Paradigm Shift

Eight years ago I underwent a paradigm shift of the kind one can't plan or orchestrate in this life, but instead one arrives at primarily by God's hand.

Paradigm shift...

On May 15, 2005, the Feast of the Holy Myrrhbearers,* I was Chrismated into the Orthodox Christian Church.

Every aspect of my life, from school to work to family and everything in between, has been changed for the better because of it.

And I've been grateful every day since.

*This year is a year in which the liturgical and civil calendars line up almost identically to how they did that year, since today is also the Feast of the Holy Myrrhbearers. Always fun when this happens. </liturgicalgeek>

Edit: Looks like I commemorated this event last year on the blog as well using much the same language. Guess it's just that important. :)

Beginning

After thinking about what I'd want to research for the past five years, and then actually doing background research and thought work on the topic for the past year, I'm finally ready to begin the investigative work on the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom that will be the central portion of my thesis toward completion of my M.A. in Theology. 

I've actually avoided this moment for a while now, arguing to myself and others that I still need to do more background research before I've "earned the right" to work with my primary text of choice. A few weeks ago my thesis advisor disagreed, and made the good point that I won't be able to focus all of my background work unless I know what I plan to say about the liturgy, and the only way to find that out is to enter into the text... in other words, to read it. 

I hear and pray this liturgy every Sunday*, and have for eight years now. I am very familiar with it in that context. But textually analyzing it, with the end goal of articulating how the words engage our minds and hearts when the liturgy is served... definitely a first for me. And I'm both excited and humbled by the task I've set for myself.

Best get started... + Lord, bless.

*Unless it's a lenten period, in which case the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil is served.

Librarians as Knowledge Creators

...or, the first post on my blog with citations at the end of it. (The publications I'm responding to here are not freely available online, otherwise a simple hyperlink would do.)

Yesterday evening I posted the following status update to Facebook:

Bookie's role in my life tonight: Cheerer-Upper for Mommy, who is seeing red after encountering certain viewpoints in her research and is snuggling with Bookie to make the red haze disperse. Anyone who challenges the idea that having a baby somehow detracts from scholarly output has never been lifted out of scholarship-induced frustration/anger/despair by a joyful little person.

And what viewpoint, you may be wondering, did I encounter that led to this reaction? Well, I'm working on a book chapter about developing a scholarly research agenda as an academic librarian (the second bullet under "Future" here). The book is tentatively titled Academic Publishing and Contingent Faculty, and in order to introduce my case study (of myself, really) I need to establish how and in what ways library faculty are "contingent." So I've been reviewing the literature on faculty status of academic librarians.

I always knew there was some angst in my discipline relating to faculty status. I have a lot of very talented, committed librarian colleagues at other institutions who do not have faculty status in the precise way I do; in fact, there is a spectrum of models related to faculty status/rank for librarians in academia, and one of the distinguishing characteristics separating the farthest end of the spectrum from the next variant over is whether or not a faculty librarian has access to tenure.

Before I continue with what may turn into a rant related to this debate (my apologies in advance if it does), there are two things I want to make clear at the outset:

1) Disclaimer: I am a tenure-track faculty librarian, with identical faculty status to my colleagues in other departments (so my rank is Assistant Professor, not a parallel/hybrid rank of Assistant Librarian, though this title existed in the past at my institution; it doesn't anymore, and junior faculty in the Library department come in as tenure-track Assistant Professors). I've never had a job in which this was not the case, since my current position was my first professional appointment after completing my MLS.

2) Just because I believe that library faculty should have access to tenure and identical faculty status to their colleagues in other academic departments on campus (and all of the responsibilities that go along with this), does not mean that I think my colleagues who work at libraries where librarians do not have access to these things are somehow "lesser citizens," or not doing their job as well as they could be. (This "lesser citizens" leap is often made in the literature (1) which is the only reason I'm mentioning it, and when it is it's usually meant to describe the attitude of faculty in non-library departments toward their librarian colleagues.) I admire and respect these colleagues of mine greatly and believe they do amazing, valuable library work. Most of them have more academic library experience than I do, and I view them as peers from whom there is much I can learn about what it means to be a librarian in an academic community.

Now, with all of this as background, here is the viewpoint I encountered in my reading last night that caused me to see red, encapsulated in a single sentence which I'll put in bold in the excerpt below:

"A few librarians engage in original research, but that is not the norm. We function as knowledge providers, not knowledge creators. Therefore, we do not need tenure to protect the pursuit of highly specialized research interests." (2)

I'm actually not interested in addressing in detail the tenure-for-librarians question, although research (3) (and common sense stemming from the "publish or perish" imperative) shows that when a librarian has access to tenure there are incentives and supports in place that encourage the pursuit of a scholarly research agenda resulting in papers, presentations, and publications...in other words, the creation of knowledge. Instead, I am interested in the claim that the function of librarians is only to provide access to knowledge, and not to create any in the process.

First: %^$%*&???!!!?!?!?!?!!11111!!! ... Okay now that I got that off my chest, I can proceed coherently.

Here are some reasons why encountering this viewpoint, from a Library Dean with the rank of Professor at a school where, yes, librarians have faculty status and rank, but no tenure (i.e., University of Oregon), and who wrote the above in 2005 (!!!), right as information environments were shifting in ways that are forcing us to reconsider what it even means to provide access to knowledge and information, let alone create it...ok, reigning in the rantiness. Put simply, I was shocked to see this in print. And here are some reasons why:

1) From where I stand it appears this statement was made in a vacuum, with no actual research into the scholarly practices of librarians. Nor into the value of said scholarly practices. Nor even into what it actually means to provide access to knowledge in today's information environment and that to do this requires the creation of knowledge as part of the process. But more on this below. Basically I couldn't believe the librarian (library administrator, actually) speaking could not see the importance of knowledge creation to our function as librarians. And for what it's worth, this doesn't have to be in the form of scholarly publications; I really mean it in a broader sense here, including learning objects, professional and scholarly discourse hosted on social media platforms, and pedagogical decisions related to teaching our students how to access the knowledge they seek. Perhaps she's right that the number of librarians engaged in original research, with the end goal of publishing, is lower than those that don't. I have some stats in the articles I'm reading on this, but even if this is true it's beside the point. That she then leaps to the conclusion that because it is not the norm means it isn't part of our function (or shouldn't be), is nuts to me.

2) The work I'm doing related to information literacy and social media proves her wrong. First, there's the framework within which I understand and teach information literacy, being referred to in the literature now as metaliteracy (4). This framework takes information literacy and reconsiders it within participatory information environments (i.e., social media), and suggests ways in which the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education should be revised to account for the changes in information environments over the past 10 years. Some ways related to knowledge creation include the recommendation that we teach students to effectively "produce original content in multiple media formats" (p. 74) and to "share information in participatory environments" (p. 75). This framework is grounded in constructivist learning theory applied to information literacy and is thoroughly developed (so, not coming out of left field and making these recommendations in a vacuum). If we're to teach our students to do these things, then don't we need to be able to do them as well? Librarians need to be knowledge creators if we're going to effectively teach students to be knowledge creators. To be sure, the librarian quoted above was writing six years before the metaliteracy framework appeared in 2011, but she still doesn't get a pass from me on this because it shows that she was not engaged in the information environments her librarians and students were at the time of writing, nor in applying information literacy theory to those environments, two things I would expect from a head of libraries at an academic institution. (FYI, you just got a sneak peak at some of the ideas that will appear in the next article I'm co-writing with my research partner, Teresa. The draft is over halfway done, so the connections between information literacy and social media, and what this has to do with teaching information literacy in the classroom, are very much on my mind right now.)

Image from Facebook Page Undominated Generation

3) And now that I've proven that I'm not reacting to this viewpoint in my own vacuum (as I hope #2 has done), here is the primary reason reading this statement in print last night bothered me so much. It illegitimized the very work I was doing when I encountered the statement. I was conducting a literature review for a book chapter that has been accepted for publication only to be told (in print) my function as a librarian was not to create knowledge, only to provide access to it. Not only that, but to add an extra layer of meta to this entire exchange, the book chapter I'm writing is about librarians as knowledge creators. (In fact, I now think I'm going to name the chapter something along those lines.) To be creating knowledge as a librarian, only to encounter a viewpoint that says what I am doing is not part of my function as a librarian, is absurd. I felt like I was suddenly in a Lewis Carroll story. Either I'm mad, she's mad, or we're both mad.

And so it was, once I finished the article I was reading in which this viewpoint was quoted and cited (thankfully the article I encountered it in disagreed with the statement being quoted), I stepped away from my work, and went to snuggle my Bookie. Her smiling, happy little self helped me let go of my frustration and, I admit it, anger at what I had read. And it provided for me yet another example of how important motherhood is to my work as a librarian.

The image of a sane scholar

And now that I've gotten all of that off my chest, I can get back to work at creating knowledge. Onward and upward!

***
(1) Coker, Catherine, Wyoma vanDuinkerken, and Stephen Bales. "Seeking Full Citizenship: A Defense of Tenure Faculty Status for Librarians." College & Research Libraries 71.5 (2010): 406-420. Print

(2) Carver, Deborah A. "Should Librarians Get Tenure? No, It Can Hamper Their Roles." The Chronicle of Higher Education 52.6 (2005): B10-B11. Print.

(3) Gillum, Shalu. "The True Benefit of Faculty Status for Academic Reference Librarians." The Reference Librarian 51.4 (2010): 321-328. Print.

(4) Mackey, Thomas P. and Trudi E. Jacobson. "Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy." College & Research Libraries 72.1 (2011): 62-78. Web. Accessed on 23 March 2013. http://crl.acrl.org/content/72/1/62.full.pdf+html.

Between Worlds

Most of the time I am sure of myself. What I mean by this is, my sense of self is something I can usually pinpoint and own, even in and amid the many varied roles I fill in my life. A glance at the "About Me" here on my blog (currently in the right sidebar) names just a few of these roles, though there are even more roles that aren't listed there: daughter, daughter-in-law, sister, aunt, godmother (this one's new this past weekend!), choir member, parishioner, and so on.

Now, generally speaking this is a sentiment any person should relate to---every person is many things to many people. But for my part, the two of my roles that I've been ruminating on lately are "academic librarian" and "mother". Or more broadly: professional and mother.

As I've written about at great length before, I am more than OK with the fact that I am both a mother and a professional who works in the workforce. I was a professional before I became a mother, but even as a committed professional I also knew that if God led my life to where becoming a mother, in the context of an Orthodox Christian marriage and family, was suddenly a possibility, I would never do anything to prevent it (or "plan" it or "wait until we're ready for kids" or any of those things). When we were dating and Paul and I discussed the possibility of marriage, I shared this with him and framed it as a bit of a deal breaker for me. Fortunately for me (because he's wonderful and even then I loved him), he was more than open to having children as God saw fit for us and not trying to control it ourselves. But part and parcel to this was the simple fact that, if it did happen right away for us, there was no question I would continue to work as I became a mother and he a father. He understood this. So we were married...and then I became pregnant, and Bookie's first due date was exactly nine months after our wedding day. Thus it was I suddenly found (and find) myself both a professional in the workforce and a mother.

So far, I feel I've walked this line pretty well. My workplace is amazingly supportive, my husband is amazingly supportive, the people in our lives are amazingly supportive of our family and all we have on our plates (my husband works too of course). To make sense of my world, I have several different communities I belong to for different parts of my life: my co-workers and professional network for work-related things, and my mommy-groups, -blogs, and -friends for mommy-related things, to name a few. And navigating between and within these communities usually feels natural, organic and right.

Often, though, as I navigate these separate though sometimes overlapping communities, I encounter information or conversations that are firmly rooted in either one or the other of these worlds. And I admit, sometimes when this happens, I am caught off guard by the jarring experience of diving into reading something I was sure I would relate to (being a card-carrying member of said group), only to realize there is something about it that, basically, doesn't apply to me, or applies to me but in a different way.

This happened yesterday when I read a very thoughtful, honest post on a blog I follow, and the rich comments thread beneath it, about finding a healthy balance between "me time" as a mother and the actual work of mothering. At first glance this sounds like something that I'd certainly relate to (and I do!). But then I realized, as I read on and especially delved into the comments, that unlike the very strong and awesome women who were commenting (mostly mamas, many of whom I know IRL, whose work as mothers I respect immensely, and whose friendships I value highly)---unlike most of them (to my knowledge), in addition to my mothering role I have a professional outlet where I can exercise the parts of myself that don't directly come into play when I am mothering Bookie.

And yet, despite this luxury (in the context of the problem being discussed), I still crave "me time" that isn't professional in its nature. God only knows how long it's been since I've grabbed one of my favorite YA novels and just read it because I want to. For instance, I'm dying to reread Ender's Game before the movie comes out later this year. It's not likely to happen, though, at least not in the way it used to before I became a mother, because of two very different but equally important responsibilities I have: 1) mothering Bookie and putting her needs before mine, and, 2) putting any additional energy I have left over, around mothering Bookie, toward the immense amounts of reading, writing and research I need to do in order to maintain and succeed in my professional life. There's no question that, after I've applied my daily quota of energy across these two responsibilities (not to mention being a loving wife to my husband! Bless his supportive and sacrificial heart...), all I want to do at that point is sleep (when the baby lets me), in order to build my energy again for the following day.

I thought about leaving some of this in a comment on that thought-provoking blog post, but somehow felt that the balancing act I'm describing here is unique to my circumstance as a working mother. So I decided to share about it here and link back to the post, rather than hijack a comments thread that feels, to me at least, firmly rooted solely in the world of motherhood. As I read the post and the comments that followed, and experienced my response to them, I was suddenly aware of myself as "between worlds".

That being said, you are not reading a post about loneliness or separateness, but one about adapting and belonging...

On the question of "me time" or the lack thereof as I experience it, i.e., as a working mom, I assure you dear readers that I am not deprived of light and beauty that is unfettered by my mothering or professional responsibilities. Instead, my solution has been to reimagine what "me time" looks like in my new life as a wife and mother, and interestingly enough it has manifested itself in my sharing my usual sources of light and beauty with the two people I love most: my husband and my daughter. So, whereas before we had Bookie I'd grab a book and spend a few hours getting lost in it, now instead I grab the same book and we read it aloud as a family. We started this with Anne of Green Gables, a book that is a balm to my tired soul. It is all the more enjoyable because I am introducing my Bookie to Miss Anne Shirley, my dear (fictional) bosom friend, which fills me with a warmth and joy that would be absent if I were to read the book solo for a few hours. This is just one example, but I've been trying to build into our days and weeks as a family opportunities to feed the parts of me that otherwise may become neglected amid the considerable responsibilities I and my husband have willingly assumed in our daughter and our work lives.

As for the out-of-sorts feeling that sometimes (not always!) comes from navigating between worlds, the best solution that has presented itself to me has been to build a third world between the two. For me this meant that, when the opportunity arose to help form a closed Facebook group for working moms which called upon my talents as a Facebook researcher to help get it off the ground, I took it. The story of how I got involved in the group is still being written, as the group is just under a week old, so I won't attempt to tell it just yet.

But I will provide the link, in case there are any other working mamas reading this who are also in need of a world between worlds: The Wonderful World of Working Moms (If so, please click and request to join!)

And the group description, so you know the culture of the world I'm linking to: "This is a support group for working moms who strive to mother their babies gently and compassionately. This includes moms who work outside the home or who work at home, but who have jobs in addition to the hard work of being a mom. Any discussion about the unique circumstances, both the struggles and the victories, surrounding being a working mom is welcome. Come join us!"

We just passed 50 members this evening, which is pretty exciting in one week. And the professor in me is cracking up at how my involvement as an admin in this group may play out in my professional life down the line: If the group really takes off, and becomes a large community of support to a considerable number of mamas, I can see myself making the case for my admin work in the group counting toward my service requirement as a member of the faculty at my institution. Traditionally "Service to the Community" means service within your local, geographic community; but we're living in a connected world where the definition of "community" is changing or at least expanding to include virtual, networked communities, like my working mamas Facebook group.

And so, I leave you with the image of me cackling to myself in my unabashed geekdom, as I relish the thought of making the case to my colleagues for my work on a Facebook group being bona fide, valid and valuable service to a very real community, when it comes time to apply for promotion later this year. Oh man that's gonna be awesome.

Research Snapshot

What I'm researching at the moment, reflecting two very different areas of study...

From top to bottom:

Information literacy and social media:

• Net smart : how to thrive online / Howard Rheingold ; drawings by Anthony Weeks. 
• Think like Zuck : the five business secrets of Facebook's improbably brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg / Ekaterina Walter. 
• Teaching information literacy for inquiry-based learning / Mark Hepworth and Geoff Walton. 
• Networked : the new social operating system / Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman.
• Networked collaborative learning : social interaction and active learning / Guglielmo Trentin. 
• Using technology to teach information literacy / edited by Thomas P. Mackey and Trudi E. Jacobson. 

Early Christian Liturgy:

• Prayer book of the early Christians / translated and edited by John A. McGuckin. 
• Church, world and kingdom : the eucharistic foundation of Alexander Schmemann's pastoral theology / William C. Mills. 
• On the historical development of the liturgy / Anton Baumstark ; introduction, translation, and annotation by Fritz West ; foreword by Robert F. Taft.
• The serious business of worship : essays in honor of Bryan D. Spinks / edited by Melanie C. Ross and Simon Jones. 
• The Eucharistic liturgies : their evolution and interpretation / Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson. 
• Liturgy : the illustrated history / Keith F. Pecklers ; afterword by Inos Biffi.

And there are more in my stash, on both topics; this was just what I checked out from the library today.