Information literacy: social class perspectives — at LILAC 2024

Introduction

This blog post follows on from a panel discussion at the LILAC 2024 conference, Information literacy : social class perspectives. Our panellists were: Jennie-Claire Crate, Darren Flynn, Rosie Hare, Ramona Naicker and Andrew Preater.

For our panel we asked LILAC attendees and others who could not attend to respond to four statements or provocations about social class and libraries with their comments and ideas. The Padlet is open in read-only mode: link to Padlet from our panel session.

In the session we drew on themes from the Padlet to inform discussion and explained we would follow up to address more of the questions and comments via a blog post which we hope will continue to spark additional conversations. We could not cover every comment without writing a post five times as long as this, so have summarised and grouped comments and ideas into themes under the original provocations we used in our panel session.

Do you agree that if you care about equity and social justice then you should include critical theories within your information literacy practice?

There were several responses in the comments, panel discussion and follow-up conversations at LILAC about our argument for the necessity of critical theories.

We chose critical theories as a term suggesting there are multiple critical traditions. However, within information literacy practice critical information literacy (CIL) is the critical approach that is most fully theoretically developed and it is CIL we centre in our work. CIL represents the application of critical pedagogy to information literacy practice and, as this approach ultimately has its theoretical roots in Critical Theory (CT), used here in uppercase to denote Frankfurt School Critical Theory, it is both radical and aligns with the social justice agenda mentioned in our provocation. We agree with the Padlet comment that CT can be employed performatively, which we take to mean employed in a shallow way for the sake of surface appearance, and we view critical librarianship not as a style to be chosen from a toolbox of different approaches in the classroom, but a thoroughgoing approach underpinning all aspects of our practice.

One unanticipated reading of our provocation is shown in the Padlet comments that we are arguing for teaching CT to students, rather than use these theories to inform our approach i.e. our practice. We agree with the Padlet comment that it is “possible to fold critical theory into our teaching as care, love without needing the ‘right’ terminology. We don’t need the discourse to value each other and respond with humanity“.

We had anticipated we might receive pushback, or unwillingness to engage with critical approaches based on a perception of these ideas being difficult, and our provocation was designed with the hope of eliciting discussion about this, and counter-arguments—as in the Padlet comment above. In the article we developed our LILAC panel from (Flynn et al., 2023) we wanted to demonstrate that working-class thought, theory and mind are not limited compared with that of librarianship’s middle-class population. We do not view our engagement with theory as limited to consumption and repetition of middle-class scholarship, but a field which we aim to enrich and transform with the development and creation of new theory.

We repeat our request to our readers from that article: “We ask those middle-class readers who find our engagement with theory challenging to keep in mind that this work was formed through our intellectual lives which are rooted in our working-class lived experiences within the academy. We also ask them to reflect on why they may wish to dismiss working-class critical theories of work and educational environments which were designed for their comfort” (p.164).

Presenting theory as too difficult, language as impenetrable, or asking for definitions of words which can be looked up online is a strategy of refusal and an excuse we do not accept. The idea that we expect students in higher education to engage and grapple with new, challenging and unfamiliar ideas is commonplace and something we agree with. We argue the same thing is true for us as lifelong learners. Refusal to engage with the meaning of critical ideas reflects privilege and falls short of the expectation we have of colleagues who hold an advanced degree in our field, or equivalent experience. What we mean by this expectation is that we know holders of a Level 7 qualification such as the library PgDip or masters have demonstrated they have “conceptual understanding that enables the student to evaluate critically current research and advanced scholarship in the discipline,” and can “continue to advance their knowledge and understanding, and to develop new skills to a high level” (QAA, 2024 p.24).

We believe we can trust in our colleagues’ ability to look up the meaning of any terms that are unfamiliar, and think about how theory might be applied to their practice. We know it requires a level of engagement and vulnerability to understand that you may be an absolute beginner, or may never reach deep expertise, but the work is still necessary.

This is hard work, and is supposed to be hard because any work that focuses on how different people have been oppressed over the years will involve unpacking the feelings, knowledge and assumptions you hold within yourself, and looking in the mirror at how you’ve benefited from certain privileges—especially as a white, middle-class person. This is the hardest work, because you have to be fully honest with yourself and to be progressive implies this is work that is never finished. There is a real need to sit with our discomfort.

We can, in our practice cite and utilise authors who do this sort of theoretical work without recourse to over-complex language such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. This also connects with the strengths in knowledge that working-class students bring to academia, as bell hooks writes, “Importantly, one need not be either intellectual or academic to engage in critical thinking. Everyone engages in thinking in everyday life” (p.187). Engaging with CIL benefits our teaching practice as its theoretical body of knowledge helps open students’ eyes to structural inequalities, preparing them to handle diverse perspectives and challenges in a pluralistic society. Adopting a critical approach to information literacy strengthens teaching, but also facilitates meaningful dialogue among students from varied social class and socioeconomic backgrounds, fostering empathy and a collective commitment to tackling social justice issues.

We observe librarians are unaware of how middle-class librarianship is. How do you think this permeates our teaching environments as a form of shared knowledge?

This comment in the Padlet demonstrates an excellent example of the kind of reflective praxis that this work involves, and shows how critical self-reflection isn’t an academic exercise but a necessary part of our professional growth: “I’m a white extremely middle class librarian serving a population that is mostly not white and mostly not middle class and until I started examining that and working on myself, I wasn’t serving that population properly. I’m still working on it but I’m much better and it shows in the better way I can advocate for my students.” This work does not involve throwing our hands up and despairing at how we aren’t getting it perfect straight away. We all have certain privileges we need to examine before we are better able to understand and work with the various forms of capital and community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) that students bring to education settings. This work enhances our professional practice, but also ensures we are genuinely meeting the diverse needs of our student population, rather than perpetuating outdated and exclusionary standards.

In the comments for this provocation there is a theme about assumptions colleagues make about common—meaning shared—knowledge staff and students have, which is in fact knowledge common to the middle class. This knowledge informs our assumptions about what information literacy actually is, and how and what we teach. Librarianship inherits the middle-class norms and values of the academy and our colleagues, and one challenge to ourselves is to ask what our responsibility, or ability is to influence and change this. This is work that lies outside ourselves, that implies change in a wider social system based on hegemonic norms, values and assumptions. Attempting to influence that system can be a deeply frustrating experience. Hegemony means the dominance of a social group based on the cultural outlook or worldview of a ruling group, such that it becomes viewed as a natural or inevitable cultural norm. These frustrations act individually, as the needs and perspectives of our working class colleagues are overlooked, and structurally as this reinforces a cycle of marginalisation within our educational settings and curtails innovation in librarianship. We argue that we can at least be prefigurative in those areas that we can influence: we can always, at least, role-model the approach and behaviours we wish to see as the future norm.

There is a Padlet comment, and were contributions in the LILAC panel from librarians from outside the UK about our class system. The panel was speaking from a perspective of experience limited to the UK, and we welcome reflections from those—particularly of working-class origin—who had not grown up here. This is an ongoing conversation and, as stated above, this work is never finished.

We ask if you feel uncomfortable reflecting on classism and class privilege in your work and information literacy practice, to ask yourself why that might be?

A key theme we draw from responses to this provocation is the discomfort felt by our colleagues of working-class origin who have attained middle-class income or other markers of status due to social mobility, and work in middle-class environments such as higher education where a sense of difference or ‘not fitting in’ is still felt by those who have crossed this divide.

We do want to draw a distinction between social class and socioeconomic status (SES), which are often conflated. Both of these concepts describe social stratification but SES considers socioeconomic factors such as employment, income and education level whereas social class relates to sociocultural factors and one’s relationship to social power (Manstead, 2018). SES can change rapidly throughout one’s life, whereas social class is inherited and relatively stable throughout one’s life course. This means that those of working-class origin who have experienced this migration will have improved their SES, but retain their position in terms of social class.

These feelings of dislocation are familiar from research on sociology of education and social mobility, described by Teresa Crew as “a set of dislocating symptoms produced by the reconciliation process between a working-class identity and the hierarchically organized field of academia” (2020, p.32). We also saw in the Padlet comments and panel discussion mention of imposter phenomenon, meaning feelings of intellectual phoniness (Clance and Imes, 1978) based on class position, including being driven to imitate middle-class social mores to better fit in.

Conversely, this understanding of difference can inform and enrich our interactions with our students and provide moments of critical reflection. In the Padlet there are some breakthrough critical reflections on one’s own class privilege and intersectional identity, which represent positive moments demonstrating growth and understanding. There is a need to sit with the discomfort of these realisations that, as in the comment which references Robin DiAngelo (2018), “Even though my family was impoverished, I only realised that I am privileged on account of my skin colour after reading ‘White Fragility’”, and “It hurts to start realising that you are in fact the oppressor in some circumstances, when you are used to seeing yourself as the oppressed”.

This work is intersectional: we argue for an intersectional politics of class rooted in critical self-inspection. Unpacking your own class privilege needs to include and be informed by inspecting your privileges around race, disability, sexuality, gender identity, neurodivergence and other aspects or facets of identity. We reject hard-right and Conservative reactionary discourses about the white working class: librarianship remains a very white profession with less than 5% of the workforce identifying as a global majority ethnicity (CILIP, 2023) and this needs to be improved. This monoculture—the dominance of white perspectives in librarianship—is reflected in these workforce demographics and also influences the research and scholarship within our field, often sidelining the diverse experiences and needs of global majority communities.

If you identify as middle class, what steps could you take in terms of allyship or as an accomplice to challenge social class elitism in your information literacy practices and workplace?

The problem of classism in higher education is an embedded, complex structural issue that must be met structurally and as such, we do not aim to present quick tips which we know will not affect meaningful change.

One thing we consider a key practical step is working on one’s self to gain the type of breakthrough critical reflections we describe above, which are rooted in understanding one’s own positionality and privilege. Positionality means one’s social location in terms of facets of identity, and one’s social and political context. Again, this work can be some of the hardest to do, because it is thankless: nobody will pat you on the back or give you a gold star for your good allyship. Many who do attempt to complete social justice work in their workplaces experience pushback, as their colleagues become uncomfortable when a mirror is held up to the practices that have served them well for years. For those who are middle-class or who have migrated into the middle class via social mobility, these actions may be viewed as a betrayal by their peers who do not want to cede their unearned benefits of class privilege. Overcoming people-pleasing as a profession that is made up of 75% women (CILIP, 2023), where women are predominantly socialised to be accommodating and amenable, is difficult work involving significant reflective practice and vulnerability.

We can however utilise the privilege we do have to improve things, where we can. This can include everyday actions of solidarity, as one comment in the Padlet reads, “Call[ing] out the bullshit from my fellow middle-class colleagues”. This still comes with some measure of risk, even for small actions, as colleagues’ reactance and hurt feelings can be out of proportion to the action being taken. As one action of recognition and solidarity we can bring to our professional practice and share, if we have these, working-class lived experiences with working-class students and colleagues. We also can work on sympathetic or empathetic understanding of others’ experiences, and work against our own immediate assumptions. Related to this, we can work on our assumptions about our students’ knowledge of unspoken rules—the so-called hidden curriculum—and our assumptions about previous experiences of libraries from their previous educational experiences. It is crucial to acknowledge that individuals from minoritised groups often face additional hurdles and have often had to work harder to overcome these systemic barriers to achieve their current position. We need to continually challenge our assumptions about what students know, and how they interact with us and our collections. We can also call out snobbery around colleagues’ assumptions based on students’ outward markers of social class such as fashion, accents and dialect. Importantly, as Teresa Crew (2020) explains in her research on working-class academics; making the hidden visible works as both a strategy for challenging assumptions and classist microaggressions (p.88) and in terms of connection with students by sharing understanding rooted in shared lived experiences (pp.118-120).

We are stewards of our libraries and learning spaces, and can work to develop them into places of welcome rather than of exclusion. One person who commented on the Padlet and works in further education said, “I have noticed that a lot of students seem hesitant to come in and ask if it’s “allowed” to sit at a table or use a PC,” and that deliberate relaxing of rules that has led to more positive student behaviour as, “it no longer feels like a place where there is an unwritten assumption that everyone knows how libraries work and that there is an expected way to spend your time there”. This comment, and discussion from an audience member at LILAC about their work to mitigate fear felt by students who had not used libraries before, reflect approaches to reduce feelings of library anxiety, which are feelings of inadequacy and lack of skill when confronted with the size and complexity of academic libraries (Mellon, 1986). In our article, we also identify as one cause the architectural scale and grandeur of academic library design that prioritise middle-class tastes and preferences (Flynn et al., pp.171-172).

Finally, there is a comment on the Padlet that makes a structural point about reducing barriers to entry and progression to senior roles within the profession, as “Despite recently introducing apprenticeship positions in the library, we still ask for postgraduate qualifications for more senior roles but don’t offer financial support to allow junior colleagues to pursue these.” Employers in our sectors already use the Level 3 Library, information and archive services assistant standard as an alternative to hiring graduates into library assistant roles (which is classified as a non-graduate role by the UK government). We acknowledge this standard can be misused by employers, for example by paying apprentices less for the same work as other staff.

One near-future possibility for our workplaces is using the Level 7 Library, information and knowledge professional standard as an alternative to current qualifications like the PgDip or masters, anticipated later in 2024. Introducing these to our workplaces does require positional power and senior leadership support, alongside this it is crucial that leaders and hiring managers give genuine equivalence to this route as there is a risk the cultural capital embodied in postgraduate qualifications leads to disadvantage for those coming via the apprenticeship route. Our sector has generally not done well at keeping up with qualifications frameworks, recognising non-academic routes or expressing parity of esteem (Fair Library Jobs, 2023). However, advocating for these apprenticeships, responding constructively to sector consultations about apprenticeships in our sector and raising awareness of these as an option in our workplaces—including helping dispel myths—is open to all of us. By creating pathways for individuals from diverse backgrounds to enter and advance in our profession, we not only enrich our libraries but also demonstrate practically our commitment to inclusivity and equity.

Conclusion

As a panel we want to extend our grateful thanks to the contributors to our Padlet both ahead of time and in the session, and those who contributed on the day at LILAC. Your thoughts and ideas made the discussion as rich as it was—thank you.

As we said on the day to our colleagues and friends of working class origin in the audience, we have done this for you. We wanted you to feel seen and recognised, because we know this is not the norm in librarianship. We hope we met this goal in our session and have represented the same spirit in this follow-up piece. Moving forward, we encourage each one of us, regardless of our class backgrounds, to continue these conversations in our own libraries and communities.

References

CILIP (2023) Workforce mapping 2023. Available at: https://www.cilip.org.uk/page/workforcemapping (Accessed: 15 April 2024).

Clance, P.R. and Imes, S.A. (1978) ‘The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: dynamics and therapeutic intervention’, Psychotherapy, 15(3), pp.241-247 [Online]. doi:10.1037/h0086006.

Crew, T. (2020) Higher education and working-class academics: precarity and diversity in academia. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

DiAngelo, R. (2018) White fragility: why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Boston, MA: Beacon.

Fair Library Jobs (2023). On qualifications – part 1. Available at: https://fairlibraryjobs.substack.com/p/on-qualifications-part-1 (Accessed: 18 April 2024).

Flynn, D., Crew, T., Hare, R., Maroo, K., and Preater, A. (2023) ‘They burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why’: Stories at the intersection of social class, capital and critical information literacy – a collaborative autoethnography,’ Journal of Information Literacy, 17(1), pp.162-185 [Online]. doi:10.11645/17.1.3361.

hooks, b. (2010) Teaching critical thinking: practical wisdom. New York, NY: Routledge.

Manstead, A.S.R. (2018) ‘The psychology of social class: how socioeconomic status impacts thought, feelings, and behaviour’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 57(2), pp.267-291 [Online]. doi:10.1111/bjso.12251.

Mellon, C. (1986) ‘Library anxiety: a grounded theory and its development’, College & Research Libraries, 47(2), pp.160-165 [Online]. doi:10.5860/crl_47_02_160.

Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) (2024) The frameworks for higher education qualifications of UK degree-awarding bodies. Available at: https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/quality-code/the-frameworks-for-higher-education-qualifications-of-uk-degree-awarding-bodies-2024.pdf (Accessed: 15 April 2024).

Yosso, T. J. (2005) ‘Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), pp.69-91 [Online]. doi:10.1080/1361332052000341006.

Widening participation praxis and library leadership

Book cover of the edited collection 'Critical Librarianship', in the series Advances in Library Administration and Organization (ALAO). Edited by Samantha Hines and David Ketchum.

I recently had a book chapter published in the collection ‘Critical Librarianship’ in the series Advances in Library Administration and Organization (ALAO), edited by Samantha Hines and David Ketchum. My chapter is titled ‘Widening participation praxis and library leadership’ and is about the role of academic libraries in cultural recognition and misrecognition—sometimes styled (mis)recognition or mis/recognition in the literature—of students from what are termed widening participation (WP) backgrounds.

Publisher’s version: https://doi.org/10.1108/S0732-067120200000041003
Green open access (CC BY-NC 4.0) version: https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/7261/

This post is a brief reflection on this writing, with some additional thoughts on developments since I submitted the first draft of the article in March 2019.

https://twitter.com/chelseaheinbach/status/1290361635412959232

Obviously I am team ‘love praxis!’ all the way, and aiming to keep praxis ‘with an x’ alive in LIS scholarship in 2020.

In responding to the call for papers for ALAO, I wanted to address the editors’ suggested theme of social justice in library management and leadership—interpreted specifically as it relates to widening access and participation in English higher education. In this area English universities have regulatory requirements in terms of improving access to courses, of attainment of students, and of progression of students into employment.

In the LIS literature there is relatively little attention paid to the role of libraries in WP as a political project which promotes social justice and social mobility; more common is librarianship’s contribution to liberal WP strategies which can elide or even exacerbate issues of social injustice. Working on the ground in academic librarianship, the feeling can be very much one of WP work being something that happens ‘elsewhere’, especially if there is a view that this work is concerned mainly or solely with access to courses and activities that support and promote this.

Liberal WP strategies represent a rational response to the metricisation of WP by government which regulates and funds the sector. However these approaches are also rooted in cultural difference and misrecognition within libraries as academic spaces, especially in comfortable acceptance of deficit models of WP students. The area of deficit models is one I’ve returned to over and again during and after writing this chapter. Writing the bulk of the chapter in early 2019, I had thought of myself as a ‘good Bourdieusian’. Based on my own experience of higher education and as an education worker attemping to promote equity and social justice in my work, I accept Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the forms of capital in three fundamental guises: economic, cultural, and social; and my understanding of library work is informed by the relationship of libraries and our collections to these forms and our role in the reproduction of in/equality in education.

Bourdieu’s work is too influential within the sociology of education for librarians not to know about, however Gurnam Singh’s insight into the limitations of Bourdieusian thinking has helped me understand the potential for these analyses to reproduce deficit model thinking about our students. For Singh, a social and cultural capital frame represents a development from a simple deficit model based on academic knowledge and skills, but is still one in which students are understood as lacking in social and cultural capital.

It is easy to see how a deficit approach could be combined with a model of education that reimagines Paulo Freire’s banking model of education, based on transmission of white, middle-class cultural and social capitals to students previously lacking in these. Mindful of this, two ideas became central points in my chapter: that deficit models should be radically reframed or inverted, such that we understand middle-class education professionals as those in deficit, and that library workers can recognise the cultural and social capital that WP students bring with them to higher education.

In terms of the literature, I found limited but often startling vignettes from sociology of education such as the diary fragment by Aisha that I quote in the chapter (p.28). Aisha is one of Penny Jane Burke’s research participants quoted in her book The right to higher education. I considered this example significant, because we can see how, based on a library worker’s actions and speech a student internalises and reproduces a deficit model of WP within herself.

Despite limited examples in the literature, on raising this idea with academic friends and colleagues I saw immediately recognition of the idea of libraries as spaces of social and cultural mis/recognition, both in their own experiences of libraries in education settings and from their students’ experiences. Two contrasting themes emerged for me from these discussions: a real need and expectation for libraries to be a nurturing space for exploration and affording safe intellectual risk-taking, contrasted with feelings of exclusion, marginalisation, and unwelcome based on lived experiences. On this subject I am especially grateful to attendees at the Working Class Academics Conference 2020 for sharing their experiences in our pre-conference sessions, this conference provided a uniquely supportive and trusting space.

In attempting to create linkage between WP as a political project and Critlib movement, it is certainly Penny Jane Burke I have leaned on most heavily as a theorist. For me, it is Burke’s identification of WP as a social justice project, and of critical and feminist pedagogies as a practical way of enacting and delivering that project where I see the strongest potential for developing critical practices of WP within library work and LIS theory and scholarship. However, this is also a space of challenge as by definition critical approaches to WP constrast with liberal approaches, and critical librarianship constrasts with hegemonic or mainstream approaches. Critlib movement is not simply suggesting new, optional styles for teaching or new toolkits for collection development, but aims to intervene and disrupt structural inequalities.

One hard lesson from both critical theory and our sector’s statistics showing differential outcomes for different student groups is that practices of higher education and within it, academic librarianship are not inherently those of social justice. These discussions about classed experiences of libraries and reflection on theory bring into sharper relief the differences or gaps between library workers’ personal and professional values as we espouse them, and values as we really enact them in our practice. In terms of tactics or practical next steps, Baharak Yousefi’s analysis and discussion on “the disparity between what we say and what we do in libraries” would be my first recommendation.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.) & R. Nice (Trans.). Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241-258). New York, NY: Greenwood.

Burke, P.J. (2012). The right to higher education: beyond widening participation. Abingdon: Routledge.

Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M.B. Ramos, Trans.). London: Penguin.

Yousefi, B. (2017). On the disparity between what we say and what we do in libraries. In Lew, S. & Yousefi, B. (Eds.), Feminists among us (pp. 107-125). Sacramento, CA: Library Juice. Available at: https://summit.sfu.ca/item/17387.

Tales from Covid, part I

All were quietly appalled
To imagine mankind annihilated.
What would heaven do
With a globeful of empty temples?
Alters attended
Only by spiders?
Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (1997, p.19)

(This blog post is modified from a shorter piece I wrote for our library staff newsletter.)

Our university buildings closed on Thursday 19 March, and along with it we closed our two physical libraries and moved to online learning support and delivery of teaching. At the time I felt exhausted but relieved, having thought about very little other than coronavirus, Covid-19, “the virus” or just “it” the past weeks. I had felt higher education was slowly, slowly—and then quickly, immediately, today—moving toward closing. Thursday was the point where we were confident we had a plan in place to support students with nowhere else to go, including those living in our accommodation and vulnerable student groups such as care leavers and those estranged from their families—so we were ready to close.

Incident management within a crisis is very different from the day-to-day working of any university. Higher education governance, committees and processes are designed to support a complex system that works to semester, annual, and multi-year cycles. We work with considerable uncertainty year-by-year, but within frameworks, expectations, and practices that provide certainties. But within a critical incident, university leadership needs to immediately engage a very different skill set, putting aside our usual tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainties and instead focusing on what is essential.

As the pandemic developed things changed each day, and accelerated the week of 16 March. At the time, it felt like being physically on one of the now-familiar exponential graphs of Covid-19 cases. Things that seemed certain or agreed 24 hours ago were overtaken by events and dropped. A few days later, that timescale had shortened to 12 hours or less. With our immediate horizon changed to what needs doing today, and our medium-term horizon changed to two or three days from now, organisational hierarchies and reporting lines are much less relevant. Colleagues do what needs to be done, and communication becomes more frank, urgent, and honest. For leaders, it is vital to perceive the underlying concerns expressed, and to be as generous as possible in our reading of colleagues’ words and tone.

At my university the library team was amazing at moving smoothly and efficiently to online learning support and delivery, while dealing with extreme stress and worry in our lives outside work. I could not have asked for better colleagues in the library and as peers—both our own heads of departments and deans of our academic schools, and also my wider peer group of library directors who worked collaboratively in sharing experience and knowledge. For me it’s worth stating that almost all of this advocacy and sharing happened behind the scenes, particularly in how we supported each other to advocate to our senior leadership teams for closing physical libraries and learning spaces. Chris Bourg’s blog post (15 March) and Helen Rimmer’s blog post (22 March) are significant public statements of this. Elsewhere in education and in libraries in other sectors, I saw advocacy being carried out at genuine professional risk. I am immensely grateful to colleagues who contacted me with their words and arguments that in turn made my advocacy much more effective.

At the same time as managing risk and immediate concerns of incident management, there were short- and medium-term scenarios we needed to plan. Once we had made our immediate, rapid and orderly shift to online delivery of teaching we needed to think about the longer term. The Covid-19 pandemic is currently open-ended. We are adjusting to new ways of working and finding out what is most effective in our own teams and our wider circles. This isn’t a blog post for sharing tips as at the time of writing I’m still decompressing, but my immediate thoughts on our shift to sustained online delivery are about the change of gear from dealing with immediate practical concerns, to ensuring we maintain resilience as a team and an educational community.

My thoughts on the Cilip sector membership survey, or, “Cilip should…”

Cilip, the library and information association, recently launched a consultation intended to find out what is important to library, information and knowledge management workers and how Cilip can better support the sector.

Personally I have heard, and uttered myself many times the words “Cilip should…” followed by an idea which would require a substantial pivot in direction or investment of time and money from our professional body. In this case though, it’s actively encouraged and I think it’s vital for all information workers to make their views heard especially as Cilip are explicitly asking for views from those who are not members as much as those who are.

Because some of the text fields in the survey are quite short, I found it easier to write a coherent paragraph separately in my text editor and paste it in. Below, I’ll reproduce some of these thoughts. The text of this blog post is licensed CC0, meaning I have waived all copyright and related rights to the fullest extent possible. You are absolutely free to reuse or modify my words without permission or attribution including in your own reply to Cilip’s consultation survey.

My main priority

My main priority was advocacy and lobbying, because it was the closest priority I could choose to express the urgent need for solidarity between library workers and our professional association across sectors. Public libraries especially are embattled and beset by the ongoing and often cruel effects of austerity, and as such solidarity is needed as the most basic measure possible by which we can support each other.

In my view, Cilip is still working through some of its recent history of not campaigning or supporting library activists, and I know colleagues who say they will never join or re-join Cilip because of these actions. I feel it right that Cilip accept and own this criticism because it reflects depth of feeling of current and former members, but it certainly should not stop us moving in the direction of an activist and social justice orientation and leaning in to this work. As well, I feel those library workers who advocated inaction based on Cilip’s charity status or royal charter do also need to reflect, and look forward to what we can do right now to support activism.

Equality, diversity, and inclusion

An area of work I did not see emphasized specifically in the survey is to improve equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) within the library and information profession. I realize it is the case that EDI is represented within other areas of Cilip’s work and is a thread throughout multiple activities. In particular, I found the ‘Libraries, information and knowledge change lives’ position paper very welcome and it has boosted my confidence in Cilip as a professional body and membership organization. However, I do think this work is both urgent and important enough to be called out specifically within the consultation survey. I recognize and applaud recent excellent work Cilip has done for EDI including the BAME Network and LGBTQ+ Network, as well as moving toward an activist and social justice stance rooted in ethical activism. To maintain momentum, I would like to see guaranteed Board of Trustee representation for the BAME network and LGBTQ+ network alongside any individual Trustee’s membership of those groups.

As an individual member of Cilip, I feel I understand the role and remit of a professional membership organisation reasonably well and despite my various “Cilip should…” takes I appreciate that the diverse views of members means that we won’t always agree. I do not think Cilip needs to be a democratic centrist organization similar to a trade union to be effective. What I would like to see is a more rapid change of pace and direction toward becoming a campaigning and activist organisation, and genuine support for members’ and others’ activism within libraries. Given the tone and content of the recent position paper, I feel we need to see changes throughout Cilip’s organization and structure such that our espoused values are congruent with our enacted values. For me this needs to be seen from the CEO, from the Board of Trustees, and from Cilip in a corporate sense, and not left only to individual members who are outspoken advocates for social justice on a personal basis.

What are the main challenges of my role and how can Cilip help?

This was an interesting question to be asked. I am a library director working in a London post-1992 university so the main challenges of my role (phrased as ‘frustrations’ in the survey) relate to higher education broadly, rather than librarianship specifically. What I picked out in the survey is one major challenge acknowledged widely throughout further and higher education is that to be more inclusive, we need to improve the diversity of our workforce. Within librarianship there are multiple, interlocking forces preventing this that maintain the status quo in ways that make it appear to be a seemingly ‘natural’ state of affairs (a very loose paraphrase of Gramsci, 1971).

Firstly by definition, the lack of diversity of the library profession means the pool we can recruit from is lacking in diversity. Allied to this, the vast majority of library workers lack lived experiences of oppression based on race and ethnicity, which creates a dominant liberal view of discrimination being rooted in individual ignorance and acts of meanness which can be solved by individual approaches rather than being structural and systemic.

Secondly, the cost of postgraduate library qualifications mitigates against drawing applications from a more diverse pool. However, simply removing requirements for qualifications from what are known as “professional posts” risks the deprofessionalization of library services and downgrading of posts. One thing Cilip can do is continue to support development of Cilip-accredited degree apprenticeship courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels (Levels 6 and 7 in English higher education). This would have parity of esteem with existing qualifications based on level of study, credits, and academic quality assurance, as well as combining a job with degree-level study that is free to the student.

Finally, the cost and other difficultly of getting the kinds of continuing professional development (CPD) needed to be an effective reflective practitioner means that staff in our existing pool do not always fulfill their potential. Alongside institutional and more overt forms of discrimination this means that staff from communities marginalized within librarianship and higher education may not be as actively developed as much as they should, to flourish and fulfill that potential. One thing that could help is for Cilip’s professional registration routes to be viewed with greater esteem within and across sectors, as such I would to love see everything related to support for mentoring and professional registration strengthened by Cilip.

Works cited

Cilip (2019) Libraries, information and knowledge change lives. London: Cilip. Available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TOq6oBuGRE7dpSxjPVEiMi528E7LuIMe/view

Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the prison notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart

‘Getting smart’ in a time of change, at ARLG 2019 (Part 1 of 2)

This blog post is modified from a workshop, which included a presentation, delivered at the Cilip Academic & Research Libraries Group (ARLG) Conference on 4 June 2019 at the Darlington campus of Teesside University. Rosie Hare of the Northern School of Art, who was also one of the conference organizers, co-facilitated this.

Note on terminology: below, I will use the terms critique and criticism interchangeably. When I refer to critical theory (lowercase) this does not mean a particular critical tradition, or imply there is a single critical tradition.

Our slides are available, but as with most conference slide decks this tells a partial and incomplete story. Below I will expand on our rationale for running this session and the value I feel we derived from doing so, including our first of two workshop activities. Rosie Hare has written about the second half of the workshop, in ‘Getting smart’ in a time of change, at ARLG 2019 (Part 2 of 2).

The theme of the conference was originally, “Doing more with less” which following sharp, critical engagement from the community was later reworked as, “Working smarter in a time of change“.

This angers me. My current work place exists on a shoe string budget. More doesn't get done with less; a 5+ year backlog of essential things builds up, "non-essential" things don't get done, and nothing new gets tried. https://t.co/8zgQXP5mWk
— Nicole Gauvreau (@nlgauvreau) December 4, 2018

It was in the context of critique, refusal, and push-back that I was inspired by Donna Lanclos‘s suggestion to submit a critically-framed response to the call for papers (thread below).

In fact, I'd encourage anyone in the UK within shouting distance of putting in for this conference to do so with critical papers and panels. Flood the CFP with a critique of the framing, reframe it with your submissions.
— Dr. Donna Lanclos (@DonnaLanclos) December 5, 2018

Our title is a reference to Patti Lather’s (1991) Getting smart: feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern, which has particularly influenced my thinking about language and power within postmodern textual practices. Seeking voice and making meaning through dialogue provides a direct link to Lather’s work, due to her focus on importance of removing barriers that prevent people from speaking for themselves.

Thoughts and feelings

In our reply to the call for papers we explained that although we speak as further and higher education workers, library workers across all sectors and industries will likely recognise in their workplaces a context of constrained budgets, intensification of work processes, and pressure to continuously improve to meet the evolving needs and increased expectations of library users.

In doing so, library and education workers actively involve ourselves in roles of self-government which are rooted in measurement, evaluative techniques, and a logic based on markets and competition. But inevitably, gaps appear between the service that is achievable within our organisational financial constraints, and our commitment—which is framed by professional ethics and personal morals—to providing the most effective service. Library workers at all levels can find this situation emotionally charged, unsettling, and generative of feelings of impostorship. For managers especially, one temptation is to shift into a practically-focused crisis management or damage limitation mode, without necessarily giving critical consideration to this complex set of thoughts and feelings.

We had not personally experienced at a mainstream library conference an attempt to create a supportive environment for frank conversations to explore issues like this, and we hoped that delegates could trust each other to share what we felt we needed to say and articulate in critically interrogating these challenges—which might include expressing complicated, negative feelings. We asked workshop participants not to live-Tweet the session or otherwise share it on social media, hoping to create a space for trust and good faith dialogue which would be inclusive of participants who were less familiar with discourses of critique and critical theory—of any tradition. As well as open discussion, we wanted to facilitate questions without anyone feeling they would be picked up for perceived mistakes.

In the workshop, and in our follow-up here we utilized the Chatham House Rule which states that, “Participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed”.

Making meaning with critique

Our working assumption was workshop participants could come to the session with anything from little to a great deal of knowledge of any particular critical theory tradition. We wanted to strike the right balance between potentially ‘splaining basic concepts and being condescending, and assuming too much shared knowledge and falling into the trap of the ‘curse of knowledge’ cognitive bias.

We therefore opened with a explanation of brief summary of what we meant by the term critique or criticism. As simply as we could state it, by critique we mean a process which informs and directs actions which carry social and ethical implications, beyond the technical execution of library work. However this process is in itself complex, and the terminology potentially contested and understood by different people in different ways. There are different critical traditions, and your notion of a critical theory might be conceptualized and understood very differently from mine—and that is fine.

In being critical we do not mean negative finding of fault, instead we mean critical inspection of our practice as information professionals. We particularly want to place analytical focus on the structures and systems that govern what we do in our workplaces or other professional contexts, and the power dynamics which operating within and outside those structures.

We particularly mean to focus on power, not conceptualised just terms of a coercive form of authority but as more of a social force, generated within our social relations and networks. We wanted to ask what potential there is if we analyse and ‘see through’ established authority and what we may think of as dominant means of control. If we are to be critical in a negative sense, we wish to address this to that established authority.

Becoming comfortable with our words

One way of become comfortable with the language of various critical theory traditions is by engaging with literature from different theorists, and coming to know the terrain and contours of their landscapes. However, we argue that processes of criticism can be engaged in without having to ‘have’ an enormous amount of knowledge of theory, that is, one does not need to be an expert to engage with critical ideas. We wanted also to emphasize the practical element of theory, because our view is that being critical is fundamental to reflective practice. We see an extended form of self-knowledge about our motivations for developing critical responses, and its limits and risks, as key to this point.

The requirements of praxis are theory both relevant to the world and nurtured by actions in it, and an action component […] that grows out of practical political grounding.
Lather (1991, p.12)

Patti Lather theorizes this form of practice as politically grounded. Praxis, spelled with an x, here has a sense of being informed action—in particular action which has a political component relevant to directing social change. We feel that this practical political grounding is generated by and through a reflective approach—one which includes knowledge developed from lived experiences, as well as the new knowledge we get from reading and conversations.

We asked the participants to aim to critically inspect how established authority operates within the communities they operate in. Our social networks and relationships are often complex, and a ‘solution’ to a challenge or an issue could look more like an ongoing, continuous, and iterative process rather than a one-step solution. In this spirit, we asked participants to put to one side the idea of simple solutions which process to clean, straightforward resolution and think about a process that might evolve over time.

Activity: reflective question

Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, ‘this, then, is what should be done.’ It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal.
Foucault (2000 p.236)

Some aspects of engaging with a critical approach will make us feel uncomfortable and can feel like thankless work. For example attempting to illuminate and challenge our own internal biases, while also asking others to critically inspect long-held beliefs themselves can be extremely challenging. It may be difficult simply to hold and sit with these feelings and not be overwhelmed, particularly when there is no obvious solution or practical first steps toward a solution that we can busy ourselves with. One point we emphasized to workshop participants that I think bears repeating, managers and leaders discover themselves in that position as well, as reflective practitioners.

As a first exercise we asked a reflective question based on this Foucault quote about the use of critique in refusal, rather than problem-solving. We asked participants to think about themselves being in a position of being one who “refuses what is”, based on thinking and writing about a real-world situation where they wanted to say something but felt they could not. The scenario we described as an example was not being able to to provide a service, or a particular quality of service, due to a constraint outside their control.

We asked participants consider their thoughts and feelings about the situation, without trying to work out how to solve the problem, or jump to a preferred solution. As this was an initial exercise we asked participants be more descriptive about their thoughts, and not to pressure themselves to reach fully-formed conclusions. The initial purpose of this was to provide a period for thoughtfulness not based on talking around a table; and although brief we also hoped this would subvert experiences of conferences dominated by extraverted activity given that there was a longer small group exercise coming later.

We asked participants to concentrate on refusal and visualising themselves in a mode of refusal to, we hoped, facilitate broader ideas and thinking about strategies for change that did not drive toward immediate results. Since then, I found Donna Lanclos’s delineation of power, refusal, and agency in her recent Academic Practice and Technology (APT) Conference keynote provided a rich way of thinking about strategic refusal, and refusal as evidence of institutional rather than individual malaise or deficit:

We need to stop seeing refusal as evidence that there’s something wrong with the people doing the refusing. We need to see refusal as evidence that there is something wrong that they are communicating about, something wrong with the systems they are being presented with, with the structures in which they are placed.
Lanclos, 2019

It may seem unusual that we discussed and focused on feelings—or affect—in our workshop. Indeed, this framing was key to our approach. We did this because we know that feelings are rational, rooted in our material understanding of the world, and in practical terms can sharpen our decision-making processes as well as our motivation to enact our decisions. In relating the politics of feminist movement with that of climate change activism, Susie Orbach describes how spaces of dialogue and sharing are also affective, and build resilience:

Facing feelings is not a substitute for political action, not is it a distraction from action. Feelings are an important feature of political activity. Acknowledging our feelings—the ourselves, to one another—makes us more robust.
Orbach (2019, p.67)

I had hoped our approach would facilitate thinking at greater length about a scenario of lacking control and agency, and would prove helpful later in the small group discussion so that participants weren’t starting from scratch. Rosie and I joined in the exercises with the workshop participants, on the basis that we would not ask anyone to do anything that we were not willing to do ourselves. I personally found this a very useful shared experience, having done completely unstructured free writing exercises many times before this approach provided a similar sense of writing something purely for myself while also serving a useful purpose for the next step in the workshop where we would analyse issues from our experience in greater depth.

Bibliography

Chatham House (2018) Chatham House rule. Available at: https://www.chathamhouse.org/chatham-house-rule

Foucault, M. (2000) ‘Questions of method’, in Faubion, J.D. (Ed.), Power. New York, NY: New Press, pp.223-238.

Lather, P. (1991) Getting smart: feminist pedagogy with/in the postmodern. London: Routledge.

Lanclos, D.M. (2019) ‘Listening to refusal: opening keynote for #APTconf 2019’, Donna Lanclos, 9 July. Available at: https://www.donnalanclos.com/listening-to-refusal-opening-keynote-for-aptconf-2019/

Orbach, S. (2019) ‘Climate sorrow’, in Farrell, C., Green, A., Knights, S., and Skeaping, W. (Eds.) This is not a drill. London: Penguin, pp.65-68.

Cilip Conference 2019 Leaders’ Network Panel: Why self-determined learning matters for leaders

This is the text, slightly modified and with additional citations, of a lightning talk presentation I gave at the Cilip Conference 2019 Leaders’ Network Panel session on the subject of why self-determined learning matters for leaders at all levels.

I will speak about why I think self-determined learning is key to critical reflective practice for leaders. You may already have heard of self-determined learning as heutagogy (Hase and Kenyon, 2000). I say critical reflective practice because critical reflection is the method I identify with—because it focuses on concerns of power and social justice. That matters to me in part because of class positionality—social class remains a barrier to education and entry to librarianship, as Liz Jolly said yesterday in her keynote talk.

I want to centre reflective practice for leaders because it is a critical learning skill, that is associated with and connected to knowing how to learn. I also feel personally, the leaders who have most inspired me and that I think role-model an authentic approach are those who take a reflective approach in their practice.

Reflective practice as a way of understanding and dealing with unique situations is important because to be frank, leaders do not always immediately know what is right and sometimes not even a full picture of what is going on operationally. By that I mean that we will not have an effective playbook or toolkit to work with in situations that are ‘new and novel’, and we may be removed from the operational detail as well: we may not realistically have time to build that knowledge from the ground up.

When I face a new challenge I often think about similarities from experiences I’ve had in the past, and my mind starts developing analogies. But that’s dangerous ground in so many ways—it leads to situations in which cognitive biases can creep in. Remember, many cognitive biases exist because there is an advantage in allowing us to make quick, snap decisions—as such we have to remember that the gut feeling we have needs to be questioned exactly because it feels right.

A workplace role as a leader or senior manager don’t mean that you know everything or can reach good answers or wise judgements quickly; more likely in my experience is that the snap judgement is really a hot take, rooted in cognitive bias or shallow moralising. Think about this: have you ever worked for someone who you thought made a snap decision and then wouldn’t change their mind, no matter what evidence was presented? Or, have you actually been that person?

We need knowledge from outside ourselves to develop self-awareness. My colleague Jacqueline Smart at University of West London taught me yesterday at our learning and teaching conference, that the kind of self-awareness that we gain during reflective practice is also a form of new knowledge. Why we need to be self-determined is that working in new and novel situations that are ambiguous and uncertain is the key space of leadership work.

The most powerful lesson I have learned in any senior role is there are multiple ways to do things and often multiple, functionally-equivalent correct answers. In those new and novel situations there is often no practical or timely way to ask “what are others doing?” and an outward focus for learning combined diverse viewpoints and experiences as input is essential. I’ve learned that this point is often a very difficult one for leaders to make peace with. Leaders place themselves in a vulnerable position when we admit they don’t know something. Those in senior roles often don’t have many peers in the institution at their level, and commonly no-one else with our particular skill-set.

To add, the mentoring relationship you can get through Chartership professional registration is an amazing way to develop that kind of trusted relationship outside your institution—however that’s really not what I’m getting at here. What I have found effective is to draw on the professional body of knowledge of librarianship. Now, saying a body of knowledge is another way of saying “theory”, and for me theory is a living thing we embody in our work. Of course, it can be got from reading thing but it can also be gained from others including by way of what we might think of as the oral tradition of our profession.

In self-determined learning the benefit is in looking wider, outside of librarianship, is that this is your way to find the global maxima—the highest point.̣ Reading within our discipline normally finds you a local maxima only. A local maxima may be enough, especially as a starting point for wider investigation. The issue I have found though is that new and novel problems demand knowledge from outside our discipline because they demands the most powerful knowledge. Our mentors’ roles here is to help us in scaffolding the knowledge we need to learn how to learn, but beyond this we need to be critical and self-determined learners.

References

Hase, S. and Kenyon, C. (2000) ‘From andragogy to heutagogy’, Ulti-BASE In-Site, December [Online]. Available at: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nph-wb/20010220130000/http://ultibase.rmit.edu.au/Articles/dec00/hase2.htm

Smart, J. and Rowson, J. (2019) Reflection as dialogue in work-based learning [Conference workshop at UWL Festival of Learning and Teaching]. University of West London, London, July 3.

Bridging the gap between theory and practice: Open Access in Theory and Practice round table event

Stellar collection of LIS colleagues in one room! #OATaP pic.twitter.com/jRpOkbXert
— lyn robinson (@lynrobinson) June 25, 2019

Last week I attended a round table meeting about bridging gaps between library and information science (LIS), and digital humanities, theory and practice at City, University of London.

The discussion on the day between the group of practitioners and academics and was so rich, interesting, and detailed that there was no way to adequately convey it ‘live’ using social media—though Tweets under the #OATAP hashtag give some flavour of what was discussed. This blog post is therefore a reflective account of the day and an interpretation of what I learned.

Ahead of time we’d been given some framing questions to be addressed on the day, which very much spoke to my interest in the relationship between theory and practice and their potential integration as praxis:

What is the use of theory and how can it be better used to inform practice?
Can researchers and practitioners work together more closely in designing and conducting research, and then interpreting its significance for practice?
What should be the relationship between theory and practice in teaching and learning?
How might LIS schools better serve the needs of employers in developing graduates able to make a significant contribution in the contemporary information professions?

On the day I learned the event was organised under a strand of an AHRC-funded project, Open Access in Theory and Practice (OATAP) which is a joint project between the library schools of City, University of London and University of Sheffield. The project investigates the relationship between theory and practice in the context of open access and the dissemination of research. Despite the title, the questions and small group discussion at the event were not about the theory and practice of open access and scholarly communications, but about the relationship between theory and practice in LIS holistically. I also found out on that day attendees had been invited based on being identified not as theorists or practitioners, but as boundary spanners. This is a term from organizational development theory which means, briefly, a person who can build relationships, create shared meaning, and exchange information across boundaries of various types—in the case of OATAP the focus was theory and practice, rather than for example the departments or networks within and outside our organizations.

In working with academic (faculty) colleagues, one thing I love is getting to see their ability to synthesize information in both breadth and depth in ways that creates new knowledge and insights, and their scaffolding of new understanding in group situations. A point noted, and then deliberately subverted on the day by Professor Stephen Pinfield was that the process of theorizing in research can look like “magic” from the outside. The reality is rather than magic, it is an ongoing and iterative process of creative intellectual work which anyone can engage with; and as bell hooks observes, “one may practice theorizing without ever knowing/possessing the term,” (1994 p.62). As such, everyone can be a theorist and can theorize.

In introducing the day, Pinfield reminded us of a quote attributed to psychologist Kurt Lewin:

There is nothing as practical as a good theory.
Lewin, 1951 p.169

This is a very well-known quote that appears in a variety of slightly different forms in the literature (McCain, 2016). Pinfield quoted the paragraph proceeding this quote, which expands more on the idea of an interrelation between theory and practice:

The greatest handicap of applied psychology has been the fact that, without proper theoretical help, it had to follow the costly, inefficient, and limited method of trial and error. Many psychologists working today in an applied field are keenly aware of the need for close cooperation between theoretical and applied psychology.
Lewin, 1951 p.169

I read an assumption in framings such as Lewin’s of a distinct line between what we think about as ‘theory’ and what we think about as ‘practice’: related, but ultimately separate domains; and the idea of gaps emerging between theory and practice was central to discussion at the event.

#OATaP pic.twitter.com/HmcsgrS4Bv
— lyn robinson (@lynrobinson) June 25, 2019

One of the general assumptions based on findings of the OATAP research is that we should actually think about theory and practice as more closely related, including ‘cross-fertilization’ between them. I went to the round table day questioning this binary presentation, and despite some limitations of the word ‘praxis’ I wanted to put across an understanding of an integrated ‘theory-practice’ as theoretically and critically-informed reflection and action, drawing on Paulo Freire’s (1997) and Hannah Arendt’s (1998) work.

One of the main things I took from the day was the importance of how the language we use and assumptions about what we mean can shape our collective thinking, or pull us toward particular conclusions. Sharing definitions can be helpful, but in practice doing this is not necessary the best use of limited small group discussion time. I think one of the main benefits of bringing domain experts together in conversation is our ability to rely on our shared body of knowledge and its shorthand, jargon, and slang, in ways that allow us to immediately speak in-depth about the particulars of practice.

For me, the sum of this body of knowledge within LIS practice is another way of describing what we call ‘theory’. I try not to see theory wholly in terms of abstracted or generalized knowledge, but as knowledge deeply entangled with and expressed within practice. I asked colleagues in small group discussion if we might think about theory-practice as more complicated, more like a ball of plasticine made of a combination of mixed-up colours, rather than neatly-separated domains.

Representation or mental model of the Internet drawn by Maya, a primary school pupil, for the Can You Draw The Internet? project (website now defunct, available via the Internet Archive).

Our experiences of theory and practice

From others at the event I saw a wide range of understandings of theory in work and practice, from the assertion of one researcher that “Theory is my bag!” to one practitioner’s explanation of being highly focused on “Getting on with the day-to-day,” in ways that work against being able to spend time thinking abstractly, to a focus on a facilitation or bridging role between theory and practice described by a practitioner from a sector body. An insightful point made on the day was that researchers and practitioners talk about theory using different terms: practitioners might call something a toolkit or guidelines, whereas a researcher might call something similar a model or a framework. Generally though, no-one is calling these things theory…!

Personally, I feel that centring theory within practice is a key method of developing reflective self-awareness and reflexivity; or in more colloquial terms I ask if we do not seek perspectives and understanding outside ourselves, how do we have confidence we are doing the right things and how do we know what to change? The theme of reflective practice, and in particular being critically-informed as reflective practitioners, was one I found repeated throughout the day. My group discussed an imagined ‘anti-theory’ practitioner, someone who might think of ‘theory’ or the ‘academic’ in a pejorative way. We understood that even those with an anti-theory standpoint will in their practices inevitably use and access abstract and generalized knowledge, because what they have learned about practice themselves and from others will be theoretically-informed. One irony of an “anti-theory” standpoint is that this is itself a theoretical position.

Rhetorically, I asked why wouldn’t you want to start from the most advantageous position as a practitioner—that of understanding many broad, diverse viewpoints from theorists who have already invested time and energy in that creative process? At the event, I noted several theorists and practitioners as influences on my thinking. I’ve written previously about the value of engaging with scholarly work for CPD so won’t retread that ground, but briefly I would be astonished if I could organically come to functionally-equivalent understandings as those I have developed by engaging with colleagues’ scholarship in librarianship and education.

I remain especially indebted to theorists and practitioners within and beyond LIS who've influenced my thinking about what theory is and can 'look like', including (non-exhaustive list) @mchris4duke, @panoptigoth, @AprilHathcock, @olinj, and @DonnaLanclos. #OATAP
— Andrew Preater (@preater) June 25, 2019

Thinking about constraints, the main issue practitioners explained we face is not having enough time to effectively engage with theory. Secondarily, we felt workplaces in which attention to theory is not valued present a barrier; as do traditional publication formats of journals and expectations of a particular style of academic language.

I had a dissenting viewpoint in this, as I think access to research and scholarship is a more important issue than these points about content and style. Firstly, given the diversity of library and information scholarship published in English globally I suspect that theory-informed research probably is addressing the “right problems”, more likely than work not existing is that I am unaware of it because it is not discoverable. Secondly, in working in libraries as an education worker I have found multidisciplinary breadth in reading and learning from theory necessary, rather than a beneficial but nonessential adjunct—on the day I learned I might expect this from a boundary-spanner. The research we need or can use often being outside our area implies learning from disciplines that are new to us, with a use case very likely unanticipated by scholars in those disciplines. My personal view is in those situations, I find standardized approaches to content and style to be ultimately a help rather than a hindrance, and remain reasonably certain I would not be identified as a relevant practitioner to ‘push’ research toward.

Conversely, the main issue researchers explained that they face is lack of demand from practitioners to be involved with their work and to co-produce research. Libraries as employers do not generally individually commission research from library schools to address the issues facing us, although we do collectively through sector bodies such as SCONUL, so I found this open discussion between researchers and practitioners pointed to a potentially extremely fruitful collaboration. This is an idea I have heard before from Dr Lauren Smith, in her CILIP Conference keynote (2016).

#CILIPConf16 @walkyouhome contact your local library school if you need help with a research problem!
— Charlie Inskip (@CharlieInskip) July 13, 2016

I noticed the small groups had reached very different and varied conclusions about this. One comment I found striking was in reply to the point that we may not have a library school nearby to engage with, it was highlighted that even in situations where a library school and their university library are in close proximity, colleagues may see no more of each other than any other subject liaison roles. Simply having a department close by doesn’t imply deep engagement is easy, any more than being in an academic setting implies engaging with research and scholarship is easy—as ever, the issues are those of building relationships, shared understanding, and trust over time.

Bridging the gap

I found the group discussion on what we can do to bridge gaps, or develop more feedback mechanisms between theory and practice particularly interesting, and it spoke to some challenges relevant to my workplace and our library’s strategic priority for practitioner research and scholarship:

4.5 Enable our staff to engage with and create practitioner research and scholarship, connecting theory and practice in our discipline as well as enhancing our ability to support research and scholarship activities.

Simply put we all broadly agreed that practitioners being involved with theory and theorizing—that is, engaging with and creating research and scholarship—is highly beneficial to individuals and our organizations. The challenge I heard shared by practitioners in senior roles is that writing a strategic priority needs to be followed with material support to enable it, so that it is not treated as an optional extra.

For academic libraries in the UK this might mean introducing a combination of development activities to support enquiry beyond our operational work, as well as a way of tying this development to our appraisal and reward structures. This would in many ways make library workers’ professional development closer in form, level, and function to the type of development expected of academic colleagues for their own pedagogic practice. Within this idea there is potential to link library workers’ professional development to our academic quality standards in a similar way to academics’ own professional development. An insightful observation raised in group discussion is that library workers do engage with pedagogic research and scholarship if they complete a PgCert in academic practice. A final point for critical reflection then, is to ask if equivalent engagement could be possible within librarianship as this qualification is at the same level, with similar expectations of conceptual understanding of research and advanced scholarship?

Bibliography

Arendt, H. (1998) The human condition. 2nd edn. London: University of Chicago Press.

Freire, P. (1997) Pedagogy of the heart. London: Bloomsbury.

hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to transgress. New York, NY: Routledge.

Lewin, K. (1951) Field theory in social science: selected theoretical papers by Kurt Lewin. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

McCain, K.W. (2015) ‘”Nothing as practical as a good theory” does Lewin’s maxim still have salience in the applied social sciences?’, Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 52(1), pp.1-4 [Online]. doi:10.1002/pra2.2015.145052010077

Smith, L. (2016) ‘From the bronze age to big data: why knowledge matters’, CILIP Conference. The Dome, Brighton, 12-13 July [Online]. Available at: http://cilipconference.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Lauren-Smith.pdf

UWL Library Services (2018) Library Services Strategy 2018-23. Available at: https://www.uwl.ac.uk/library/about-library/library-services-strategy

Chartership, and learning how to learn in a senior role

I completed the Cilip Chartership professional registration process last year and since then wanted to write something about how it can be used as a way of ‘learning about how to learn’ in a senior role, how that process has influenced my approach to learning and development, and some of its limitations. I was preoccupied working on another thing (here is a thread about that), and just returning to this now I have some time.

One reason I initially embarked on Chartership was because mentoring from a particular person was available through this route, and I decided to ask her directly. I expected, and found, this mentoring to be highly inspirational and motivating. However, as with any process of learning and development by the end I’d travelled some distance. On looking back, my view of things was very different when I compared my initial expectations of the mentoring process with what I had actually learned reflectively.

Briefly, the most important things I learned from this mentoring relationship are:

The centrality of reflective practice as a way of thinking and a method to inform one’s self-determined learning.
The importance of an interpretive awareness and about our wider sector and political contexts, in understanding how libraries can both support and shape our institutions’ missions.
The value of an authentic style of leadership counterbalanced with acknowledgment of the difficulties in enacting and maintaining such a style.

Below I will concentrate on the first two of these points, with the third on leadership style perhaps something for a future blog post.

What can Chartership do?

Interpreted as a set of tools, Chartership provides a framework for assessing and seeking the development needed to build one’s skills and knowledge in a structured way. Beyond the individual—or the personal—this knowledge includes one’s organisational contexts and, importantly, the wider sector and professional contexts we operate in. As knowledge of these organisational and professional contexts form two of the three assessment criteria for Chartership, this is baked-in to the process.

I think this wider understanding is key to building the awareness needed to be effective within more senior roles which are necessarily generalist and require a new, self-directed form of identity construction to grow into and inhabit. This generalist identity is one in which we need to make effective use of the in-depth knowledge we bring with us from those specialist roles we’ve held in the past, but is appreciative that our work within a wider context is a default mode of working. I think also this type of awareness is that which enables us to develop more wider-ranging structural critiques of our work and practice—the kind of critique which re-imagines new possibilities for practice or develops counter-discourses.

Within higher education, I’ve found this means being willing to develop understanding about other professional services’ work (for example, reading their professional and scholarly journals) and current awareness of debate in discussion within their areas. Interestingly, I’ve personally not seen that much importance placed on this type of wider awareness in development of leaders at assistant director or ‘head of …’ level. It seems more often the case our focus is on how library services support students’ learning and academics’ teaching and research, rather than seeing libraries as part of a professional services whole within the university. This understanding was, however, something I found particularly key to understand during Chartership.

Interpreted as a process, Chartership provides a framework for making reflective practice central to one’s own agentic, or self-determined learning. The latter is also called heutagogy, described by Stewart Hase and Chris Kenyon (2000) as an holistic model of learning that supports development of capability, rather than just competency. Personally, through this process I’ve come to appreciate reflection, and its expression in practice, as a core skill for lifelong learning that can be relevant to all library roles. Combined with focused reading of our professional body of knowledge (theory) and current awareness I see this as a key workplace information literacy skill for library workers to weave into their practice.

What I found particularly enabling within Chartership is a focused purpose for developing these abilities and applying them to practice. This is one thing that supports the ‘actually doing it’ of developing a theoretically-informed reflective practice. The core of the Chartership submission is the reflective evaluative statement with its very spare 1,000 word limit; this is supported by one’s selection of evidence. Much of this evidence required for the submission can be created by reflective writing, which the Chartership handbook characterises as,

“… your response to experiences, opinions, events or new information. It is a way of thinking to help you to explore your learning and gain self-knowledge. Most importantly it is your personal reaction to the situations you encounter and is invaluable when aiming to get the most out of your learning experiences.
Reflective writing is not pure description, judgement, or instructions.”
Cilip (2014, p.15)

Over time, I found this requirement honed my ability to think and write reflectively as an ongoing part of practice. Sometimes I realised that I would need to write a reflective account about a particular experience primarily to use as evidence, which could become tiresome when I felt the potential for reflective learning and self-knowledge at hand had already been played out through reflective thought. Interestingly though, in having to come back to a problem and reflect on it further through writing, I always found new insights would emerge. I found this was particularly the case when reflecting on the various contradictions within practice, by which I mean ways in which in practise we are able to or fail to live up to the values we espouse. To clarify, by ‘thought’ I do simply mean thinking about a particular question, issue, or experience and working through critical questions about it to try to understand and problematise my assumptions about practice, and also to engage more imaginative elements of reflection—which is something I can combine with other activities like my commute.

Why this learning is difficult

I believe for leaders at all levels a commitment to place self-determined learning at the core of one’s development is important to grow within and into new roles. Although applicable at any level, I’ve found in more senior roles it becomes much more necessary. It may sound odd, but roles with more positional power often have more constraints and limitations in what is possible.

Firstly, there is the issue of availability or existence of training and development programmes for your area—realistically, what you really need simply may not exist or may not run regularly due to limited demand. (Sconul have created a directory of such leadership courses.) Additionally if a programme targeted to senior people does exist, it is safe to assume it will not be cheap which presents another barrier to access to many institutions. In this situation a self-determined and creative approach to learning, supported by self-efficacy, becomes necessary.

When I say learning is difficult, I mean the process of ‘learning about how to learn’ that comes with a new role that is a move us—about the work, our contexts, and our self-knowledge—is a difficult one. The second issue for those in senior roles in hierarchical organisation is with fewer people at your level you have fewer peers, and that the type of open, reflective conversations that necessarily include a sense of vulnerability become more difficult to have—perhaps impossible—with one’s own organisation. In this context, I became more aware of the limitations of individually-focused reflective thought that I developed within Chartership.

My focus is on critical reflective practice, which in its deeper forms normally implies group working because of the importance placed on learning through dialogue within critical reflection, for example the approach described in Jan Fook and Fiona Gardner’s work. This model of critical reflection is collective by design, but individually-focused reflection obviously lacks the social elements as enablers. I think therefore a key challenge is finding those networks and personal connections which are vital to enable such reflective conversations, whether structured or more informal.

Alongside the experience of being mentored, the single most valuable thing I found to facilitate this learning is getting different perspectives from peers that enable a collective approach to reflection that has reach beyond my own organisational context. To me this meant finding honest and open insight, within a trusted atmosphere that could support a willingness to share. I think this is one reason peer mentoring groups such as the Sconul deputies and new directors groups are so popular and valued by their members, though I also see similarities in the less formal support networks that Natasha Chowdory (2019) calls “library pals”.

On an individual basis this type of reflective learning is something I aim to support and enable colleagues to do themselves and develop as a habit of mind. Personally, I have been delighted to see colleagues use and benefit from reflective models, including critical reflection, in their work and read and share ideas from the literature. However, I do not think it desirable or even possible to compel anyone to do reflective practice. Firstly because there are many frameworks and models to inform reflection, I feel practitioners do best to assess them and understand which, if any, will work for them within their social context and environment. I also no longer recommend a particular model of reflective practice, having changed my mind on this during Chartership. This is partly because my own preference for critical reflection presupposes knowledge of critical theory to inform what should be changed as a result of reflection—going back to Paulo Freire’s description of praxis as, “reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed” (2000, p.126). So, I don’t think it is possible to understand and apply critical reflection without critical theory at its core.

Moreover though, I don’t want to compel anyone to reflective practice. This is an ethical principle, but has a pragmatic element connected with reactance. Reactance is a psychological theory that explains that when an individual feels forced into a certain behaviour which limits or removes their freedom, they will react against it. On writing reflectively for Chartership, one of the conclusions I reached about self-directed and self-determined learning what that reactance theory could explain some of the antipathy toward unwanted impositions relating to learning such as being told to “do the reading”. Put formally, in a review of research and scholarship of reactance Benjamin Rosenberg and Jason Siegel note that, “People can also reduce the discomfort associated with reactance by showing hostility toward […] or derogating […] the source of a threat” (2017, p.3).

Finally, the learning that I took from the Chartership process that has proved most enduring are those lessons, summarised above, where I’ve been able to ‘triangulate’ a particular settled position. By triangulation I mean seeking out, listening to and hearing different views on the same concepts and ideas from different theoretical perspectives and traditions, and from colleagues working at different levels and in different roles. This adds to and enriches, rather than replacing understanding drawn from lived experience, and speeding this process up is another reason I feel peer mentoring networks are so effective. In summary, do consider Chartership.

References

Chowdory, N.S. (2019) ‘Support networks aka library pals’, Infopro Tasha, April 8. Available at: https://infoprotasha.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/support-networks/

Cilip (2014) Chartership: a guide for members. Available at: https://www.cilip.org.uk/resource/resmgr/cilip_new_website/professional_registration/chartership_handbook_070314.pdf

Fook, J. and Gardner, F. (2007) Practising critical reflection: a resource handbook. Maidenhead: Open University.

Freire, P. (2000) Pedagogy of the oppressed. 3rd edn. London: Continuum.

Hase, S. and Kenyon, C. (2000) ‘From andragogy to heutagogy’, Ulti-BASE In-Site, December [Online]. Available at: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nph-wb/20010220130000/http://ultibase.rmit.edu.au/New/newdec00.html

Rosenberg, B.D. and Siegel, J.T. (2017) ‘A 50-year review of psychological reactance theory: do not read this article’, Motivation Science, 4(4), pp.281-300 [Online]. doi:10.1037/mot0000091

Addressing Barriers to Student Success Conference

On 13 February I attended a one-day conference held to disseminate and share learning from the Office for Students (OfS) funded Student Attainment Project 2 (SAP2) at the University of Derby. This project recently concluded, with Derby as lead institution for this work and Solent University and University of West London (UWL), where I am Director of Library Services, as partners.

At University of West London, the purpose of SAP2 is to narrow and eliminate unexplained degree-awarding gaps between different groups of students with an initial focus on:

The gap between White and Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) students awarded a 1st or 2.1 degree classification
The gap between students from the most deprived areas compared with least deprived areas awarded a 1st or 2.1 degree classification (‘deprivation’ is measured using the Index of Multiple Deprivation or IMD, for England)

The project at UWL concentrated on implementing interventions that had been found to work effectively at Derby, and “scale up” Derby’s success. If you want to know more about this Eirini Tatsi, Academic Lead for the project at UWL and Esther Darby, Head of Academic Planning at UWL have written about this in our in-house journal in an article on ‘Addressing the gap‘ (2019).

These gaps are more commonly called attainment gaps, but following Dr Gurnam Singh’s critique of this term as a ‘critical friend’ of the SAP2 project, I use degree-awarding gaps and strongly recommend this video ‘From attainment gap to awarding gap‘ explaining why:

The focus for the conference was the unexplained degree-awarding gap between White and BAME students as a whole, and especially between White and Black students where this gap is most pronounced. This degree-awarding gap is both long-standing and complex, and represents a deep inequity within higher education. In this context, the conference provided a series of reflection-on-action pieces from colleagues involved with this work, from students across the partner universities, and stakeholders which for me spoke to both the urgency of the necessity for positive change.

The format of the conference included traditional presentations, small group ‘Talking Circle’ discussions mixing staff and student participants, and several performance pieces by students. The main performance was a powerful spoken word piece by students from London College of Music at UWL, who performed words taken from interviews with BAME students across the three partner universities about their experiences of exclusion and racism within higher education. This was recorded, and will hopefully be made available widely.

For me a question raised during the introduction to the conference, by Professor Malcolm Todd, Provost (Academic) from University of Derby, was to ask why we find the presentation of the things we already know—those plain facts of degree-awarding gaps—as ‘challenging’.

This theme continued for me during the presentation by Kirsty Johnson, Access and Participation Manager at OfS, who spoke twice during the conference. The view Kirsty gave from our regulator is that we need to understand better what is effective in raising attainment—in understanding what works and what does not in different contexts. Rather than simply widening access to higher education, OfS have a keen interest in addressing unequal outcomes for different groups of students throughout their course of study—this includes for example inequality in admissions, and differentials in progression and retention, and in academic attainment.

It is significant for English higher education that OfS is a regulator rather than the funding council Hefce, which it replaced. What came through for me in Kirsty’s talks was the way in which OfS staff are still getting to grips with their new role as a regulator with significant power to effect change using what are termed “policy levers” or “regulatory levers”. A realistic view for me is to expect the new regulatory approach to inequity in attainment and outcomes to be heavily driven by metrics and data. We expect OfS to create and publish datasets that provide both a national picture of degree-awarding gaps across English higher education, but that also have regard to how individual universities are performing. As education workers, I feel we need to think about how a metricised approach will affect our interactions with students who will know all about inequality within our universities and what we are doing, or failing to do, to address it.

From the National Union of Students, Amatey Doku, Vice President (Higher Education), gave an account of barriers to student success that asked us to first think about our context. Amatey asked us to consider the academy’s role in and responsibility for knowledge creation, in that it was the academy that created and legitimised knowledge such as ‘scientific racism’ which birthed and now continues to reproduce structural racism. Inequity in higher education cannot be thought of as a simple fault to be resolved, as we might think we can fix a burst pipe. Instead what is needed is a ground up re-evaluation of everything the university does. This is both difficult to achieve and also exciting as there is such far-reaching potential for positive change.

Amatey made a point I have heard many times from Black academic and student leaders and which I feel bears repeating: BAME students and staff cannot solve inequity in education alone. It is unfair to assume or ask this, as it represents a ‘double disadvantage’ for staff and students who experience structural inequity within education to shoulder this workload and responsibility alone. Amatey also spoke on the Black degree-awarding gap at the AdvanceHE EDI conference in 2018, I very strongly recommend watching this:

Eirini Tatsi of UWL spoke as part of the panel discussion for academic leads from the three partner universities, and as the SAP2 project is concluding, she concentrated on looking forward to how we can embed cultural change within academic and professional services practice. Eirini’s point is addressing degree-awarding gaps is not solely about assessment or what happens in the classroom, but demands a cross-institution approach—this may be familiar in mirroring contemporary approaches to widening participation activity in general as ‘whole institution’. Eirini noted some work we have started in Library Services to consider how students’ diverse identities can be represented within course materials or reading lists, as just one aspect developing an inclusive curriculum and also spoke about the need to reflect diversity and inclusion work in our priorities at a more strategic level.

Dr Gurnam Singh of Coventry University offered a critical perspective as a social work academic on the need to understand the complexity of learning experiences. Coventry has not been involved with SAP2 as a partner institution, but as I noted Gurnam has been an influence throughout its duration. Personally, I have found him to be a particularly inspiring speaker and a compelling theorist of critical pedagogy—he has a skill in blending citations to lived experience alongside theory and ideas which is, to me, incredibly convincing.

As with Amatey Doku’s talk, Gurnam reiterated the longer-term work is about transforming the university, not just fixing a broken element that is holding certain groups back—in fact as might be suggested in the title of the conference. Degree-awarding gaps are a scandal, and a telling sign that our processes and practices are not fit for purpose. Another way of framing this is degree-awarding gaps are symptomatic of universities breaking ground in widening participation, so we need to maintain focus on developing this work and trust that it will be judged positively.

Other speakers on the day had discussed intersectionality, but Gurnam showed what good citational practice looks like in action by tracing intersectionality to its genesis in Black feminist scholarship, including citing Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) who introduced and developed this theory. In raising this Gurnam criticised and made problematic many of the oversimplified criticisms of intersectionality, including those that claim socioeconomic status, or social class, as the most powerful axis of oppression, and those that centre feelings of White guilt and helplessness to effect change.

Gurnam’s analytical take is degree-awarding gaps reflect a problem with a complex system, and changing one aspect of learning can lead to unintended negative consequences. Over time, our analyses of degree-awarding gaps have become more nuanced and have left behind discourses that model deficit in students, however they have not yet really addressed complexity in students’ learning experience. The danger is that as learning relationships are dynamic and can be non-linear, in making a particular ‘intervention’ we may accidentally reinforce the problems we seek to disrupt and overcome.

A key challenge for me was Gurnam’s critique of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural and social capital (1986), which is a widely cited analytical frame used by staff at my workplace and of course broadly within higher education. I lean heavily on Bourdieu myself. Without care this approach can simply be utilised as another way of individualising deficit within students by conceptualising them as ‘lacking’ in cultural and social capital. A more critical perspective is to consider how the university can recognise the cultural and social capitals widening participation students bring to education, rather than prizing those capitals most associated with an imagined ‘ideal’ student.

Ultimately Gurnam thinks this is possible, but we need better ways to escape the traps of our biases and the epistemological frameworks that create and sustain our biases. Doing the seemingly logical or simple things to address degree-awarding gaps may simply not work or have unintended consequences, so future solutions demand new paradigms and understanding based on research that more fully involves students in partnership roles.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1986) ‘The forms of capital’, in Richardson, J. (ed.) Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education, pp. 241-258. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Crenshaw, K.W. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989 (1). Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8

Tatsi, E. and Darby, E. (2019) ‘Addressing the gap’, New Vistas, 4(2) [Online]. Available at: https://www.uwl.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Departments/Research/Vistas/Web/PDF/uwl_new_vistas_0402_tatsi_darby_0.pdf

Digital praxis and online identity

The below is modified from a reflective piece written for Cilip Chartership. As I was writing, I was interested in and thinking about motivation for engagement in online or digital spaces, and particularly social media. I began with framing in the Cilip Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB), which presents social media as tools relating to IT and communication technologies. I wanted to think beyond this framing and consider the aspects of connectedness and formation of online identity which social media can develop and foster.

Recently, Lawrie Phipps, Donna Lanclos, and Zac Gribble released the experimental Digital Perceptions reflective tool which allows for a critical reflective exploration of one’s own perception of online identity compared with others’ perceptions. I absolutely recommend trying this out to help develop a critical perspective on your practice of being online—or for some of us, Extremely Online.

In a brief discussion with Lawrie I noted Paulo Freire’s definition of praxis as, “reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed” which he worked into a piece ‘Toward digital praxis: just thinking out loud’, as:

I want to engage people with their practice, encourage reflection and action on both their existing practices, and the digital structures and background against which their digital self (Identity?) is perceived by themselves and by those with which they engage.

I feel it is this awareness of structure and context, and moreover a critical understanding of power, political structures, and ownership within those digital contexts that is essential to such reflection and action. To inform this, I draw on a model of reflection from heath and social care in which practitioners and academics have worked to create a body of knowledge and theory that combines reflection with critical theory, reflexivity, and social theory. This use of social theory has all the interesting implications one might expect:

This is literally the best thing about social theory though https://t.co/5pRsbQBjLa

— Sarah Burton (@DrFloraPoste) August 8, 2018

This model for reflection appeals to me because of its appreciation of uncertainty and ambiguity in praxis, and a central concept of, “finding better ways to practice based clearly on different ways of thinking” (Fook and Gardner, 2007 p.67). This goes beyond the idea of corrective actions or ‘lessons learned’ of project contexts, and provides a critically-aware lens that offers deeper understanding of classic models of reflection such as Chris Argyris and Donald Schön’s (1974) single-loop and double-loop learning.

Digital Perceptions Johari window showing my ‘Arena’ and ‘Blind Spot’ quadrants.

Ahead of using the Digital Perceptions tool I had considered power and ownership at some length, which is one reason I use a self-hosted WordPress blog and free culture licenses for longer form writing. I consider a “domain of one’s own” an important form of online presence for developing not so much a personal brand, but a digital identity that reflects who I am professionally and also a way of verifying identify using services such as Keybase.io. One reflective element informed by my use of the Digital Perceptions tool is any ‘curation’ of online identity is transparent to others, in both positive and negative ways. This leads me to question how this presentation of identity can ever be authentic, and how subjective others’ perceptions of one’s identity are. For this reason I find suggestions that one is just being one’s authentic self online reward a more critical examination; ultimately I see this contraction as an example of mediation of structure and agency.

Personally, I have found critical frames drawn from sociology and cultural studies helpful in understanding social media and have been particularly informed by Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration (1984). Returning to an IT or tool-focused interpretation of social media, I argue this is a limited and limiting view. Social media can be understood not just as ‘a technology’ or ‘a medium’ but always a social system, constituting networks formed by an interplay of social and technological structures and human agency which shape each other co-constitutively. Without initially planning to, I saw how social media can be employed to develop interconnected networks of both “strong ties”, that is the professionals I know well, and “weak ties”, that is the acquaintances who I know a little or who are connected to people I know. My experience of introducing myself to someone at an event or conference that I follow on Twitter, or as a reader of their blogging, is now long established. I discovered this has some theoretical underpinning in Mark Granovetter’s (1973) argument that networks of weak ties better transmit ideas and innovation:

…whatever is to be diffused can reach a larger number of people, and traverse greater social distance […] when passed through weak ties rather than strong.

Granovetter feels this important in the spread and uptake of new ideas that challenge the status quo or are otherwise ‘risky’ and discomforting. Considering social media as networks and social systems, my interest lies in the potential for connection with these new ideas—in terms of both positive benefits such as innovation but also negatives which might be understood as risks to be managed. My understanding of the uncertainty and risk in social media communication draws on Stuart Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding model of communication—wherein an ‘audience’ is not a passive receiver, but play an active role in decoding messages based on their experience and social contexts and is moreover in an intensified situation of immediate and unmediated communication.

I find this potential for transmission of ideas most effective in two professional contexts. First, when participating in conferences where Twitter can represent a back-channel of what delegates are really thinking about the issues under discussion, and more simply in getting practitioners’ immediate reactions and views from events I am not attending. Related to this, perspectives on conference presentations and discussion can be broadcast outside of the auditorium, reaching wider network and amplifying key points. It’s an open question to me as if those reactions and perspectives are more authentic and more honest than those offered in-person—or just hotter takes. Second, I have found participation in Twitter chats an effective way of bridging connections between disparate social groups, engaging new people, and experiencing new ideas in a relatively serendipitous way. I put much of these positives, and associated negatives, down to a network effect among a self-selected group of participants; and have seen these chats provide an initial spark for new professional relationships and working collaborations.

Reflectively, I am aware of the role of privilege in social media use and consider this in my digital practice. It is easy to breezily state that as I have not known professional life without at least early forms of social media being present, opting out would be unnecessarily limiting and self-defeating. This is one area the Digital Perceptions tool can’t help with; as it is not intended as a diagnostic tool it is down to us to ask critically reflective questions. For example, I have both the time, space and technical knowledge to make effective use of social media in a relatively safe and secure way and remain connected enough with different social media networks that I have been able to leave networks such as Facebook. Though I may consider social media in its broadest sense as essential to information work as the earlier generations of technology I use, we also have to look around and consider who is not represented and present in these networks—and why.

References

Argyris, C. and Schön, D.A. (1974) Theory in practice: increasing professional effectiveness. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Fook, J. and Gardner, F. (2007) Practising critical reflection: a resource handbook. Maidenhead: Open University

Freire, P. (1996) Pedagogy of the oppressed. 2nd edn. London: Penguin.

Giddens, A. (1984) The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity.

Granovetter, M.S. (1973) ‘The strength of weak ties’, American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), pp. 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469.

Hall, S. (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding’, in Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A., and Willis, P. (eds.), Culture, Media, Language, pp. 128–38. London: Hutchinson.