Blog Post 11: Ethics, Rad Workshops, Stategic Science!

Previous class

(Note these notes are from the ethics workshop week)

It was fascinating to create a space with classmates/fellow future library folk where we could engage ethics in libraries from so many angles. Our sessions touched on ethics in the self-presentation of libraries (online and in job listings), in the conduct of librarians dealing with difficult patrons behaviors and situations that imply conflict between values (e.g. the conflict between free access to information and creative a safe public space with pornographic viewing, librarians administering Narcan, etc.), and meta-conversations about how we can find support going through these ethical decision-making processes and appreciate the complexity of these arguments (by for example forcing ourselves to take opposing sides).

On the whole, I definitely walked away feeling like I just had a really thorough check-in with my own ethical processes. Over the last few years, I have gone through a kind of stereotypical 20-something process of trying to imbue my idealism about radical and transformative social spaces/radical approaches to librarianship/etc. with an appreciation for the norms and practices of a profession and the day-to-day labor and pragmatism that goes into creating such a space. I think rather than centering my own beliefs about how we should all make nonjudgmental space for one another, I am finding it powerful to really focus on the ethics of serving the public and facilitating a public space. What does it mean if the library is part of the way we as a society facilitate a public commons? How does that influence the way libraries, for instance, step in in drug overdoses? And how does this ethical commitment to a community in this civic/public sense also provide a framework to understand institutional policies (e.g. how libraries help combat racism in a community)?

I suppose I am framing this in opposition to personal optimism, but I mean more that I find power in thinking in this contextual, institutional, applied context I think our engagement with ethics will be a life-long process that will shift and change along with us. I’m looking forward to it.

Webinar

I chose to listen to a webinar entitled “ACRL/ODLOS: Addressing cultural humility and implicit bias in information literacy sessions”. The webinar was recorded on January 23, 2018 as a joint production of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services at the American Library Association (ODLOS), the latter of which “...uses a social justice framework to inform library and information science workers’ development of resources.” (ODLOS). The presenter was Twanna Hodge, who seems like a wonderful academic librarian and person.

I was drawn to the webinar because of its specific framework: how to improve information literacy sessions (led by librarians) by more explicitly challenging implicit bias, while also enacting cultural humility as an ethos of engaging with diverse communities and experiences. I was also curious: how would this presenter engage topics that require critical self-reflection, and do so in a way that circumvents the defensiveness and anxiety that sometimes comes with these conversations?

The webinar does an excellent job setting a clear structure with goals for its viewers. On its first slides, Hodge lays out the goals of the presentation:

Session outcome goals: Participants will be able to:

• Define implicit bias & cultural humility
• Recognize their own implicit biases & learn strategies to mitigate them
• Understand why teaching and learning cultural humility and implicit bias is useful
• Incorporate strategies in this session into their own information literacy classes

Very early on, Hodge clearly outlines the demographics in librarianship and sets the stage for the importance of these ideas. Her tone is unapologetic but also not accusatory – she notes that the question of “who is here, who is missing” is profound and recurring in our profession. Hodge alternates between describing dynamics like bias and othering and providing concrete strategies to implement, such as countering stereotypic imagining, interpersonal interactions & cross-group friendships, etc.

Hodge does an excellent job expanding the conversation by continually anticipating areas of exclusion and inclusion for diverse, intersectional patrons. She at one point asks “even if our spaces are ADA compliant, are our events actually inclusive for folks with differing access needs?” (I also made sure to check that the video had subtitles -- they are the simple YouTube generated ones, but given her clear speaking voice and YouTube’s ever-improving algorithms, they are near perfect). Hodge suggests framing information literacy session topics around complex issues of authority and bias when possible (e.g. the implications of physicians believing black patients had a higher tolerance for pain, the negative individual experiences that trans folks and POC tend to have with policing, etc.)

One bit I definitely found valuable was not only highlighting scholarship that engages issues of implicit bias and cultural humility, but making sure to highlight scholarly voices that are themselves representative of diverse groups. I feel like this last step is often omitted when researching these issues (I’m guilty of this) and I appreciate the concrete material focus of thinking of the production of knowledge itself.

The webinar ended with a strong set of takeaways. We all make mistakes, and making mistakes is difficult. But we need to keep trying, and instead of centering our own discomfort or ourselves, continue to move to unearthing and then CHALLENGING implicit biases. Then these two lovely quotes:

“My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.”- bell hooks

“If we can’t see a problem, we can’t fix a problem” - Kimberlé Crenshaw

On the whole, I was really impressed by the webinar and found it to be a useful in both content and form. I’d be curious to learn more about the context in which it appears -- how do academic librarians tend to receive these kinds of webinars and enact (or not) their ideas? How does this one-off intervention relate to broader efforts to increase cultural humility in information literacy instruction broadly? Lots of things to explore further!

Reading

 In “Effective Teaching: Examples in History, Mathematics, and Science”, the authors move into domain-specific understanding of what makes learning successful in the classroom in these particular disciplines. I focused especially on the science section, as this will have the closest applicability to my future data in social sciences work.

I found the emphasis on scaffolding and conceptual organization extremely helpful -- this seems to involve a balancing act between pre-planned hierarchical organization on one hand, and more organic, experiential-based scaffolding on the other. It seems that the sciences is a domain where the lack of strong structure will create significant impediments later on, which makes me think I should start reading a bunch of books about data literacies and computational social sciences and taking notes on the best ways to orgainze these concepts (as they are kind of a grab-bag of techniques and ideas in my head at the moment).

I also appreciated the emphasis on strategy-based learning as a means to understand how to approach a problem. This, in my experience, is absolutely huge when working with large data sets. The ability to understand how to construct a pipeline for data analysis, beginning with ingesting the data, then cleaning it, then parsing and organizing it in such a way that subsequently exploratory and explanatory analysis is possible, is fundamental, and yet these strategies have taken me years to organize (and required not just learning Python, but learning how to use algorithmic thinking to solve a problem). As I will likely have the opportunity to design workshops, this is making me wonder: how does organizing knowledge hierarchically within a domain, and promoting strategic thinking, carry over from the classroom context to the series of library workshops context?