No such thing as neutral: Rethinking undergraduate instruction and outreach in a time of

Abstract

Over the years, our campus has been shaken by racially-charged incidents that leave many students hurting and confused. In the current political climate, with issues of race, gender, citizenship, sexuality, and religion constantly debated at news desks and in the halls of government buildings, libraries need to face the fact that they are not, and never have been, neutral spaces. Understanding this, and influenced by the active and growing critical information literacy movement, we chose to take an active role in improving campus culture and supporting challenging conversations by bringing open dialogue into our library classrooms.

This shift in focus for our Library Undergraduate Instruction and Outreach team has impacted our work from top to bottom. We began with drafting a new mission and vision that would illustrate our commitment to fostering the growth of successful information literate students who view the world through a critical lens. Once articulated, these statements influenced our development of a credit-bearing course and significant revisions to our one-shot sessions delivered primarily in first year seminars and composition courses. We sought to address issues of inequality and discrimination and how they impact all stages of the process of discovering, producing, and disseminating information. Students are given the opportunity to confront these issues drawn from real life situations, as well as the space and freedom to discover these structural inequalities and grapple with them in a safe classroom space.

Following the first year of our implementation of this new charge, our chapter will discuss the process we undertook to move from big ideas (mission and vision), to practical applications in courses and one-shot sessions, to evaluating our success and failures so that we can continue to promote critical dialogue among our students and faculty. Our discussion will be framed within critical librarianship and draw from seminal texts in that area, as well as emphasize practical, useful applications for librarians who teach.