It is a quieter time of year for librarian classroom teaching, although I have done a number of one-to-ones over the last couple of months. You sometimes forget that this is teaching too, and can have a real impact on the student’s thinking about how they approach their work or use of resources.
I’ve been reading Brockbank and McGill’s book on reflective learning in HE (2007), and what they say about adapting your practice to allow students to challenge the existing paradigms in which they sit really struck a chord with me, especially when it comes to how I do a one to one. As a librarian, I am separate from the academic School and the discourses used within those departments-so apart from the ways in which my learned social Othering privileges some students, which I am aware of and do wish to counteract (any tips please do share), I have no pre-judged ideas about the individuals who come to me for help.
When I first started out as a librarian in FE, the only students I saw for one to one support were students who were desperate, or students that were super organised. The desperate ones were the ones I saw two days before a paper was due in, the super organised ones (and I am one of these myself!) I saw about three months before I probably needed to. So I was either providing help just-in-time or just-in-case.
Now, in HE, I tend to see a real mixture of students. I really try and promote the idea that a one to one is a space for looking at their needs (and it is OK for them not to know what their needs actually are!) when I see students in class and at the beginning of the year for induction, students can see the space as momentarily one where they are not defined by their progress, and therefore are given greater agency to learn more reflectively (Brockband and McGill, 2007, p. 28). We also promote flexibility of access to librarians, with our Help Desk open long hours (though just because you’re flexible doesn’t mean your students are, and in my opinion timetabled support is often more valued/understood for students without a tradition of accessing support autonomously).
As a librarian I am trained in something we call Reference Interviews. This is when you figure out what people are actually wanting to know about, or find stuff on, when often they cannot explain it themselves or have little knowledge in how they would go about this. This requires knowing a lot of Stuff, but also being able to see the links between things in a non-partisan way that may not be as clear to academic teachers who tend to have very narrow subject specialisms. It also means my listening skills have been refined to pick up on hidden clues as to what the person wants, and also to practice differentiation in the advice I’d give.
I’ll give you an example from a phone call today-a woman rang the library looking for some software where she could feed in data in order to extract parts that were pertinent to her hypothesis. After talking to her for around five minutes it turned out what she actually wanted to be able to do was to search for words and phrases on webpages without having to read the whole thing. So I told her about the Ctrl+F function, which she found immensely helpful. Just by breaking down what sounded like A Whole Thing into “what is it you actually want to do?” I was able to help this woman where others had automatically started searching for complex software which confused her. I was practicing differentiation in my listening and response throughout the phone call and also asking her what she had previously done without judging her choices to make her feel valued and understood. Hopefully, she will remember the library as a place for support, and come to us again in the future.
I think often students find themselves stuck in a paradigm, where the context of learning is very structured for bits such as subject knowledge, but where they can get a bit lost in terms of practical skills. They then convince themselves they are “bad” at something (be it using computers, or reading large chunks of text, or whatever) because they construct learning as what happens in the classroom and everything else around that as them being thick and having to have extra guidance. But if you didn’t know something, listed to someone explain it, and then did know it, that’s learning! That’s part of being a student! Having access to various social processes such as speaking to librarians, or Academic Skills Tutors, or IT support staff within a University is a vitally important part of many students learning processes.
However, students who have been conditioned to see learning as something that can only take place in a classroom, and be facilitated by a Teacher, will not access services outside of this until they are absolutely desperate because their paradigm is one of specialists and behaviorism, where you tick a box and get a point. And a LOT of students come from educational backgrounds where they DON’T have support outside the classroom unless they are seen as developmentally needing it by Higher Powers.
Make one to ones with support staff the norm in Schools and Colleges, not just for the ones who “need” it, and you will end up with students in HE who can cognitively process autonomy of learning outside the classroom a lot better, and be more reflective in general.
Brockbank, A., McGill, I., & Society for Research into Higher Education. (2007). Facilitating reflective learning in higher education. (2nd ed). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Jess Does Teaching 