paper & laminate the card), cut out the individual cards / tokens / boards  / etc and be ready to go…

I could also include the prototypes from events like the workshop in Leeds, if I spent some time working through them and finishing them off – as long as people are happy their games being shared this way.

If I wrote the text, it’d cost a relatively small amount of money to get someone to titivate it enough to look prettier (i.e. proof read, typeset, design a cover, etc.) that would normally be done by a publisher, plus the cost of sending out a handful of copies to legal deposit libraries.

So, should I try and do this? Perhaps via a Kickstartercampaign to fund it?