Service Learning Librarian

A shout out to fellow blogger, Jessica Olin, today.  I wrote a post for her blog, Letters to a Young Librarian, and it's live today!  Check it out, along with the rest of her blog!  http://letterstoayounglibrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/finding-your-voice-by-maureen-barry.html

A few WSU service-learning (and non-SL) courses this fall are themed around November's election.  As such, one of my colleagues put together this very informative guide:  http://guides.libraries.wright.edu/election2012 I also discovered today a few other resources that other librarians may be interested in: You can order free posters (or download PDFs) to encourage voting at this web site:  http://www.nonprofitvote.org/endorse-voting.html And, it might also be worth promoting this election app for smartphones to your students and patrons.

Watch out world!  My faculty friend Dr. Sarah Twill & I will present about our service-learning experiences twice this fall.  Once at the Academic Library Association of Ohio conference in October and again at the Lilly International Conference on College Teaching!  And if that isn't exciting enough, we also just got word this week that we'll be co-presenting along with Jennifer Nutefall, University Librarian at Santa Clara University, and Maggie Stevens of Indiana Campus Compact, at the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) 2013 conference in ... Continue reading

The concept of civic literacy was brought to my attention this morning by my friend and fellow service-learning enthusiast, Jennifer Nutefall.  Perhaps I've been living under a rock.  I've heard dozens of kinds of literacy in recent years (digital literacy, media literacy, transliteracy, financial literacy, etc), but I haven't spent any time looking into civic literacy.  Jennifer forwarded me papers and proceedings from a recent IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) conference: http://www.lnb.lv/iflariga2012/papers-and-proceedings The theme of the ... Continue reading

If my Wordpress dashboard is correct, this is the 100th post on Service Learning Librarian!  This is a big week for my blog and for my "agenda" of pairing service-learning and information literacy.  On Monday, Chris Sweet, Information Literacy Librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University, became SLL's first-ever guest contributor!  If you haven't read it yet, here is his post.  Chris has had a similar experience being embedded in a capstone environmental studies service-learning course as I had being embedded in the sustainability honors course here at ... Continue reading

Let me begin this guest post with a short introduction.  My name is Chris Sweet and I am the Information Literacy Librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University (Central Illinois). I had been following Maureen's blog as well as her publications for some time prior to meeting her in-person at this year's LOEX Conference in Columbus, OH. Both of us have discovered a real passion for service-learning and have seen first-hand how adding information literacy elements to service-learning courses can create even stronger and more effective classes. I want to thank Maureen for allowing me to share ... Continue reading

This summer, I'm working on several projects that will support several service-learning courses with which I will l partner beginning fall semester.  As I've said many times over, service-learning students and community partners often need local or otherwise unique data - outside of the usual "find some scholarly articles" kind of assignments. One of the projects is a libguide full of local Dayton information - statistics and such that help students understand the community in which they are working to solve problems.  It's very bare-bones at the moment, but one of my colleagues ... Continue reading

Last week, a friend sent me this article in which the author  muses about seemingly opposing pedagogies.  He observes that those that teach in higher education are simultaneously "pressured" to teach online while being "pushed" to increase civic engagement.  The author points out that the former completely ignores space, while the latter is very much tied to it. While it may seem like an obvious dichotomy, service-learning courses have been taught online successfully and, I imagine, not without challenge.  When I teach in-person service-learning courses, I have always ... Continue reading

This morning, I read an article posted in the online American Libraries, called Community Reference:  Making libraries indispensible in a new way by Colbe Galston, Elizabeth Kelsen Huber, Katherine Johnson, and Amy Long.  It reminded me a lot of why I chose to explore service-learning as an option for my information literacy course 5 years ago.  They highlight many of the same concepts in their endeavors to get out into the community that are vital to a successful academic service-learning relationships.  The authors stress the importance of working as a ... Continue reading

Campus Compact's annual member survey summarizing 2011 was recently released.  The report offers a great portrait of the landscape of civic and community engagement in higher education institutions throughout the country. View the entire report at:   http://www.compact.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/2011-Annual-Survey-Executive-Summary.pdf