Institutional Transformation
Christin Wixson
Summer 2019
The Cluster Pedagogy Learning Community filled my summer with readings, discussions, meetings, and the Academic Technology Institute, and now the CPLC folks want to know what my takeaways are. That’s not a simple question. This summer I was reminded that I have as much to learn as the students, and was engaged in the work of learning in a way I haven’t been in a while. I found myself reading not only some of the books shared at the CPLC book fair, but finally getting to others that I’d long meant to read. The confluence of all these books and conversations has set my brain on fire in a good way that hasn’t happened in a while. Here is a first attempt to describe what I’m getting out of the CPLC.
I expanded my values horizon.
Both the values discussion we had in our first CPLC meeting and the books I read from the CPLC reading list invited me to think about my own role in identifying and embodying the values I want to see, not just in libraryland, but in higher education as a whole. I read the New Education by Cathy Davidson and Generous Thinking by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and got to discuss them with my colleagues. (Which, when we’re all “doing more with less,” did feel like a novel experience.) These books provided some big picture context for the work that I do. Before this experience I was primarily focused on my work as a librarian, focused on the specific values of that discipline, (info access for all, information literacy, intellectual freedom, privacy, lifelong learning.) Sure I worked in higher education, but the larger issues around higher education weren’t front and center in my mind. Now I understand the relationship between my work and the bigger picture and I’ve expanded my values and goals to include:
Cooperation and openness over competition and exclusivity
Individual student growth over the pursuit of institutional status
Strengthening the relationship between the university and the community
Working in the open to make our scholarly work useful to the public (ok, that one’s not new for me)
I finally found out what “student centered” means
While I’m not officially in the CPLC open track, I got to attend ATI again this year as a presenter. Listening to thekeynote presentations might have been the first time that I understood what it would look like to actually be “student centered,” a phrase that has been overused nearly to the point of meaninglessness. The radically student-centered ideas like trusting students, making room for student contributions in the syllabus, and acknowledging all the parts of students’ complex lives that were present in these keynotes also came up again and again in the reading I did this summer. Even though the work I do is not as teaching heavy as that of most faculty, the ideas below (paraphrased from my notes taken during those presentations) have stuck with me and are things that I want to incorporate into my work.
Start by trusting students
Purpo