Friday, June 02, 2017

Roles and Strengths of Teaching Librarians

A month ago (apologies for missing it) ACRL published Roles and Strengths of Teaching Librarians, "a revision of the 2007 ACRL Standards for Proficiencies for Instruction Librarians and Coordinators". The roles are: advocate, coordinator, instructional designer, lifelong learner, leader, teacher, and teaching partner. "The purpose of the roles is to conceptualize and describe the broad nature and variety of the work that teaching librarians undertake as well as the related characteristics which enable librarians to thrive within those roles. These seven roles, which can and do overlap, are intended to help librarians situate our individual work experiences within the broader work of academic libraries and within academic communities, as well as suggest creative new areas for expansion."
The document could be useful for discussion about current and futures roles (training, goals etc.), and I think I will also use it next year in educating about teaching information literacy, as a complement to the Wheeler and McKinney (2015) article which outlines four conceptions of the role of the librarian in teaching.
I think I would have brought together the Teacher and Instructional Designer roles (either under Teacher or under Educator) though this may partly be an issue of UK vs. US educational terminology (I think in the UK we use the word teacher more broadly and we avoid the "instruction" word).
Go to http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/teachinglibrarians
Reference: Wheeler, E., and Mckinney, P. (2015). Are librarians teachers? Investigating academic librarians’ perceptions of their own teaching roles. Journal of Information Literacy, 9(2), 111–128. http://doi.org/10.11645/9.2.1985
Diagram copyright ACRL

1 comment:

Dina said...

This has been an eye opener for me. I have just recently been appointed as an instructional librarian, and I need all the info I can get on facilitating information literacy