Marjorie Whetstone Ashton Speaker Series

What would happen if art was used as a tool for care, both in the classroom and without? Art can function as an intervention for remembrance and care. Museum objects, paired with visual thinking strategies (VTS) that support students' visual literacy development, can help us connect with one another and cultivate peace and joy within ourselves and in our relationships with others.

Much of our work in higher education assumes a type of rationality in how our students understand and incorporate information sources. Advances in neuroscience and psychology reveal a different picture in how the mind processes information. Current theories in neuroscience emphasize that our minds work as “an orgy of utter chaos” drawing on the feeling of knowing to make decisions. This talk explores these ideas and connects them with information and digital literacy and the work of academic librarians. How can we better understand the influence of unconscious mental processes and break away from more traditional models of rationality and critical thinking? How can we use this to change our practice into something more reflective and in alignment with the lessons in psychology and neuroscience?

H. Samy Alim and Django Paris (2017) write, “CSP seeks to perpetuate and foster–to sustain–linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation” (p. 1). In this talk, we will explore what it would mean to apply Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP) to our library instruction work and other ways we teach and learn in educational settings. As we map CSP’s intellectual and cultural lineage, we will discuss where it departs from other critical assets and strengths-based approaches and what it means to teach to the white gaze, as Paris and Alim have written, and what opens up for us when we reject that framing and commit to centering Indigenous, Black, Latinx/e/a/o, Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Through a CSP lens, we will interrogate how information literacy (IL) and library instruction practices become formalized and passed down to new librarians. How do we understand IL and its related practices? How can CSP help us evolve our understanding of IL and shift our teaching practices?

Internet technologies are part of our daily life - through social interactions, classroom instruction, government business, or household products - keeping up with how our data is exchanged within those systems is extremely difficult. As various groups like Documenting the Now and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have noted, this kind of information gathering - in some cases, surveillance via social media - can have detrimental effects on communities of color and other vulnerable groups. This presentation will include strategies and resources to help our communities build critical awareness of surveillance technologies.

To some, climate change is a simple scientific question to be answered with data while to others it is a misguided hoax that could cost our country jobs and hurt our economy. The decisions we make around climate change can help us understand the mechanics of skepticism and reason.

This talk will seek to recognize the interconnections between the affective and cognitive aspects of decision-making. It will consider how educators can better reveal the personal nature of information to our students

Teaching is an embodied practice. We grasp this instinctively. Bodily activities, habits, and sensations are inseparable from the act of teaching, including teaching online. However, post-secondary environments rarely encourage or enable us to think about our work as embodied. In fact, we are often structurally incentive to proceed as though teaching and learning are disembodied, as though they somehow transcend physicality. By considering embodiment, there is potential for us to reflect in new ways on our own experiences of teaching, and to enrich how we teach. In this talk, we’ll survey multi-disciplinary research on the role of the body in teaching, learning, and knowing. Next, we’ll consider how insights from this research can influence the classroom environments and learning experiences we create.

Why do we encourage students to read widely, think critically, and conduct their own research? We are preparing them for lives in a world filled with ambiguity and complexity. The surprising outcome of the recent election has prompted us to examine our assumptions about how knowledge is arrived at and shared – and even why it matters. Librarians and faculty in the disciplines have long helped students learn how to find and assess scholarly information, but we haven’t always been explicit about why it matters. What we’ve come to call “information literacy” must be more than learning how to evaluate websites and recognize “fake news” as an information consumer. It’s gaining an understanding of the ways information systems shape our world while gaining the confidence and conviction that we ourselves can shape the world for the better. Paulo Freire urged us to think of education as the practice of freedom. We will explore ways to prepare students who are entering a world saturated with personalized propaganda and “alternative facts” to be free human beings and empowered citizens.