My learning in Critical/Cultural Perspectives in Education
felt in some ways like opening Pandora’s box – if we can reimagine the box as a
chaotic good instead of chaotic evil. The chaos came from opening myself up to
critiquing in a curious way.
Pandora's Other Box: Critique
I illustrated my “Pandora’s Other Box” with bubbles because some of the ideas still feel fragile to me (although not in danger of popping) and I love the imagery of bubbles rising. Good ideas should rise and be seen/heard. The box could also be labeled “Critique.” The bubbles come from several arenas of this course. For example, “race” and “feminism” are two of the types of critiques we examined this semester. Other bubbles, such as “together” and “listen” came from my need to practice being a good collaborator.
The bubbles are: Who?; Together; Ask; Responsibility; Race; Inclusion; Care; Feminism; Accessibility; Reflect; Tell; Listen; and Equity. These represent the main themes and practices I reflect on the most from this course. Part of being a good advocate is noticing and asking, collaborating, and telling/sharing. One of the bubbles I could have put in a hundred times and not felt guilty is "responsibility." As future leaders, educators, or really any person who wants to have a guiding hand in a child's life or community, responsibility is so important. We have a responsibility to critique every-day practices, not just new ones. It's our responsibility to make the world a better place for everyone else!
Something I always want to do is rethink my biases. This course helped me formalize some of the techniques (critiques) I can use to examine not only my own biases, but also others'. These are techniques I will carry forward in my work as a librarian, not only through my ongoing advocacy project (diversity audit), but also through future projects and programs that are yet unknown to me!
I'll be keeping Pandora's other box close to me going forward as a reminder of my own biases and what I can do to make things better.
My learning has culminated in a lot of ideas about how education and librarianship go hand-in-hand. A library is a home for lifelong learning, and education is one of the first roads we can take to get there. The word-cloud below shows some of the important themes I studied that represent programs, practices, or just thought processes that I have worked on personally or professionally during my time in this program.
The words depicted in the word cloud include: diversity audit, universal design, preflect (introduced to me by a peer in this course!), representation, collaborate, critique, research, equity, practice, empower, global, lesson plan, educate, ethics, makerspaces, STEAM, libraries, advocate, 3D printer, coding, diversity, reflect, individual, robotics, characters, action research, microbits, awareness, and engineering design process.
What is my professional future vision?
Throughout the semesters I have worked on my degree in Education, my vision of my profession and how I fit into has changed. While my previous degree in librarianship more than prepared me to undertake research, I focused largely on conducting case studies and literature reviews in preparation of my work as a special or academic librarian. In the past year, I've embraced action research as a necessary part of youth services librarianship.
Last semester, I performed action research to work on finding a new method of reaching teens and inviting them to the library. My findings in some ways contradicted my takeaways from published research: while the research supported going to where teens were (in this case, I visited the high school twice during their free period to talk with them), what I found was that the teens were less interested in what the library could do for them and more interested in what they could do for the library through volunteer. This action research is helping me re-design my approach for future academic years to greet teens where they are and talk to them about what they are most interested in.
Beyond outreach, I have been researching two other avenues that will direct the future of my work as a youth services librarian. One of these is an advocacy project in my Critical and Cultural Perspectives course that is ongoing in the youth collection at the library (with plans for including other collections later): I have started work on a diversity audit to determine whether the youth collection reflects diversity in main characters, authors, and settings. This work will be ongoing, as it needs to be in order to remain effective, and will help me order books to fill gaps so all readers can find themselves in the books here. This is also work that can be shared with local school librarians as we have overlap in parts of our collection.
The other avenue that will direct the future of my work as a librarian is the implementation and maintenance of a Create Space (makerspace) with appropriately diverse and educational programming. My initial introduction to this topic was more of a deep-dive into the equipment and management aspects of makerspaces and has since expanded and is culminating in my Capstone course. The past several years in this program and with my research have introduced me to some of the challenges that users face with makerspaces. In particular, the areas I have been most keen to research in order to implement change beginning in my library include equity (especially with economics), inclusion (especially with gender and race), and accessibility (especially with designing the physical space to be accessible so a person can feel welcome without needing to ask for accommodation).
I started working on this M.A. in Education with a focus in Digital Media Literacy to help better design educational material and programs at the library. What I found is that the crossover between education and librarianship is vast and there was so much in both fields that I could tie into my practice and my education. My STEAM programming at the library has evolved to support learning in robotics (kids especially love Robot days where they get to design obstacle courses with the Dash robots and use the different apps for block coding, remote control, or line drawing to compete). I suspect this is true of many fields, but especially for these two, learning is lifelong! There is always more I can be critiquing and learning from, and there will never be a time where what I do at the library does not in some way support students -- whether they're from public, private, or home schools.
