The Critical Digital Librarian
Critical digital librarianship asks librarians to constantly reflect and re-examine what we consider to be our understanding about libraries as critical learning spaces and who our patrons are as individuals. Critical digital librarianship is an approach that fosters dialogue with patrons and promotes each patron’s own discovery of learning and self-actualization as each patron decides what libraries can mean to them. In this track, we will explore Freire’s concept of codification and decodification in our critical reflection of situations within our libraries (public, academic, P12 school). During this week’s community of practice, we will define what it means to be a critical digital librarian for ourselves, explore the connections to digital pedagogy and the pedagogy of care within libraries as we discuss topics of culturally sustainable libraries such as equitable open education resources, patron privacy, literacies, and intellectual freedom.
Participants will create an individual or collaborative strategic advocacy plan on how to foster more critical digital librarianship within their libraries with colleagues and share these ideas across communities.
This track is ideal for:
Recommended Reading
- Myra Waddell and Elena Clariza, Critical digital pedagogy and cultural sensitivity in the library classroom: Infographic and digital storytelling
- Margo Gustina, Critical Optimism: Reimagining Rural Communities through Libraries, In the Library with a Lead Pipe
- Andrea Baer, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Conversation: Expanding Dialogue About Critical Library Instruction Through The Lens of Composition and Rhetoric, In the Library with a Lead Pipe
- Eamon Tewell, A Decade of Critical Information Literacy: A Review of Literature. Communications in Information Literacy
- Violet B. Fox, Disorientation Guide to Librarianship
- Journal of Critical Digital Librarianship: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/jcdl/
- Julia Torres and Lois Parker-Hennion, Librarians: Digital Literacy Experts (Episode 7). The Mind Online, a podcast of Teaching Tolerance
- Eamon Tewell, Putting Critical Information Literacy Into Context: How and Why Librarians Adopt Critical Practices In Their Teaching, In the Library with a Lead Pipe
- Ebony Magnus, Jackie Belanger and Maggie Faber, Towards a Critical Assessment Practice, In the Library with a Lead Pipe
- ZEMOS98, "pedagogy of care // open paper"
Faculty
Laura Summers