The Lessons from Teaching

Most encouraging of everything I learned teaching this year was that a dynamic cadre of new librarians is entering our profession. It is no overstatement to assert that they guarantee a robust future for libraries and librarianship. I taught in programs in different regions of the United States—the School of Information Resources and Library Science at the University of Arizona; the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University; and at New York City's School of Information and Library Science at Pratt Institute. Responses from hundreds of students in dozens of LIS programs to a separate email survey validated my discovery.

With impressive talent and intelligence, many, possibly most, LIS students bring fresh perspectives from the trenches in libraries of all types. Their evaluation of our professional practice and the educational preparation for it demands careful attention.

For example, students told me they need and support the convenience of electronically delivered courses but that the quality of LIS distance learning must improve. I hope our deans and faculty listen to their recommendations. These students expect and deserve professional preparation that provides both the acculturation to our profession and the skills necessary to begin work within it, whether that education is delivered electronically or in the classroom. They have little interest in our old debate between practice and theory. They want and need both.

At Arizona, some said our obsessions with image and status are mostly in the minds of librarians, not the rest of society. They asserted that graduate schools need to focus on the special needs of older, more mature learners, the career-changers so common among our students. They come to LIS programs with a full life and rich work experience but with much different needs than recent college graduates.

At Pratt, I learned that our urban libraries are suffering still but that young staff are ready to do battle to make them work better. One barrier to progress they experience in that environment is the entrenched bureaucracy and the stifling dependence on hierarchy and longstanding policies and procedures.

At Dominican, I met newly recruited librarians who had worked with the Gates Foundation to help install the new computers and train both librarians and patrons to use them. They come bearing new energy and expertise, plus insights into how to bring technology to the people.

Students from Arizona's Knowledge River program taught me new dimensions of the need for diversity in our field. They imparted an urgency for finding better ways to use affirmative action to recruit and retain librarians from America's changing mix of language and ethnic constituencies. I learned that there is a huge cohort of Americans who have been bilingual since birth, for whom neither English nor Spanish is a "second" language. I learned of the terrible damage done to the learning ability of young immigrant children when use of their dominant languages is forbidden in class.

All of these new librarians illustrated that the old demons of image and status have been replaced by concerns about how to find a meaningful place to practice our profession, without the encumbrances of rigid hierarchy and old confining rules and policy.

I am deeply moved and excited by the arrival of these new librarians. They have the ideas and energy to change our field and guarantee it that better future. Now we must welcome them and give them the power to put their ideas to work.

Bite your tongue when you are moved to tell one of these new librarians, "We tried that once, it didn't work." It might just work this time.

jberry@reedbusiness.com