Category: teaching

Fast Forward

Lindsay DavisLeave a comment
Asphalt street with a painted white arrow pointing forward

Image by joffi from Pixabay

It’s been three years and one day since my last post, and so much has happened with work and life, that I think I’ll just have to drop snippets here and there to kind of sort of attempt to capture the gist. Coming back to community college did mean sacrificing conferences and professional development within the library world, but I’m making a difference, albeit slowly, with local matters.

I taught a three-unit credit course as a hybrid in Fall 2022, LRNR 30 Information Concepts and Research Skills. It was my first time teaching a credit course (most of my teaching is as a guest in the context of other courses), and my class was small, but I worked hard on it, and the few students I had did make it fun. I actually had students conduct mini diversity audits on a portion of the library collection as the course project.

As a librarian, though, teaching the course wasn’t part of my load, so I taught it as overload. It was just too hard on my family life to do again in the spring semester as my daughter was 1.5 years old. I might consider teaching it again as a summer class online (no competing work) or in-person during a spring semester (fall is overwhelming), but I would need to make some bigger changes and also change my current work priorities. Also, our course really doesn’t have a good return on investment; there are so few librarians to cover the regular work, and while our course fulfills a general education requirement for the California State University, it will no longer count starting in 2025. California is moving to a single general education pathway for transfer admission to the California State University and University of California (Cal-GETC), which is great news for students, but our class will now only count as an elective, and students have a lot of choices when it comes to electives. One of my colleagues and I do have ideas, but given our staffing, we’re staying put for a little while.

After getting a local $25,000 grant the previous academic year, in Fall 2022, a colleague and I also launched Merced College’s first attempt to incentivize faculty to move to Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) resources, the ZTC/OER Faculty Incentive Program. The program ran out of money at the end of Fall 2023, which was projected. We had a librarian vacancy all of 23-24 as my colleague who was our Open Educational Resources (OER) lead resigned from her position last August, so I just couldn’t do much more last year. I haven’t even put the student or faculty results from our Spring 2023 or Fall 2023 surveys into a report, which covers the inaugural class of faculty. This is one of my goals for Fall 2024. Luckily, the training my colleague and I created will get reused. I need to make some changes to the training, but it seems like I will be able to launch it and use other money for faculty stipends this academic year. I also served as the college’s ASCCC OERI liaison in 23-24 and got Creative Commons certified in December 2023.

It’s been a little slow-going as there aren’t many folks available to dedicate time to OER with all of our college’s initiatives. Our community college also has an inclusive access program–the program was implemented right after my colleague and I received news about our grant. While I have been contributing where I can, I don’t think I can do much more solo.

I got tenure in Spring 2023! You would think I’d share this first, but it was not something I was very worried about given the process. It still feels really good to have this behind me, though.

Woman with long brown hard in glasses standing next to a podium with a crowd in the background

I’m embarrassed to share this in a blog post, but I also got nominated for Distinguished Full-Time Faculty of the Year this spring. The other candidates really are top-knotch, so, in this case, just being nominated really is nice. We already voted on this at the end of this spring semester, and I think they already let the winner know in advance of the reveal this next Friday during our in-service day.

My little baby is now a big three years old! My husband and I couldn’t be more proud of our bright little girl. This summer, I also got LASIK! I’m still a little nearsighted, which was the plan since I didn’t have a whole lot of tissue to work with, but it’s kind of amazing what I can see now. It’s been just over a month since I had the procedure.

Here’s to 24-25! I’m hoping to keep up in this space a little more.

Zooming through the Summer

Lindsay DavisLeave a comment

Zoom call on a MacBook Pro laptop with a green ceramic mug on the left

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

I clearly had no know idea how the rest of the 2019-2020 would turn out. I can’t possibly update the last 6+ months, but let’s just say that it’s been quite a workload since March. I can’ t believe it’s nearly July!

If you recall, I took on my role precisely to improve instructional services, and COVID-19 highlighted many of the critiques I have been making since returning to Merced College. While I was able to get more support, we’re 10-month faculty, so I’ll have to start some of this advocacy work again in August.

I worked remotely from March 20 until the end of the spring semester. (The week we went remote was fraught with tension; it involved some disparity between the library faculty and the faculty in other discipline.) I was able to make a OneSearch tutorial. (I actually had to make it twice; once in a trial of SideCar, and then a second time in LibWizard when we finally got the add-on to our Springshare subscription in May.) I was also able to make three Canvas modules:

  • Understanding & Finding Databases
  • Selecting Databases by Subject
  • Using Basic Search Strategies

I wish I would have had time to help our librarians get up to speed on LibWizard and Canvas to be able to split up the other materials that we need to make, but we all just didn’t have time. I started an instruction guide in the fall, and I have been adding more documentation and materials in preparation for Fall 2020, as we’ll do some of this work when we come back in August, though it will more than likely be remote.

Prior to the spring semester ending, a colleague and I also started working to populate the library website. The website got a big update a couple of years ago, but there were places that hadn’t been developed yet. We’ll continue to work on it remotely this summer and in the early fall. Our College also created a hub for students within Canvas for student and academic services, and my colleague and I were also able to provide a lot of input for the library’s hub space.

Summer school is online, and the library remains closed to the campus community. We are offering curbside pick-up, but, to be quite honest, print is not the big draw for learners. (I have a lot to say about this, but tenure track…). I did elect to work a couple weeks of summer school to staff the library chat, where the majority of questions have dealt with textbooks on reserve. This is such a huge deal in community college libraries, and while folks do use OER here, it’s not as far-reaching. My last day of summer school is on Tuesday. As part of my advocacy efforts, I was also given 75 hours of additional time this summer to work on instructional projects. I have worked some of these hours already adapting an MLA Canvas module. When summer school is over, I’ll pick this up again. I’ll also be working on an APA and evaluation module.

I’m also taking a 9-week online course through Merced College to be “certified” to teach online as part of the California Virtual Campus Open Educational Initiative (CVC-OEI). The course helps faculty design the first six weeks of a fully online course. While I’m not scheduled to teach the library’s three-unit course LRNR 30 Information Concepts and Research Skills this fall, teaching a course for credit is a long-time dream of mine, and I would like to teach it in the next couple of years. Week 5 starts this week. It’s quite the workload, but it’s going well considering that I’m not exactly adapting a class I’ve taught before. My favorite unit so far is the accessibility unit because it reminded me of things I have learned before but forget to practice. It also helped me fix some LibGuides and other Canvas issues. I’m glad I decided to take the class.

I hope to have a few more updates this summer.

Bias in Your Search Results Lesson @ CCLI 2019

Lindsay DavisLeave a comment

In early May, I presented a lightning talk at the California Conference on Library Instruction about a lesson I designed for an upper-division Critical Race and Ethnic Studies course at UC Merced. I’m a little shy about sharing instructional materials, so this was actually the first time I shared a lesson plan and activity I’ve designed for a class with folks who aren’t my colleagues. I first designed the lesson in Spring 2018, and I’ve tweaked it a few times since then.

As promised at the conference, I got my act together and put up my lesson plan and materials on Project CORA. Let me know if I have typos or broken links. Of course, if you end up using or adapting this, I’d love to know, as well.