Teaching from the Outside: Inclusive Pedagogy and the Adjunct Instructor

Abstract

Excerpt from Introduction: The Syllabus as a Lens through Which We Analyze Our Practice: A master’s degree in library and information science (MLIS) represents more than the credentials needed to become a librarian. It is often the point of entry into the profession, when graduate students are introduced to the cultural values, expectations, norms, and standards of behavior for librarians. What and how we teach students in our programs has much to do with the frames of mind new librarians bring to their work in the information literacy classroom and beyond. MLIS programs, like much of higher education, are increasingly reliant on adjunct instructors to teach courses on topics such as academic librarianship, teaching and pedagogy, discipline-focused searching, and many others. An aspect of equitable and inclusive pedagogy that can often be overlooked is the role of librarian adjunct instructors in MLIS programs and the influence they will also have on the pedagogy of future librarians. We four coauthors are academic librarians who serve as adjunct instructors in MLIS programs, and each of us has varying levels of agency within our associated programs and with course design. We explore how our positionality within the MLIS program impacts our abilities to integrate inclusive pedagogies into our adjunct teaching. We consider inclusive pedagogy paramount to our teaching philosophies. Although each of us endeavors to use inclusive teaching practices as we do in our work as full-time librarians, our ability to actualize these pedagogies is often curtailed by our tenuous position as adjunct instructors. We authors chose to collaborate together through community and a collective sense of joy in engaging with this work, when typically our experiences would be siloed teaching different courses at different campuses.