Librarian as Teacher
My teaching philosophy has evolved over time to reflect the many ways and places I interact with students. This philosophy is also inextricably connected to my approach to academic librarianship, which places the librarian (in this case, me) in the role of teacher.
Teaching Abroad
Transformative.
I think that is the word that best describes my experiences teaching students while traveling. These experiences have certainly been transformative for me, and I observe the same for many students.
While at Eckerd College I had the opportunity to explore many unique teaching experiences in and out of the traditional classroom. Those experiences involving travel with students remain some of the most demanding and most rewarding in my teaching career. An unintentional side-effect is that they served as an amazing point of outreach librarianship and brought my philosophy of outreach librarianship into focus.
Teaching Information Literacy
I try to see the big picture of a student’s trajectory when I am preparing for an Information Literacy class, and the class prep is the last step in an iterative process starting long before that.
I make a point to meet with faculty to learn what is important for them in their course. By knowing this first, I am able to better understand how I might fit into that plan, sometimes in ways neither of us saw before. These conversations also allow me to start mapping what discipline specific information students are getting in which courses, which in turn enable conversations about where information literacy concepts might best fit into the disciplinary curriculum.
Teaching Courses
I have developed and taught for-credit courses, including an information literacy course, two Environmental/Natural History courses abroad to Honduras and Ecuador, and a senior capstone course in the General Education program focused on examining issues of social justice.