IPAL Information Literacy Interest Group Spring Conference 2025

Thank you to all who were able to attend this year's IPAL Instruction Interest Group meeting! Especially now, connecting with friends and colleagues feels so important! We had 15 people attend the Instruction Interest Group session held Wednesday, May 28, 2025, at Drake University's Cowles Library in Des Moines. 

We started with a little orientation to the session and our activities, and outlined our expectations for everyone to get the most from our time together. We then went around the room and introduced ourselves. Because conferences are about connection, we wanted a way for people to be able to identify others who would be open to folks reaching out after the conference—What better way to indicate this than by having everyone self-select by wearing stickers? That way if something came up later in the conversation, we could be sure to get that person’s contact information for a follow up conversation.  

We spent the bulk of the time exploring Table Topics. What are Table Topics, and how do they work? 

• Participants joined a group discussing a topic they had an interest in. (There were prompts for each topic to help get the conversation started.)
• Each table appointed a note taker for their table.
• We structured the session to emphasize participation -- Conversations are made richer by everyone's expertise and experience!
• We wound up doing 3 rounds. At the sound of the buzzer, attendees had the option to pop over to another group to discuss a different topic but everyone was so engrossed in their conversations we all wound up staying put at our original tables!

We've brought together the notes from each group and posted them in the embedded Google Doc below. There were so many rich conversations happening during the entire session, and it's particularly nice to find folks who are also interested in what you're interested in to be able to share around the table. The topics were: 

• Navigating change
• Campus
• Curriculum
• Legislative/administrative pressures
• How are you staying informed? Finding balance? Advocating for your needs?
• Neurodivergent working, learning, & teaching
• What works for you? 
• What has helped you grow with your colleagues and students?
• Tech tools to make life easier *including AI
• Tools and tricks we just can’t stop telling people about
• Things that have changed how you work, teach, stay organized, communicate, and/or learn
• Professional development ideas
• How do you stay up to date with instruction approaches? How are you staying fresh?
• Articles/books you're consuming
• Info-lit-themed common read suggestions for groups of colleagues?
• What resources do you revisit time and again for inspiration?
• Whole person station
• Self-care and recharging – what works for you? Others in your orbit?
• What strategies, tools, resources (books, podcasts, mindfulness or wellness approaches) help you find balance?
• How do your hobbies help? What are your comfort hobbies? Jump-start hobbies?
• Let’s talk about boundaries!
• How can we support each other in chaotic times?

Throughout the session, participants also had access to some fidget toys, bubble wrap to pop, and coloring books to help de-stress or focus throughout our time together.

Thank you again to everyone who participated! There were so many important and supportive conversations happening throughout the session, all made possible because of your participation! We are grateful to have such caring, innovative, and dedicated colleagues throughout Iowa! 

Instruction Interest Group May 2025 Drake by cstone

 

Link to 2025 IPAL Information Literacy Interest Group Table Topics Notes in Google Drive.

Teaching philosophy: participate, contribute, and lead

Sorry for the lateness of this post. I got swept up in graduation and faculty development days. It was while I was helping run the faculty development portion of the week that the inspiration for this post hit me. As faculty members, the librarians at our university will be participating in professional portolios for the first time. I won't get into the requirements and pieces and such here, but one of the artifacts that I will have to develop is a "Philosophy of Teaching" statement.

I don't know about most of you, but I don't have an education background. My teaching and instruction qualifications stem from a semester long course on IL instruction. That's it. I've never written a philosophy of teaching before. And I'm not sure I've ever really consciously thought about what mine might include. Will mine be fundamentally different from someone who teaches a for-credit course? Or someone who sees the same students every day? I wonder if mine will be shaped by the fact that I fall into what one of my colleagues called a "practice discipline." One where a students' development and progress in the area are measured more in skills and proficiency honed via practice than in innovation, new thinking, or crafting a product. But my role in this eduction is that latter piece. I strive to think differently about education (partly because I don't have that classical grounding to fall back on) and teaching. It isn't the rote practice for me that it might require of my students. I know that philosophies of many great teachers are not bounded by the walls of a classroom, but I wonder how to address the significance that not only does learning happen outside the library classroom, but so too does the teaching.

As I got overwhelmed with these ideas yesterday, I was grounded by the language in the section I was leading. In the arena of scholarship, we are asking our faculty to think of their engagement in their disciplines and professional arenas in the following ways: participation, contribution, and leadership. I like that idea for my own scholarship, but as I took that idea one step further, I wonder if it wouldn't work for students and IL skills too. Can we think of our instruction not in the language of "introduce, reinforce, and master" but in something like participate, contribute and lead? And not just in skills. Don't we want to use scaffolding and building up of skills just in one session? Can we ask students to lead some of the instruction for lower-level skills we think they ought to have, but ask them only to participate in activities in areas unfamiliar to them. I really like the flip-flopping of this language because it changes the subject of those sentences. It is not the librarians who are participating and contributing in the instruction, it is the students. We write our Student Learning Outcomes as "The student will..." but when asked to talk about instruction, we begin our sentences with "I will..." Why? Does simply reframing the way we describe and think about IL change how we teach? What about the expectations for students?

It's something to think about. And I would love to hear about your philosophy of teaching? Have you written one? Where do you start? Has it changed throughout your career?