Hello Everyone,
My name is Stefani Gomez and this year I am serving in the role of the ACRL/DVC president. I am the Information Literacy Librarian at Kutztown University and a technology and culture researcher focused on how our families, groups, and communities influence the ways we use information and technology. Currently, I spend most of my time teaching information literacy (IL) to first-year students. I attempt to pay attention to the experiences and knowledge my students bring to the classroom and whose voices I am highlighting. Sometimes, however, like most of us, I’m guessing, I get caught up in the politics and busyness of my job and forget to think about what I’m trying to accomplish with my teaching and what I might be unintentionally communicating.
To help me reflect on how I teach, during the summer, I participated in the Digital Pedagogies Lab conference held at Mary Washington University in Virginia. It was great to have this rare time away to revisit foundational ideas on education from thinkers such as bell hooks and Paulo Freire and consider whether my practices contribute to my students’ freedom or their dominion and think about what I should be doing differently.
One of the keynote speakers at the lab was Ruha Benjamin. She researches how everyday information systems serve as technologies of racism by reinforcing and amplifying biases. She says that rather than get bogged down with outrage over individual acts of obvious racism, we need to turn our attention to the systems themselves. She likened this behavior to calling out someone that has spit in a water bottle over someone who is poisoning the water source. In this scenario, the person that is pulling the lever to the poison is less obvious than the person that spit in the water bottle despite being many magnitudes worse. Unintuitively, this makes the poisoning of the water source much easier to ignore and to be complicit with.
This metaphor can easily be applied to the importance of reflecting on the structures underlying the services we provide in our universities and libraries. In this vein, I would like the organization to use this coming year to ask big questions about our responsibility as college and university librarians to our most vulnerable populations.
We have already gotten off to a great start with a successful and well-attended screening and talkback of the film The Public at ArtsQuest in Bethlehem, which considers librarians’ responsibility for institutionalized inequities experienced by the homeless. Also, our topic for the 2019 fall program on October 25 at Cedar Crest College will be cultural humility.
Cultural humility is a cousin to cultural competence, but while cultural competence is about getting to know information about other cultures, cultural humility is about learning to continuously do the hard work of uncovering how we and our institutions are contributing to marginalization and thinking about the structural changes that are needed to rectify this. Conversations like these can be awkward and uncomfortable, but they are incredibly important and can make a positive impact on our students.
During the first half of the program presenters from across the valley will speak to their successes and failures in their attempts to integrate cultural humility into special collections, programming, and community collaborations. .
In the afternoon, Theatre of the Oppressed in NYC (TONYC) will run a workshop devoted to reflecting on some of the ways that systems of power structure how we and our institutions do our work.* Their methodology is based on techniques developed by the legendary Brazilian theatre director and activist Augusto Boal, who based his work on Paolo Freire, who many of us are already familiar with. The workshop promises to be fun, enlightening, and practical and we are very excited to be able to offer it.
Please consider joining us. You can click here for more information and/or to register for Beyond Diversity Speak: Practicing Cultural Humility in Your Library.
My hope is that the fall program and all of the other events and services that ACRL/DVC will provide throughout this next year, such as student stipends (stipends will be awarded at the fall program) and mentorships, will help to solidify a network of people passionate about equity and anti-oppression work that are looking for others to collaborate with, learn from, or simply commiserate with. Developing these types of relationships across institutional boundaries makes it easier for us all to build a career and extend our influence.
The ACRL/DVC would love to use our platform to help you share your thoughts, start important conversations, and build connections. I would encourage all of you, as you go about your year to share the work that is inspiring you or making you think with all of us. You can reach out to us at acrlpa.dvc@gmail.com or on twitter @acrldvc. I am so excited to do this work with you. I look forward to meeting you all and talking with you over the coming year.
Warm Regards,
Stefani Gomez
*Due to extenuating circumstances, Lorin Jackson, the Research and Instruction Resident Librarian from Swarthmore College and co-founder of WOC+Lib, an online community dedicated to amplifying the voices of librarians of color, will be unable to run the afternoon workshop. We are disappointed that she won’t be able to share her expertise, but hopefully, we will be able to work with her in the future.
Stefani Gomez, PhD, MLIS
President, ACRL Delaware Valley Chapter
Information Literacy Librarian
Kutztown University
gomez@kutztown.edu
She/her/hers