It's Academic

By now we’ve all heard some notion of 508 compliance, accessibility in education or universal design as a key focus for growth or strategic planning—as the percentage of students with disabilities matriculating for college/university study is outpacing non-disabled growth since 2012. Add to that the ubiquity of technology-enabled distance education across the non-profit/for-profit spectrum and the wide advertising net cast to attract non-traditional learners, and you are faced with a sizeable and increasing population for whom accessibility will be critical to success. If you are reading this, then your chosen career path brings you to the frontline of this need and casts you in the role of guide and advocate.

To that end, and to add to the solutions spoken to by organizations such as Educause,  U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, Thinkcollege, AHEAD, LearningAlly, or Closing-the-Gap (to highlight a very few), I thought I would share a few helpful resources and best practices from my own experience. While you may not be able to remodel the building to meet universal design tenants or refurbish your entire technology array, there are attainable resources for areas you can affect:

• MS Office Accessibility Suite – Probably a familiar solution, this collection of basic Assistive Technology tools (screen-to-text narrator, monitor zoom level, speech-to-text recognition agent, and on-screen keyboard) affords you a host of tools which will cover the large portion of what your special needs students will require. The best part…you already have it installed on any non-Mac at your disposal. Check the Accessories>>Accessibility or Ease of Access Center located from any Windows system’s Start menu.
  NOTE: This is a BASIC collection of tools—much better alternatives exist in each category. For those with a budget I would recommend visiting  freedomScientific.com  and www.kurzweiledu.com to explore some of the more polished commercially available options.
• Assistive Technology Lending Centers – Most states have a centrally located, nationally funded program where Assistive Technologies are able to be loaned for free to non-profit organizations and residents—the way you would check out a book. I know that I have gone to PATL many times in the past for my Pennsylvania area patrons. Find your local and FREE AT lending center by using RESNA’s State Program list.
• Techmatrix.org – This site, funded through the National Center for Technology Innovation (NCTI), offers students and educators a chance to research and compare a growing library of available Assistive Technologies. This site allows you to evaluate and spend wisely.
• Understood.org – A big part of your role in this situation is as an advocate. This site will help you, the student and their parent/caregiver navigate the tricky world of funding, universal design considerations, AT evaluation and more. Few sites do a better job of reducing the noise and helping you get results.

Finally, and this one gets a paragraph instead of a bullet as it is more important than any listed above, Your Institution’s Office of Special Needs. It goes without saying that the best resource you have available to you are the peers and professionals in your own organization whose education and training is centered on best-serving this growing student population. Yet I have found that there is infrequently a dialogue between those who shape these programs and those of us in information services who are readily working to make them work. In addition, half of the battle in properly serving this population stems from creating an atmosphere where special needs students feel understood and supported without being made to feel additionally “special”. This means that care should be taken when deciding where to locate specialized technologies…do we fill a  PC at the edge of the lab with all of the tools—relegating the user to separation—or are we making sure that they are having the same enabled and fulfilling experience as other students? Similarly, how we personally work with these students is critical toward supporting their sense of experimentation with the tools we present. We should be sure our confidence with the resources at hand, physical posture, language choice and overall demeanor is one not influenced by whether a student is in a chair with legs or with wheels. Your institution’s special needs office is full of professionals who can help YOU best support this student population.

The need to serve this population is growing, and with a little bit of exploration and inspiration we can make a significant difference as service providers who shape the conceptualization and delivery of these critical resources.

Maria Accardi’s “The Souls of Our Students, the Souls of Ourselves:

Resisting Burnout through Radical Self-Care”

Slides available at http://bit.ly/1RybIuu

Text of Accardi’s speech available at http://bit.ly/1X3sZj8

Recap by Melissa Correll, Instructional Services Librarian, Lycoming College, Williamsport, PA

On Tuesday, October 6, 2015, Maria Accardi, Coordinator of Instruction and Reference at Indiana University Southeast, gave the keynote address at the College & Research Division luncheon during the Pennsylvania Library Association’s Annual Conference. Her presentation, “The Souls of Our Students, the Souls of Ourselves: Resisting Burnout through Radical Self-Care,” addressed an issue that affects many librarians: burnout.

Often, librarians don’t want to talk about burnout. We may be ashamed to admit we have feelings of frustration and fatigue. Accustomed to accommodating faculty and students alike, we may have lost our ability to recognize our feelings along the way. We may even be afraid that any harboring kind of negative feelings might mean that we are bad librarians. These feelings are real, however, and Accardi is working to bring burnout, and its prevention and remedies, into the light.

While Maria Accardi was planning library instruction for a First-Year Seminar, the faculty member with whom she was trying to collaborate wrote to her in an email, “I don’t think of this as teaching this class for me – I consider it providing a service for the FYS students.” The professor signed her name, writing Ph.D. after it, and Accardi felt slighted, as if the faculty member were ‘putting her in her place.’ While this is certainly not the way the majority of teaching faculty treat reference and instruction librarians, it is probably safe to claim that we have all experienced a similar slighting. Being treated like a service provider, rather than an educator, can lead to feelings of burnout. Accardi experienced this firsthand.

When she began to feel exhausted in her career and to question her decision to enter librarianship, Maria Accardi used her sabbatical to do something very librarianish: she started to research burnout. She found that workers in social and human services, fields which demand a lot of emotional labor or have a highly affective component, suffer burnout often. Affect is central to librarians’ work. Reference and instruction librarians, for example, must always be approachable. We must use open body language, make initial eye contact, and set the tone for the reference interaction. Essentially, we have to be “on” at all times, which can be emotionally taxing. Yet, these emotional skills are not part of the library school curriculum, and, in fact, are rarely acknowledged.

Take this emotional drain, add the intellectually intensive work of the profession, and stir in all the extra demands of academic life (like committee work, faculty meetings, and the demands of tenure and promotion), and you have a recipe for burnout. If these factors combine in a demoralizing institutional climate, in which librarians’ work is not valued, or faculty do not see librarians as equal partners in the educational mission, burnout is even more likely. The institutional climate is what triggered Accardi’s experience with burnout; she was “tired of explaining what we do, why we do it, and why it matters.”

Librarians often feel frustrated by the continual need to demonstrate that we are doing our jobs well, and deserve to keep them. So how can we combat these feelings of burnout? Accardi recommended taking a holistic view, reminding ourselves that we are whole people, and that our identities do not necessarily hinge on our careers. This is where the radical self-care comes in.

The word “radical” comes from the Latin “radix,” meaning “root;” radical self-care means taking care of our roots. To illustrate the concept, Accardi drew a metaphor comparing librarianship to her garden, which was planted too compactly, stunting the growth of some of the plants. Something similar to this failure to flourish happens to librarians when we take on too much; if we do not allow ourselves the time and space we need to develop personally, we wither. Accardi reminded us that it is okay, even necessary, to say “no” sometimes so that we can care for ourselves.

Extending the metaphor, Accardi noted that the quality of the soil is important to the health of the plants. Librarians want to know that they are valued contributors to the garden of teaching and learning. In her research, Accardi found that a positive institutional climate can be the most influential factor in reducing burnout. Institutions can cultivate a positive climate by recognizing employees’ full humanity, and making policies that support work/life balance. Participatory management styles can also help employees feel empowered. Accardi suggested that institutions show their dedication to their public-facing librarians with strong, visible financial and political support.

Individual strategies may also help librarians to cope with burnout. Knowing our limitations, and saying “no” to responsibilities that are not productive or are a time-drain is a start. Taking restorative downtime to focus on a favorite hobby can also help. Librarians can also use their teaching philosophy as a form of self-care; Accardi suggested that seeing the student as a whole person, and teaching to that whole person, is a way to reaffirm the librarian’s humanity. Additionally, she recommended that we view ourselves as active educational collaborators rather than service providers.

If we forget to take care of ourselves, we run the risk of burning out our passion for the profession; we can’t care for our students if we can’t care for ourselves. It is important to recognize and acknowledge feelings of burnout so that we can take steps to remedy the problems.

**First off, let me preference this post with reminding the reader that my opinions are not representative of the entire “It’s Academic” CRD Bloggers and the bulleted take away statements are only from a selected few academic focused presentations that I felt were interesting to share.**

Cream of the Crop: PA Forward & Academic Libraries

• Basic Literacy – Penn Highlands Community College hosts a very large PA One Book event utilizing their entire campus and reaching out into the community at the middle school level. The entire campus supports the event financially and provides their time and talents to host events related to the theme of the PA One Book for the year.
• Information Literacy – Muhlenberg College is promoting the idea of using active learning more in one-shot sessions and beyond. The presenter’s handout was very helpful and offered ‘real-world’ examples of active learning activities connected to the new Information Literacy threshold concepts. (More on the Information Literacy Framework check out conference handouts session “Putting the Framework To Work For You” by Carrie Bishop)
• Social Literacy – A preview of a later conference session, Penn State York, introduced their highly interactive first- year experience program titled, ConnectED that in this blogger’s opinion, many universities should consider undertaking. More information to follow.
• Financial Literacy – If you are not familiar with Penn State Main Library Student Financial Education Center, you may want to send this idea up the administrative chain. While many libraries have brought traditional tutoring opportunities to their libraries, Penn State boasts financial student peer educators trained to assist with budgeting, student loans, and credit.
• Information Literacy – Herding Cats and assessing information literacy is the tune at St. Joseph’s University and while the idea may not be unique to some readers, it was to me. The presenter described how they are working with some faculty members to evaluate completed research papers based on the library skills delivered during one-shot sessions. For example, upon completion of the papers, the librarians are gaining access to un-graded copies via the Blackboard platform and evaluating the resources, in-text citations, etc. based on a library specific rubric they created. Since an IRB was not sought and they are using this for internal review, the results were not shared.

Connecting & Collaborating: Using PA Forward in an Academic Library by Barbara Eshbach, Head Librarian, Penn State York

• Brilliant idea to connect events to PA Forward Literacies
• Held 23 events over the course of an academic year targeting First Year Experience students
• Offered scholarship (provided by librarian’s family) to entice participants
• First –year experience only students could win scholarship money
• Created elaborate and colorful tracking score card  (presenter suggested if completed again, she would probably use digital badges instead of score card)
• Most events had nearly a dozen participants
• A lot of events were based on unique journal article ideas & were fun
• Offered speak easies or informal conversation opportunities such as superstition
• All events took place over the common hour
• Utilized TED talks in a unique and constructive way
• To learn more (and I suggest you do) look over conference handouts or contact Barbara

*Thought to share- why not create this idea for not just FYE but all students to entice them to attend library events? We typically don’t have the ability to offer attendance slips so this might be another way to entice students. Create an events passport and offer prizes via a drawing.

Open Access & IRs: Educating & Empowering the Campus Community (in honor, of Open Access Week Oct. 19-25, 2015) by Adam Hess, Arcadia University

• Educate and entice faculty offering space for authorship (ask them to send CV and find out permissions for authorship rights, etc.)
• Visit faculty meetings and offer presentations about repository
• Create a campus-wide steering committee (i.e. faculty champions)
• University of Winnipeg offers a great graph of the Publication Cycle
• If not available, attempt to assist with the creation an University-wide  open access policy
• Visit events that deem relevant for possibility submitting to repository such as Thesis Day, etc.
• Duke University has an awesome Scholarly Communication blog
• Some Universities have created publishing funds to encourage open access
• Repository page landing pages for authors link online sites such as LinkedIn
• Open Access Directory
• Discover ORCID
• Consider working with University Relations, Alumni, and Student Organizations
• Create marketing strategy (print and virtual)
• Presentation catch phrase “Pound the Pavement” (i.e. best advertisement = ‘word of mouth’)

Teaching at Learner, Learning as Teacher: Energizing Your Library Instruction Practice through Feminist Pedagogy by Maria T. Accardi, Indiana University Southeast

• Very inter-active participant centered workshop patterning the style the presenter wanted to teach
• Had an opportunity for reflection and think-pair-share
• Student- centered, being thoughtful of the power structure in the classroom
• Handout offered great examples of feminist instruction librarian strategies
• Handout was from Maria’s book, Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction
• Website is very helpful http://mariataccardi.com/
• Referenced educational professionals in the field that believe in feminist pedagogy in education
• Shout out to participants (inside joke – #evilowls)

Overall, due to time and self-imposed word count, I did not summarize every session that I attended. To be honest, I felt that most of the academic sessions could easily be explained by the conference handouts as some of the presenters posted their power point presentations. Finally, coming from a public library setting, I felt that most of the academic sessions were primarily focused on research or ongoing research ideals. These sessions were very different from public sessions. “It’s Academic!”… after all! 950 words

On Friday, October 23rd, ACLCP will be hosting its 50th Anniversary Conference at the Red Lion Hotel-Harrisburg East (formerly the Holiday Inn-Harrisburg East). The conference will be a celebration of ACLCP’s half-century mark and a member showcase featuring the themes of Access, Collaboration, Learning, Community, and Preservation.

Registration is now live. Please see the flyer below for more details and link to the registration form:

http://www2.aclcp.org/documents/program-fall2015flyer.pdf

Questions can be directed to programs@aclcp.org.

We look forward to seeing you there!