I want my students to fail, repeatedly. They should fail because they are trying things that are hard, pushing past what they know they can do to find the uncomfortable edge between striving and succeeding. But one can only fail in an environment of trust and acceptance—a truly safe space.

Furthermore, this space needs to support two further core critical pedagogical missions through what I call IDEAL: (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access [for the purposes of] Liberation/Love); and through education as a “convivial tool” (Illich, 1973), which forwards power to the user to decide how and why they should use the tool.

The core mission of my professional life is to support IDEAL and convivial tools in my research, service and teaching. This means I practice love for the people I am learning alongside. As Polkinghorne & Greenshields (2022) describe it, “love” in Library and Information Science is “joy plus solidarity” (p. 459), and is “celebratory, liberatory, resistant, and transformative’ (p. 460). As Paolo Friere (1968/2018) notes, “Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.” (p. 177). Supporting liberation and love means that I, as the instructor, am PART of the course experience and must act in in dialogue and solidarity with students, rather than as an adversary with grading power or the sole expert in the room.

Further, if my goal is to ensure that education feels liberatory rather than stifling or codifying, joy must ground all we do, especially in troubling times. The internal stresses of a mental health crisis and increased anxiety, and personally-experienced political challenges to librarians and information science professionals, are accompanied by further external stresses, including global climate change, war, pandemic, political instability, and shrinking civil rights. Joy is necessary to struggle against these headwinds. As we know, people cannot learn well when stressed (e.g. Vogel & Schwabe, 2016). Similarly, when advising, my job is to actively support students with love—as opposed to waiting for them to contact me. I do this advising through repeated email outreach, check-ins via Zoom, and a Discord channel where advisees can talk to me informally any time.

To support IDEAL, each student should have the power to shape their own learning to meet their specific needs. I offer loosely-structured assignments whenever possible, so that students can take them in the direction that meets their specific pedagogical and career-based needs. For example, in LIS601: Information Search, I ensure that students can share resource lists on topics that are deeply meaningful to them, and in LIS690: Makerspaces in Information Organizations, students are encouraged to situate their work in the organizational context that they are most interested in. This allows students to create a meaningful (to them) setting to learn. Such a setting thus becomes what Ivan Illich (1973) calls a “convivial tool”:

An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. (p. 34).

Ensuring that students are not being passively acted upon, and have agency in deciding how their education can be best shaped to serve them, can benefit our society beyond the students in these courses. Thus, the resource lists that students create in LIS601 are shared online, as help for libraries or people seeking information on topics of interest to the students, whether that is the use of LEGO to treat mental health problems or resources for people who are unhoused (two recent topics from students). My makerspace course encourages students to consider real grant opportunities, and at least one student has leveraged her grant assignment in that course to seek competitive grants for her library. In LIS603: Management in information Organizations, students do real strategic planning work for real partner organizations, helping to address problems that professionals face. After all, if an assignment is something only a student and a professor sees, how can students act as agents and impact the world? By sharing these resources publicly, students are practicing professionalism in two ways: in these sense of “trying it out” with some room for failure and learning, and in the sense that they are engaging with their professional identities, and impacting what practitioners do in the real world.

To support education as a convivial tool, IDEAL, and the safe space in which students can fail and strive, my pedagogy centers on the following:

• Radical trust—I do my utmost to give my students every possible bit of leeway within the confines of a university structure. I believe them and believe in them. My policy is to nearly always say “yes” to requests for a delay, to new ideas, to changes in how the students engage with coursework. I also trust them to self-assess their own work and to peer assess one another’s work, and that such reflexive activities further learning beyond any feedback I could offer alone. For example, in LIS690: Advanced Library Management, students grade themselves and their peers on assignments, with a critical self-reflection practice that asks not only how learning is occurring for them, but also how other students might interpret assignment directions in ways that the student had not considered. This can change how the student understands the course content. Students have consistently reported that they never before considered some other interpretations or ways of solving problems, but seeing how other students do the same activity develops their understanding.

• Peer teaching—I encourage peer teaching because I trust students can almost always can inform one another far better than I can inform them. As Illich (1971) notes, “Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting” (p. 18). It is up to me to supply the meaningful setting and allow the students to engage with one another through the learning webs and interconnections that Friere (1968/2018) and Illich (1971) describe as essential to learning. In one example, in LIS601, I ask students to create teaching materials for one another so they can solve problems as teams.

• Active instructor support—I reach out to students regularly, engage sympathetically, and encourage a willingness to engage through supporting each other. I especially encourage peer support and building a community of practice. For instance, in LIS690: Advanced Library Management, I use the platform Discord to create an informal community of practice that not only allows students to share ideas but show off pets, projects, or memes. This resulted in deeper, richer, and more self-reflexive conversations than those I have seen in the Canvas discussion forums.

• Growth mindset—I congratulate failures and offer feedback so the next attempt will be either a success or much closer to one, and I do not penalize good-faith failure. I encourage a revise-and-resubmit culture around assignments, rather than harsh grading. In one example, a student in LIS601 at first struggled to meet expectations with assignments. I not only gave reams of feedback, but was able to meet with him on Zoom and set him on a better course. He reworked his assignments and met and surpassed those expectations when given another chance.

• Careful scaffolding—I seek to nestle the potential for failure among many paths toward success, building students’ knowledge and skills gradually so they can make the big leaps knowing they have a successful foundation already in place. I do this through breaking down assignments into pieces, with peer or instructor feedback after each step, and demonstrating each associated skill through examples in lectures, print, and visual representations. In the previous incarnation of LIS601, where there were four large assignments, I broke the first into three steps, so students were less overwhelmed and had plenty of feedback and opportunities to learn from mistakes. In the current version of this course, students are asked as teams to proffer a single solution to some information search problem, which they must then defend from constructive critique from others. This scaffolds their learning by offering opportunities for them to rethink their own strategies and take into account new ideas.

• Transparent and universal design—I aim toward clear and easy to understand instruction using a variety of modalities, including checklists, visual pathways, overviews, video lectures, and transparent descriptions of the intent of each assignment. I offer these various modalities since students take in information in diverse ways, and by including a multiplicity of tools for all, I can hopefully assist those that might otherwise struggle. In all courses I include checklists, graphic and textual instructions, templates, and often brief videos on assignments and how they can be approached. In this way people who prefer to learn visually, textually, or auditorily are all supported. I also work with the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching on assignment handouts and use their Journey Mapping techniques for finding and ameliorating potential pain points for students in working on assignments. Furthermore, I teach such transparent and universal design methods in my Makerspace course, which has a great deal of Instructional Communication work for students to plan and implement informal teaching activities in makerspace settings. Students use Journey Mapping techniques to orient themselves to the need for universal design of the tutorials and programs they offer.

• Playing to one’s strengths—All students should have a well-rounded education, should try the things they think they are “bad” at, and often discover things they never thought they could do when they are challenged. Yet I believe that the straightest path toward happiness lays in developing core expertise and thriving through one’s strengths. I encourage my students to build teams that complement one another, to bring past experiences and perhaps seemingly unrelated expertise to the fore. For example, the Statement of Work students create with their teams in LIS603 allows them to build off each team member’s strengths as they plan who does which activity in a strategic planning context. If a student excels at design, in this example, they can be in charge of creating marketing materials, infographics, and/or a presentation. I also try to ensure that if one is quiet or deliberative or shy, that there are ways to contribute to class conversations, and that the quick-off-the-mark extroverts do not take up all the space in the room. I do this in all my courses by including social annotation opportunities, team leadership opportunities, and diverse team support activities, so each type of person can shine where they feel best suited, while stretching themselves in other areas.

• Creative and lateral thinking—I encourage students, often through assignments, to come up with novel ways to address problems they face in either their professional or scholarly lives. I also encourage divergent ways of interpreting assignments, as long as the basic gist of directions are kept in mind. For example, in all of my courses, a student is welcome to present a video or diagram instead of text, or a well-formulated question instead of a regurgitated answer. I develop assignments aimed to activate all types of strengths: design, critical thinking, productive argumentation, interpersonal skills, and so on. In my Advanced Library Management course, one of the assignments asks students to create decision-making cards that help them think laterally and creatively when dealing with a challenging decision. This assignment allows visually-inclined students to highlight their design skills, the verbally inclined to focus on writing, and analytic students to create decision trees—all of which can support their practice as library leaders.

• Assessments that ARE the learning—by developing assignments that allow the student to practice new skills and self-assess or peer-assess, I ensure that students have the tools to support their own learning throughout their careers, beyond the MSLS program. This is especially visible in LIS601, where students are tasked with creating teaching materials for their colleagues while knowing only slightly more than their colleagues do. Being able to swiftly synthesize a concept for other members of a team is a valuable career skill. By practicing this skill in a low-stakes environment, students are able to assess themselves and each other as part of the assignment, just as they would in a work environment.

• Critical self-reflexivity—At the core of critical pedagogy is a constant questioning or pushback against the heterodoxy of a profession, and/or the habitus of one’s own life and culture. I want my students to be comfortable in asking why of their instructors, peers, places of employment, their society, and of themselves. I do this by pushing back, playing devil’s advocate, or most often through a dialectic approach inspired by the Socratic Method. In Advanced Library Management, for instance, a weekly “discussant” assignment means that one student both synthesizes the previous week’s conversation and challenges it, by looking at perspectives that are missing, or issues we might not have considered.

Clearly I want my students to succeed, repeatedly, as well as fail. They should succeed knowing that failure is not a terrifying option, but one that can lead to a success that is deeply and intrinsically satisfying, builds resilience, and develops a sense of self-efficacy. This type of success can help temper the uncontrollable nature of the world by ensuring students can deal with whatever uncertainties they face by ensuring they know HOW to learn, not only WHAT they should know. They know how to pivot. They know how to respond to critique from others and how to critique themselves. This builds the resilience and sense of self-efficacy that is paramount to professional success in the field of Library and Information Science, where resources and help are often in short supply, while community and political challenges are constant pressures our students must push back against.

References

Greenshields, M., & Polkinghorne, S. (2022). Love is a lens: Locating love in Library and Information Studies. Library Trends, 70(4), 458-471. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2022.0011

Freire, P. (1968/2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. Bergman Ramos, Trans.; 50th Anniversary ed.). Bloomsbury Academic.

Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. Harrow Books.

Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. Harper & Row.

Vogel, S., & Schwabe, L. (2016). Learning and memory under stress: Implications for the classroom. Science of Learning, 1(1), 1-10.