Guardienne of the Tomes

Teacher- Librarians In practice here at CSUCI Broome Library, we are all teaching librarians. when I schedule information literacy sessions, all librarians are up for grabs for me--my Head of Public Services and Outreach, Head of Unique Collections and Scholarly Communication, my Collections & Technical Services Coordinator, my Electronic Resources Librarian, my Original Cataloging Librarian, even my dean/AVP. Everybody's on deck when there's an instruction need, and with over 120 information literacy sessions scheduled this fall alone, everybody bats, and everybody bats big. In addition to the many information literacy sessions we teach, many of us also teach semester-long classes. Before I talk about teaching my credit course this semester, some important background. Here at CSUCI, the librarians (who have tenure-track faculty status) regularly teach and co-teach credit courses in disciplines where we're qualified, in addition to classes actually certified under the L...

You don't even have to have your finger on the pulse of academic news to have heard about the Lacour and Green research debacle. It's been bouncing around in my brain since it's related to the way we maneuver in a world of information, and it is relevant to my work as a librarian and as a researcher. In a drama-filled nerdly nutshell (with links to further reading for the details), the situation: Brief Unofficial Timeline of the Study, and Discovery of Possible Misconduct an important study on persuasion coauthored by a UCLA political science graduate student (Lacour) and a big-name political scientist at Columbia University (Green) was published in (and then retracted from) the peer-reviewed journal  Science; the large-N study indicated that attitudes about same-sex marriage could be significantly changed long-term by brief exposure to someone who was gay; because this would be huge news, it was picked up by NPR's This American Life ; because the conclusions g...

Those of you who know me know that I'm a perpetual student, addicted to lifelong learning (and the pieces of paper that certify I accomplished something). In September 2014, I started work on the  Ph.D. in Mythological Studies, with an emphasis in depth psychology . As I finish the readings for the first session of my third semester in my latest academic endeavor, I find myself thinking about the different ways of knowing in academic disciplines. I've had a lot of experience as a student. (I remarked to a class the other day that I've been doing homework for 30 of my 35 years. And then I nearly cried. They looked a mixture of horrified and awed.) At the undergraduate level, I overloaded my schedule each term (requiring the Dean of Students' signature) and did significant work in international relations and political science, economics, Spanish, and foreign language study (Spanish, Italian, French, German, Ancient Greek, and Japanese). At the Master's level, I've...

To my great delight, I've been invited to teach in the Freedom and Justice Studies minor in Fall 2015. I'll be teaching the three-credit upper-division interdisciplinary general education course FJS 340: Exploring Freedom and Justice on Thursday afternoons in fall 2015. The course description as it appears in the catalog is: Starting from philosophical understandings of identity, community, and democracy the course focuses on themes such as slavery and emancipation; migration, exile, and diaspora; violence and reconciliation. Using an interdisciplinary lens that engages fields as wide-ranging as economics and literature, students will engage in trans-historical, cross-cultural exploration of freedom and justice and the various ways different peoples have attempted to put them into practice. Students will engage tools to analyze the relationship between these concepts and the structure of identity and its material effects. Effectively the course chooses a wicked problem and expl...

Today I read a piece that hit close to home. The Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece by Andrea N. Geurin-Eagleman on dealing with academia, divorce, and name changes. The article does a good job of relating the concerns of many female academics I've talked to--namely, that changing your name may effectively erase all of the name recognition we've been building in our fields since we started out into the hallowed halls of higher ed. Fabulous Husband and I are approaching our second wedding anniversary at the end of this month. Both before and after our actual wedding, we talked long and hard about what we wanted to do with our names. Our conversations covered a lot of territory, and these are some of the facets of the issue that came up: I already had a significant number of publications under my maiden name, and was concerned about the academia/continuity-of-recognition factor; We were both over 30 years old when we married, so each of us had significant years ...