Teaching Philosophy:
I’m Here To Serve
The first class I took at SILS was in 1997, Human Information Interaction, with Elfreda Chapman. It was a required course and, like many master’s students before and since, I resented having to be there. It wasn’t my primary interest, I thought it was too theoretical, and I was sure it was a waste of my precious time. Imagine that! Annoyed by getting to listen to Elfreda Chapman! And of course, I now know that the topics and ideas I encountered in that course helped me identify the paradigm shift that was happening while I was a master’s student. When I entered SILS in 1997, the field was one thing. When I left in 2000, it was something completely different. Chapman’s course helped me navigate that change. I know I’m no Elfreda Chapman, but I find it amusing that my career has brought me to a similar place: teaching required courses to people entering the field, annoying them, and hopefully, along the way, awakening an interest that they didn’t know they had.
Throughout my time at SILS as a teaching professor, I’ve seen myself primarily as a service provider. I volunteer to teach the required courses, I teach multiple sections of those courses, and I often teach extra sections of those courses at very short notice, so that I may be a help to the school and its students. I teach at night and online (usually once per semester) so working students will be able to take their required courses without having to fundamentally change their work schedule. I advise at least one practicum project every spring, because I know that students need work experience, and I am happy to use my community ties to get them that experience.
I know that students don’t like having to take the required courses, but I voluntarily teach these courses because they are important. I find that these classes require my type of determination to get across the core values, strengths, and weaknesses of the field. Students need to be introduced to issues in a way that is sometimes challenging, and might make them face uncomfortable truths about the field; but will ultimately help them have successful careers and become effective leaders. I want my students to go out into the world and feel confident that they understand the foundations of information and library science, why things are the way they are, and what steps we can take to maybe change the world. I work hard at giving my students a positive and compelling learning experience, and I know that my courses do that.
Every course I’ve taught at SILS has been a required course. In INLS 500 (Human Information Interaction), although it is far out of my sphere of expertise, I taught students about the different ways that researchers conceptualize interacting with information. Maybe more compelling for my students, I also had them present a real poster session at the end of the semester, with ‘minute-madness,’ weird-acting visitors to their poster, and an experience that many have said was fundamentally important in the development of their careers.
In my sections of INLS 520 (Organization of Information), developed by Melanie Feinberg and augmented by me, students learn how different philosophers approach the problem of describing and organizing the world. The final project in that class is a Pecha Kucha presentation (20 slides / 20 seconds per slide), which I think will be challenging but also powerful. Students will need to be able to concisely and convincingly argue a point in a time-limited presentation, with primarily visual information behind them. I’m excited to see how it turns out!
In INLS 777 (Perspectives of Information), my students learn how the internet works, why it’s important, how it differs from what came before, and how it remains the same. The project in that class is the “Dream Job” project, where students identify the kind of job that they want to have upon graduation (plus 10 years). In this assignment, students find relevant job ads, identify leaders in the field and if possible evaluate those career trajectories; identify what SILS has to offer them in terms of classes, internships and other opportunities; and they then build a strategic plan for their remaining year and a half at SILS. I believe that this is a fundamentally important assignment for my students.
I am conducting an experiment this semester in INLS 776 (Ethics, Values & Society). The last time I taught the course (Spring 2024), during a debrief at the end of the semester, students told me that they found it difficult to identify a topic to be interested in. This was confusing, because I provided time in class for discussion on current events readings as well as getting together with likely research group partners. I created a weekly discussion board where students found ‘interesting’ articles related to information ethics, and discussed those articles with peers online. I provided lecture time to provide insight into the process of identifying viable research topics. Even with all of this preparation, the general consensus was that the students always reverted back to saying that they’d be “interested in anything,” when asked by their peers what topics they wanted to work on. To confirm that I understood the problem, I asked, “you’re saying that you don’t know how to be interested in a topic?” and they said that yes, that was the problem.
Troubled, I’ve designed this semester’s INLS 776 class to guide the students through the process and activities related to being interested in a research topic. I’m calling this the ‘case study’ assignment.
We’ll start with choosing a paper from a list of papers that are relevant to the topic of the course. I’ll put the students in groups and give them a chance to explore what it means to be in a collaborative group, i.e., what are their responsibilities to each other, what do they hope to get out of the group, and how will they deal with adversity within the group, and so on..
We’ll work through some good old-fashioned citation chasing (of the author, the papers cited, and the papers that cite the original paper). The students will practice writing abstracts of a subset of those cited/citing papers, and presenting interesting papers to their groups. Through the citation chasing process, they’ll also identify related themes and concepts, fields, and close-ties researchers.
Finally, they’ll present this work at midterm to the rest of the class, using the Pecha Kucha presentation form. I’m recommending that the students use this topic and all of the work they’ve done in the case study assignment to develop their symposium presentations, which take place at the end of the semester, but they’ll be able to choose any topic they’re interested in.
Is it true that some percentage of our incoming students don’t know how to be interested in a research topic? I don’t know. But I do know that walking them through this process, giving them the muscle memory of exploring an idea, will be valuable whether they continue on a research path or not. They may or may not be interested in their case study topic by the end of the assignment, but they will definitely know what to do if and when they’re interested in exploring an idea in the future.
The final class that I regularly teach is INLS 697 (Undergraduate Capstone). In this class, I introduce students to the Design Thinking Methodology. Students have a chance to explore a problem and various solutions. They conduct primary and secondary research into the problem, brainstorm solutions, and develop prototype tools and products. At the end of class, we have a ‘pitch fest,’ where students present their ideas (using Pecha Kucha!) [You really should try it, the presentations are very fun!]. We have Shark Tank style voting to see which group gets ‘funded.’ In the past we’ve developed Escape Rooms (thanks to Maggie Melo’s idea at Arizona), and student tools. Although the students don’t believe me when I tell them that this is very useful training for going into the tech sector (especially startups), I’ve heard from more than one student that interviewers and managers are very impressed that they know the lingo and can use the ideas of Design Thinking when they begin their careers.
Finally, I’m always interested in improving my teaching methods. In addition to taking every class that UNC’s Center for Faculty Excellence has offered, I have also taken courses outside of UNC to improve my skills. Below is a list of the courses I’ve taken since returning to Carolina as a teaching professor:
Organizing Against Racism
Groundwater
Phase 1 – Two Day Workshop
Phase 2 – Two Day Workshop
Ongoing attendance at OAR’s Durham White Anti-Racist Caucus
Center for Faculty Excellence
Course Design Institute
Faculty Mentorship Training
Equity in Teaching Institute
Ongoing participation in “eqTI Community Check-In”
Duke Integrative Medicine: Transform Your Health: Write to Heal
Liberating Structures
Two-Day Immersion Workshop
Ongoing Explorations
UNC’s Learning Center
Coach Approach Training: Foundation (March, 2022)
Technology of Communication
ToP Facilitation Methods (Online)
I strive to provide an excellent learning experience for my students, while knowing that students are rarely excited by required courses. I happily volunteer to teach these classes because I know that they’re important, and that I’m providing a valuable service to the school. Teaching these classes - updating the lectures and readings every semester - provides an opportunity for me to continuously grow and learn, and reminds me of what it was like to be a student. This continual process of renewal informs my pedagogical approach to teaching, and makes me a stronger teacher with every semester. Working with students, designing and redesigning classes that I think are interesting and exciting, collaborating with colleagues and students - it all makes life so interesting!
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