#WPC15

[latestblogpost]

WPC15 : Everything you should know about WPC15

WPC15 : Everything you should know about WPC15

WPC represents World Pitmaster Cup. competition in which the country’s quality grill masters convey their roosters and follow them for battle. Presently you could envision that the Government has restricted this resistance. But, this isn’t genuine. Not all nations are given a restriction on video games. Its strategy WPC15 remains acted in numerous countries. In this way, we’re examining the WPC15…

[sportfunda11]

Wpc16 Login/Register 2023 - SportFunda

In this article, we discuss on the WPC16 dashboard Login/(wpc15 Com) Register Now. The Philippines is popular for its vast array of sports and games, that are becoming popular across other nations. In addition to football as well as NBA There are a variety of games and sports that athletes take pleasure in.

The subject we’ll examine in this piece is the WPC16 Com Live. In the past, cockfighting had an essential role in the formation of relationships between human beings. A sport that involves numerous rounds of cockfighting is often referred to as in conjunction with an original phrase. People are interested and are investing their time into these cockfighting contests.

[mneylon]

Public safety vs privacy #wpc15 (at Orange County Convention Center)

[oceanmeest-blog]

Good morning Orlando! Day 2 begins! #wpc15 (at Orange County Convention Center)

[kellymce-blog]

Distance Education Technology and Social Justice

Trying to bust out all my reflections from the White Privilege Conference: these are my thoughts from the session Using Distance Learning Technologies to Examine Privilege by Abby Ferber and Eddie Portillos.

Not gonna lie, I was ready to zone out during this presentation. Psh, whatEVER, Blackboard, amirite? Instead, I got a tonne of great ideas, and listened in on a fascinating audience discussion about the digital divide. Ferber and Portillos both teach online courses (in sociology and criminology) and were talking about their experiences bringing discussions of privilege into non-face-to-face classes. 

Two things that Ferber does with her classes just blew me away. The first was the idea of doing a digital field trip, where students explore a museum or library collection on their own, with some kind of guiding . This seems like a brilliant way to highlight items in a digital collection, especially ones that are locked down in poorly navigable content management systems *cough ContentDM cough*. It doesn't have to be fancy, but a series of questions or narrative guiding students through a series of objects, to complete some kind of activity. I might work on something like this while I'm at QZAP for a week in August. 

The other thing was the idea of co-teaching a course with faculty at another university. Basically, there's a course that Ferber teaches to her UCCS students, co-taught with a faculty member at another university, who has his own classroom full of students. In this case, these are face-to-face classes, so her class Skypes with the other class. I pretty much had a complete meltdown thinking about how awesome this would be for an information literacy course, and telling jennafreedman, catladylib, and @pumpedlibrarian that I would drag them into this. I've settled down a bit, but this is still a goal: a for-credit information literacy course, cross-listed at multiple colleges and universities. In Ferber's case, by working with a colleague at a HBCU, her mostly white students got to be in class with mostly African-American students. In an IL context, I can imagine the benefits for our (large Midwestern public university) students to compare notes with students at a small liberal arts college, a community college, a commuter college...so many opportunities. Research habits and student culture are very different in different places, and I can see a lot of potential to learn from those contrasts. There are challenges to make this happen -- getting new courses approved, and differing academic calendars, for example -- but the potential to enrich student engagement is exciting. What if we took one of the new framework's threshold concepts and built a course around that? 

Like anything else I talk about...lemme know if you're interested in working on this kind of project. 

[mneylon]

Microsoft CEO from a distance... #wpc15 (at Orange County Convention Center)

[oceanmeest-blog]

Ya! Celebrating 10 years working on WPC! Love my job!!! #wpc15 #thankyoupartners #luckygirl (at Orange County Convention Center)

[kellymce-blog]

Don't use "everybody": Active listening in teaching

As promised, I'm writing up my reflections on the sessions I went to at the White Privilege Conference. This is all about Active Listening For Social Justice, led by Pippi Kessler. 

Active listening can be radical and empowering: to really listen to someone is to show that you value them, and that you are interested in them. It is an action that does not require money or a helluva lot of time. Which is awesome: it's a small action you can take, all day long, every day. Some people in our culture get to speak, teach, and be heard, but others don't. Think about your students. How often do they really get heard by staff or faculty? How do you express that you hear and are interested in their voices? 

Pippi laid out that there are three basic layers to what people say: facts, feelings, and underlying human needs. As you listen, you may find one of those areas easiest to listen for, but all three are important. Listening just for facts seems to be a shortcut for the harried, problem-solving librarian. I can think of a few reference interactions I've had that, in retrospect, were about more than just the facts at hand. In fact, the one time a patron was verbally abusive to me, possibly could have been avoided if I had been listening more attentively to the underlying need. We have many kinds of professional boundaries -- for example, time restrictions and concerns about privacy -- but that doesn't need to make us insensitive. The information need may not be the most important piece of the interaction. 

Active listening requires asking questions, open-ended, non-assumption-laden questions. I've found that when I work with first-year students in a class, this is crucial to building any trust. I used to ask "How is your paper/topic/research coming?" That assumes that they have a way to evaluate how it is coming, that it is started at all -- and namely, suggests that it should be coming some kind of way. Now I usually use "Tell me about your paper/topic/research." Outside the classroom, open-ended questions are obviously a good way to connect with students. Our VP for student life sends out weekly lists of open-ended questions for staff to ask students, to show students that *everyone* on campus cares about their success. 

The biggest takeaway for me from Pippi's presentation was her message about messing up as a listener. When you ask about someone's mom, and it turns out they're adopted, or make some platitude about how duh, nobody likes Family Circus, or whatever boneheaded thing you'll inevitably say...KEEP TALKING. Say "Oh dang, I just made an assumption about you. I'm sorry. Can you tell me more about _______?" Don't awkwardly get silent, just keep talking and keep listening. That is hard, but such good advice. 

In terms of instruction, active listening plays a role in any truly student-led learning. Yeah, we don't always have the time to sit down and talk with each student, but assessing student learning often really requires careful listening of some kind. To put it another way: when I am doing all the talking, I have almost no clue whether students are learning. I've been using a lot of in-class, reflective, non-graded writing lately, and it strikes me as akin to this variety of active listening. 

I've thought a lot recently about how misguided it is to have our message as academic librarians be "Ask us questions!" I work at a large public university, where many students have never been in a research library before. We are the biggest library in the whole state, so students are often intimidated by the process of getting started. Most importantly: many new undergraduates don't know what questions to ask yet. That alone can keep them from seeking help. Librarians, we are good at questions. We can use those skills to help students clarify what they need to know, *before* we help them find it. I'm interested in finding better ways to do that, in the classroom, in the stacks, and outside the library. 

[sweat-garbage]

Social justice is hard and complicated and I need to learn to cut people some slack

[testosterlonely]

Really rough workshop. LGBT accountability was hard and painful and I'm trying to work through it.

[oceanmeest-blog]

Ya! This is happening! #wpc15 (at Orange County Convention Center)

[kellymce-blog]

Thoughts from #WPC15

Aw man, I am still processing a lot of this, and will be on into the future. But here are my initial thoughts on what I learned at the White Privilege Conference, and specifically, the role of anti-racist work in librarianship.

The first #critlib discussion was last night, too, so I've got some thoughts on that. (Check out the Storify that aszingarelli put together, if you missed the discussion.) One thing that jennafreedman pointed out during our planning is that issues of critical ANYthing may be better suited to longform rather than Twitter, so I'm gonna try to follow every #critlib with a reflection here. 

The White Privilege Conference is an annual event "that examines challenging concepts of privilege and oppression and offers solutions and team building strategies to work toward a more equitable world." This was the 15th year, and my first time ever. There were about 2500 people there in total. I met lots of teachers (K-12, higher ed) and social workers, but no other librarians, besides the folks from my institution. 

The biggest takeaway of WPC for me was: as a white person, I do not get to decide if I am an ally to POC. Duh. DUH. I mean, I knew that, but it was really brought to the surface by a setting explicitly structured around dismantling white supremacy. It was reinforced by hearing other white people say, again and again, that they "do anti-racist work," not that they "are anti-racists." What you believe and what you take action on (obviously) aren't the same thing. (To give a queer parallel: how many straight folks have mentioned their nominal support of gay marriage as a way to flash me their ally card?) In one session, the speaker, a white woman, said that the most helpful advice she ever got about anti-racism was an email that just said "SHUT UP AND LISTEN." So obvious, yet so important. 

Going to this conference right after the BCALA statement about Annual being held in FL helped me focus on the role of intersectional diversity in libraryland. Figuring out how to do anti-racist work in conjunction with my professional engagements (say, with the Zine Pavilion) is something I honestly haven't done yet. It is something I need to do. So: I'm working on it, and I'm taking suggestions. 

Many of the sessions I went to touched on pedagogy, explicitly or not. I'm going to break those down into separate posts: on active listening, on serial testimony, on the use of distance ed tech, on the connection of academics and cultural competency, on journaling as accountability. I'll tag all those posts #wpc15. 

There was a lot of discussion of the importance of developing authentic relationships, and again, I'm thinking a lot about how this fits in my professional work. No conclusions yet, but thinking about it a lot. 

The White Privilege Conference will be in Louisville next year -- I really hope to go back, and I'd love to see more libraryfolks there.

Oh, I guess I really didn't talk about #critlib, but I will next week. In the meantime, check http://tinyurl.com/critlibx if you're interested in that. Now I'm off to update the reading list.