The "this is fine" dog as a stuffed animal

Hi everyone. How are you? Your blog team is tired, but doing our best. We wanted to take this moment to check in with all of you in the Teaching SIG as this unprecedented (we are also all very tired of that word) semester inches up to a midway point. We talked earlier this year at our virtual meeting about how we were all preparing for instruction in the time of COVID, but now we want to take a moment to see how that’s actually going. We sent out a survey earlier this month, and this is what y’all had to say: What kind ofRead More →

by Courtney BaronDirector, Art Library, University of Louisville The COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020 led to the rapid movement of higher education to online formats and the closure of academic libraries across the globe. Faculty and librarians specializing in art, architecture, and design disciplines had to rethink how to deliver instruction and support students in a remote environment. Since art and design research still heavily relies on print materials, the closing of art research collections meant faculty and students lost access to many key library resources. The ARLIS/NA listservs have been abuzz with questions, resources, and words of support and encouragement during this difficult time.Read More →

In late 2019, the Teaching SIG blog team collected responses from SIG members about information literacy instruction in graduate school. We were interested in finding out what kind of instruction, if any, most art information professionals had been offered in their MLIS programs, and where they saw opportunities for improvement. Our casual survey indicated that most current professionals either had not had an information literacy instruction class in their program, or had been unable to take their program’s only offering due to scheduling conflicts. We reached out to Amanda Jenkins, the author of “Becoming Educators: Investigating Where Academic Librarians Learn How to Teach,” for herRead More →

This month’s blog post is the result of a collaboration between the Teaching SIG and ArLiSNAP (Art Library Students and New Library Professionals) , so to start out with, we’d like to thank the ArLiSNAP team for their work reaching out to survey participants! One common topic of casual conversation at many teaching librarian events and conferences is the state of instruction-about-instruction in MLIS programs. Though we each had our own sense of the situation, those of us on the Teaching SIG blog team were curious to hear what experiences other librarians in the field had had with instruction and pedagogy in grad school. AlongRead More →

Welcome to the inaugural post of the new ARLIS/NA Teaching SIG blog! We’re very excited to finally open up this resource for ARLIS members to share their teaching expertise year-round—and hopefully for many years to come. Let’s start by answering a few questions. What is this?: The Teaching SIG blog will serve as an informational hub for the ARLIS Teaching Special Interest Group. We’re planning to start out with an “Intro to Instruction” series of posts spread out over several months, covering many of the fundamentals of teaching in librarianship. Though many of these will be written by the blog team, we are very interestedRead More →