Keystone Concepts in Teaching: A Higher Education Podcast from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning

S2 E12 Libraries - and Librarians - as Important Teaching and Learning Resources

• Stearns Center • Season 2 • Episode 12

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Join us for a conversation with Maoria J. Kirker, MS, to explore the many resources of the university library and consider opportunities to collaborate with librarians. 

Resources: George Mason University Library:  https://library.gmu.edu Data & Digital Scholarship Services:  https://dsc.gmu.edu George Mason University Libraries Special Collections Research Center:  https://scrc.gmu.edu Library Instructional Support links:  https://library.gmu.edu/instructional University Libraries Off-Campus Access support:  https://library.gmu.edu/use/off-campus

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Rachel:

Hello and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast, a higher education podcast from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University. In this podcast, we share impactful and evidence based teaching practices to support all students and faculty. I'm your host, Rachel Yoho. In this episode, we will be talking about the libraries and librarians as a resource or resources for faculty. So I'm joined by this episode's guest, Maoria Kirker. Maoria Kirker is the lead for the University Library's teaching and learning team and an adjunct faculty member in the Honors College. She holds an MS in Educational Psychology from George Mason University and an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She regularly teaches Honors 110, Principles of Research and Inquiry, and Honors 260, Society and Community Engagement. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Maoria:

Thanks, Rachel. It's great to be here.

Rachel:

So as we get started with our conversation, can you begin by telling us about how a faculty member might even begin to engage with the libraries?

Maoria:

Yeah, so one of the easiest ways and quickest ways is to find your subject librarian. So every department major program on campus has a librarian who is dedicated to supporting that discipline or department or major. However, there's different variants of a degree there, but finding your subject librarian is the first key to success, I think.

Rachel:

So, for someone who's either been here for a while, or someone maybe who's new to the university, why might someone want to engage with the libraries, or wish to use the libraries as a resource, or even see the libraries as a resource? For example, beyond some of the places we might already be thinking about, like English and books and that kind of association or other disciplines that we might automatically associate, how might all faculty consider engaging with or using the libraries?

Maoria:

Yeah, so there's lots of different ways. And I like to think of us as teaching and research partners. And that sort of materializes in multiple different ways. The main way that I focus on is teaching. So supporting any research based or library research based assignment in a course. That and sort of the books are the main things, but we have over 1000 databases and most of those databases are not sort of English literature book oriented. And that's just like the core services. We have a lot of other programs and opportunities across the disciplines. For example, we have DDSS, the Data and Digital Scholarship Services group, and they are all things data. They help students and faculty manage, find, sort, use, analyze data, and they're like an awesome resource in the library. We have other units like, the Fenwick Gallery, which highlights art and other related programming right in the library lobby. We help with open access support, whether it's student publications or faculty publications. And honestly, that's just the tip of the iceberg of the ways librarians can support teaching and faculty.

Rachel:

That's great. So we've seen some of the things where librarians might be coming into classrooms, right? So some of the things might be with some of the publishing, the database, services. Can you tell us a little bit more about what it looks like when you go to classes?

Maoria:

Yeah, absolutely. So that tends to start with an email. The faculty has a research based assignment in the course, and they know students are going to need to use library resources. So they reach out directly to a librarian, or maybe it comes through our contact form and makes its way to our inbox. And then that leads to a conversation between the librarian and the instructor. So what are your goals? What can we do to support those goals? We often will look at the assignment with you to figure out where we could best fit. In some cases it might not fit. In some cases, they might fit in multiple places. And then we work with you and your course schedule to figure out a time and day that works to best support your student needs. And then the instruction happens. And usually what happens after that then is that the students use the librarian for the class for the remainder of the course, maybe throughout their disciplinary, that sort of opens the floodgates for the students to understand how the library can support them.

Rachel:

I think that's a great point because I think here we're really looking at not only the first step of Faculty members seeing the different support services and resources for them and their teaching, but also then having students be that next step and and their ability to engage with the libraries once they've had that experience in a class. I think that's great. I mean, we can see how we're supporting everyone in the space, you know, the instructor and their needs. Maybe we don't have to teach every single thing, but there's amazing resources already out there, and then our students learning as well. So that's fantastic. Thank you for sharing. So as we continue our conversation, what would you say, especially for, as we think about different disciplines, perhaps, you know, what does or what could a successful partnership with a librarian look like? We talked about one class, but maybe what, what else could it be?

Maoria:

Yeah, it could be so many different things, depending on what you, the faculty member or you, the person who works here at Mason needs or wants. We can help with assignment design, right? So maybe you do have a library research based assignment and things haven't worked out in the past for whatever reason, maybe the source requirements or the instructions. We tend to see the students come in with those struggles and we can help maybe tweak some language or revise the assignment in a way that hopefully produces better student work. We can help teach you to teach some of these library concepts. So if it's hard to schedule us or you need to just fit it in a block of time, we can help give you the tools to successfully teach it as well. I would say the other thing that we can really help with is grant support. So we get the occasional requests for research support on grant projects, whether that's helping with literature reviews searches, whether it's supporting database access, right? Maybe you need a database. that we don't have for your research, we can maybe build that into the grant and work with you to get that. And so that's, that's sort of like on the research side as well. And then we can also purchase books and items for the collection that you are either teaching or applies to your research. You know, so that's sort of the more traditional approach to a partnership with a librarian.

Rachel:

Yeah, I think that's great. I mean, especially as we think about teaching as research and research is a key part of our teaching, especially at this type of institution, really talking about how those things can interact, how those can be successful partnerships is so important. And I want to take a moment just to point out that we're not just looking at those disciplines that we're automatically associating with libraries. We might be looking at the STEM fields or criminology, or we might be looking at arts or any of these things. We could be looking at databases. We could have support for our students learning and engaging with, you know, what are sources? How do we find sources? How do we evaluate those? And so again, we're looking at a very broad and expansive view of who can and maybe should take advantage of these types of resources. And so, as we think about this, let's expand on this a little bit if you don't mind. So in what ways, including teaching and learning, beyond the few that we've discussed already, could librarians be a resource to all faculty? So maybe all appointment types could be taking advantage of these resources.

Maoria:

Yeah, and actually, as you were talking, Rachel, I was thinking about some new work that we've, I don't want to say been forced, but sort of been forced to engage with and that's artificial intelligence, right? Like those impact the algorithms that we work with every single day, whether it's through a Google search, but we see them in our library databases as well. And so we have librarians who are Experts, at least at the intersection of artificial intelligence and libraries. So if you're facing issues or concerns with that and your instruction or your research, we have support for that, too. But as far as, you know, how else could we be a resource to faculty, we have lots of other sort of ad hoc instructional ways that we can support. For example, we have research guides that sort of exist in perpetuity online, and these can be discipline or program specific. We've had them built for, you know, research centers on campus. For a specific course, if there's an intensive research component, we can create tutorials if appropriate for a class so that there is a, you know, a video that lives on or a PDF that lives on to help students in their research. We have some instructional design expertise that sort of works well in partnership or tangentially to the Stearns Center. And so with that, we can be embedded in your LMS, whether it's Canvas or Blackboard, to help answer students questions directly in the course. But then, you know, we have a lot of other stuff too, like as a person, if you're here and just an employee, we have access to streaming media, whether that's movies or music that, you know, isn't the broad, you know, Netflix or Spotify. We also have the analog collections too of like CDs and DVDs. We have a recommended reads collection, which is a leisure reading collection. We have access to Rosetta Stone. So I like to say that we're not here just for, you know, the teaching and the research, but we're here to support faculty, staff, students, as people engaged with this campus community.

Rachel:

Yeah, that's great. And I'm definitely learning about some of our resources as we go as well. But I think you brought up a really compelling point about, you know, the AI, the artificial intelligence thing, and it's certainly caused lots of anxiety and stress within education and plenty of other areas as well. But I think that's also a great opportunity to engage with these resources, engage a little bit differently. And it really brings us to, or brings me at least, to a thought about, there's sort of this perception about librarians just kind of collect books and read books. And I know that's obviously not just it, and that's certainly not what we've been talking about. But can you comment for a moment on how this type of engagement with faculty is part of librarians' core work and the work that you do here?

Maoria:

Yeah, so for many of us, the vast majority of our work is working with faculty and students. It's being out there with people. It's very people oriented. I would say like collections, buying, managing is for most of us that will be working directly with faculty and students is such a small part of our job that, you know, that's the work we do in the summer, if you will. I always tell students and faculty like my favorite thing is teaching is working with students and faculty and if I am stuck behind a desk, you know, just collecting books, reading books. I kind of wish my job was just reading books sometimes, but unfortunately it's not, but I would be bored out of my mind, right? Like I'm in this, so many of us are in this because we like helping the users and at an academic library, that's faculty and students.

Rachel:

Yeah, absolutely. And so as we kind of connect with that we certainly have faculty all over, you know, not all of our faculty have their shoes walking around one of the campuses, you know, in one of our several locations for the university, but can we talk a little bit about access and virtual access, and you know how, especially for for adjunct faculty or people who may not be in these physical spaces every day, how they can beyond just sending that email you mentioned at the beginning, how they can engage.

Maoria:

Yeah, so there's lots of ways. One way is we have a, a chat service on our library website. It's called ask a librarian. That's a real way to talk to a real person to get help sort of in the moment from wherever you're at in the world. That's a great support mechanism. Our databases you can access from anywhere with your Mason and ID and password. One service that I love particularly like if you're an adjunct and you just live in the DMV area is the WRLC, which is the Washington Research Library Consortium. It's a lot of the major universities and colleges in the D. C. area. And what it does is lets us borrow as though we are students or faculty at those universities, but your Mason ID will also allow you access to those library spaces. So if you're an adjunct and you live in DC, maybe like closer to American, you could just go to the American library and with your Mason ID access their spaces as though you worked there, which is a really exciting and awesome benefit, I think.

Rachel:

That's amazing. I had no idea. All right. So we're learning things here in this space as well. So I appreciate that. So as we wrap up for today, I mean, obviously if there's anything else you'd like to add, of course, but how does this conversation represent a keystone concept in teaching to you?

Maoria:

It's a great question, Rachel. The thing that comes immediately to mind for me is just the idea, the concept, maybe the belief that the library is for everyone. And that infuses in all of our work, whether it's the space, whether it's the access to the resources, you know, with the caveat that you have to be a community member to use Mason resources. But we're here to help everyone, whether it's the first time you've stepped on the Mason campus, whether you have taught on and off as an adjunct, whether you're a staff member for multiple years, whether you're a tenured faculty member who's about to retire. We are here to help everyone with their library and research needs.

Rachel:

That's great. And I think we've really seen our library and research needs can be a lot more than books and can be really great opportunities to not only support our faculty, our instructors as people, as employees, and then also that trickle out into student success and student engagement with resources as well. I think that's really, really key. It's not just maybe the first thing that comes to mind, but lots of resources. So I really appreciate your joining us. We'll be sure to link in the show notes lots of information about the libraries and the resources and all of those. So thank you so much again for your time and we're looking forward to sharing the next episode of Keystone Concepts in Teaching with everyone.

Maoria:

Thanks, Rachel.