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Presidential Reads

Presidential Reads

by Lindsay Davis

Earlier this week on the CJCLS Blog, we shared some statistics related to reading habits of Americans and asked how you promote reading in your community and junior colleges. President Obama’s summer reading lists and song playlists have been popular over the years. These lists might make for an interesting book display or content to share on library social media pages.

Check out this list of all the books the President has recommended while in office, “Every book Barack Obama has recommended during his presidency.” A few days ago, The New York Times published “Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books,” which offers a look into the impact reading has made on the President’s life. You may also be interested in reading “President Obama’s Reading List.”

Powell’s Books has put together a “Presidential Reading List” for President Obama and President-Elect Trump. What might you add? Let us know in the comments.

And for those of you who may be wondering about the reading habits of former presidents, we have you covered. In 2014, Buzzfeed put together “The Favorite Books of All 44 Presidents.” Also in 2014, Business Insider shared “8 Fascinating Stories About Presidents and their Favorite Books.”

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Search Trends: 2016 Edition

By Lindsay Davis

In case you missed our latest string of Facebook posts, we wanted to highlight four resources related to search trends in 2016.

Feel free to add to this list in the comments.

Update: The title of one of the articles has been edited but appears incorrect in email subscriptions until the blog post is opened directly in WordPress (January 19, 2017).

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2016 Best Books (& Blogs, Articles, Podcasts, etc.) Lists

2016 Best Books (& Blogs, Articles, Podcasts, etc.) Lists

by Lindsay Davis

It’s hard to believe the end of the semester is here. Soon, we’ll be seeing more and more “best books of 2016” lists—Times Critics’ Top Books of 2016, NPR’s Book Concierge: Our Guide to 2016’s Great Reads, NPR’s The 10 Best Books of 2016 Faced Tough Topics Head On, Book Riot’s Best Books of 2016, Goodreads Choice Awards 2016, Flavorwire’s 15 Best Books of 2016, Jezebel’s The Best Things We Read in 2016 That You Still Can Too, Chicago Public Library’s Best of the Best Books 2016, and World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2016 to name a few.

What about you? Are there books or articles you read—or podcasts you listened to or videos you watched—this year that were useful to you in your work as a librarian?

I’m having a hard time thinking about last spring semester, but, this fall, I read chapters from Heidi Buchanan and Beth McDonough’s The One-Shot Library Instruction Survival Guide, 2nd ed. (2017), which I enjoyed. There is a lot of practical advice in this easy-to-digest read. I also read Amanda Hovious’ Designer Librarian blog and Kate Ganski’s My So-Called Librarian Life blog, which allowed me to think about my instruction efforts a bit more. I was also impacted by Anne-Marie Deitering’s post “Culture is What People Do” in her info-fetishist blog. Most recently, I read Stonebraker’s (2016) “Toward Informed Leadership: Teaching Students to Make Better Decisions Using Information.” (It is behind a pay wall.) I enjoyed this article because it offers some practical information about how to incorporate evidence-based management strategies– decision awareness, process creation, and decision practice–into library instruction, both in a credit information literacy course or in the one-shot environment.

If you’re itching for some professional reading over your winter break, check out LIRT’s Top 20 Articles in 2015 list that was released this summer. ACRL also has a Goodreads account. Don’t forget, the CJCLS Blog also has a list of books and articles written by community and junior college librarians , which you can find in the CJCLS Scholarship page. (We’re still working on updating the citations to MLA 8.)

Please let us know what books, articles, blogs, podcasts, websites, etc. helped you in your work this year in the comments.  Also feel free to share any curated book lists like the ones mentioned at the beginning of this post. And, finally, if you published a peer-reviewed article or book this year, let us know. We will be happy to add it to our section’s growing bibliography.

Happy Reading! Happy Holidays!

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Inclusive Learning Resources: GADP & TILE

By Lindsay Davis

In the last post on the CJCLS blog, “Instruction for Diverse Populations Bibliography,” I mentioned that several of us in the ACRL Instruction Section Instruction for Diverse Populations Committee attended the National Diversity in Libraries Conference that was held at UCLA this August. During the conference, I sat it on a session related to instruction called “Educating the Educators: Proactive Approaches to the Inclusive Classroom,” which introduced me to two new resources for developing a more inclusive learning environment, the Global Awareness Dialogue Project (GADP) and the Toolkit for Inclusive Learning Environments (TILE).

This session was comprised of two individual presentations. The first presentation was given by Paula M. Smith, Reference Librarian, from Penn State Abington and focused on the Global Awareness Dialogue Project (GADP). GADP is a faculty development program that engages faculty in the exchange of ideas about contemporary global issues in education, with an emphasis on non-Western educational systems. The sessions are three hours long and are open to 20 or so faculty members who register for the program.

After Smith introduced the session, we were asked to complete The Numbers Exercise, which was developed by Roxanna Senyshyn and Marianne Brandt. Essentially, it’s a list of simple math problems, but the directions indicate that subtract means to multiply; divide means to add; add means to divide; and multiply means to subtract. So 12 x 2 really means 12-2. After a few minutes, Smith asked how we felt completing the worksheet. I said it was stressful. The idea behind this is that this is the sort of frustration international and immigrant students feel navigating American academic life.

Smith then discussed the types of GADP sessions they have had at the university. In one program, a panel of international and immigrant students were able to tell faculty members about some struggles they have had in the classroom. For example, a few students mentioned they were not familiar with cursive and were Googling the characters one by one. Some students also explained that they felt uncomfortable because many of their American classmates would leave exams early; these students said they were used to using the whole time allotted for an exam. There were also some challenges about what academic integrity means in the western context.

Another neat thing I jotted down that was a result of one of the GADP sessions was that faculty members who speak more than one language started putting little stickers (or signs) on their windows/doors that said, “My name is_____. I speak ________.”

The second presentation was given by Shannon Simpson, Librarian for Student Engagement and Information Fluency, from Johns Hopkins University. She helped develop the Toolkit for Inclusive Learning Environments (TILE), which is a toolkit of “best practices [and] a repository of specific examples that all faculty are welcome to replicate or re-use.”

Simpson shared a sample assignment that professors/librarians teaching information literacy, business, marketing, and communication could use. It’s a simple but effective assignment. “In 2014 a food and entertainment public relations firm called Strange Fruit was the subject of a media backlash. Ask the students to Google the term strange fruit to see why.” Students then answer these questions:

  • To what does the term refer?
  • Where did the term originate and who has used it since then?
  • What would you tell this firm if during the media firestorm they had come to you for advice?

During the session, we also did a pair-share in which we came up with groups or people we could partner with to share about TILE, such as a diversity committee, student life/affinity groups, teaching and learning groups, university departments, human resources, provost/president’s office, and other relevant people or groups.

How is your community or junior college library—or institution at large—working to build and develop more inclusive learning environments and teaching practices? Do you think your institution would benefit from using or adapting these resources?

(Examples from the GADP session revised on Oct. 25th.)

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Instruction for Diverse Populations Bibliography

by Lindsay Davis

Now that it’s mid-October, many of us are in the thick of teaching research skills in the classroom and at our virtual and physical reference desks. How do you help create an inclusive learning environment? How do you learn about reaching diverse populations in your instruction?

In August of this year, several of us from the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Instruction Section committee on Instruction for Diverse Populations (ISDivPops) presented a poster at the National Diversity in Libraries Conference (NDLC) at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), “Reading About Diversity: Developing and Reflecting on Inclusive Instructional Resources.” The poster outlined the work we did in the 2015/2016 academic year, which consisted of updating the Instruction for Diverse Populations bibliography.

Instruction for Diverse Populations Bibliography Poster

The ISDivPops committee’s charge is “[t]o support instruction librarians in providing instructional services to diverse populations. The committee reviews, researches new content, updates, and promotes the ‘Multilingual Glossary’ and the ‘Library Instruction for Diverse Populations Bibliography’ bi-annually, focusing on one document per year” (“Instruction for Diverse Populations Committee”). The bibliography includes print and electronic resources key to development of effective methods and materials for providing library instruction and teaching information literacy competencies to diverse student groups.

In spring 2015, the committee moved the bibliography from a static PDF document to a Zotero bibliography that utilizes collaborative and dynamic features. In fall 2015 and spring 2016, the committee added new student populations, including veteran students, and also worked on adding tags and new content. The committee focused on adding resources written primarily within the last ten years that specifically describe teaching diverse groups within an academic library context. In 2016/2017, the committee will continue to update the bibliography and will also be updating the Multilingual Glossary.

If you come across an article, book, website, or another resource you think would be a good addition to the bibliography, do let us know in the comments. Ernesto Hernandez, Teaching and Learning Librarian at University of California Irvine, is the chair of the Instruction for Diverse Populations committee this academic year.

Stay tuned later this week for a resource not yet in the bibliography that I discovered while at the NDLC.

“Instruction for Diverse Populations Committee.” ACRL Instruction Section, www.acrl.ala.org/IS/is-committees-2/committees-task-forces/instruction-for-diverse-populations. Accessed 17 Oct. 2016.