Building Connection with Community Reads: Opening Up a Learning Community During Isolation and Beyond

Presenter Information

Hannah Mendro, University of Washington - Bothell CampusFollow
Alyssa Berger, University of Washington - Bothell CampusFollow
Carina Bixby, University of Washington - Bothell CampusFollow
Joanne Chern, University of Washington - Bothell CampusFollow
Kat Wyly, University of Washington - Bothell CampusFollow
Laura Dimmit Smyth, University of Washington - Bothell CampusFollow

Presentation Type

Presentation

Location

Zoom

Event Website

https://guides.lib.uw.edu/bothell/communityreads

Start Date

15-4-2024 1:00 PM

End Date

15-4-2024 1:55 PM

Description

Community Reads at the UW Bothell/Cascadia College Library is a program open to students, staff, and faculty across both our communities with the goal of facilitating conversation around topics of social justice and equity. We use a shared reading (a book, essay, or short story) that aligns with a greater theme as the basis of our programming, but build out from our reading in many different ways. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and more than a year of virtual learning, the team has focused on providing multiple creative entry points into our readings and discussions, prioritizing alternative ways of knowing and interacting with texts and ideas.

To further this goal, we have cultivated a robust partnership with our library’s Digital Scholarship unit and utilized a variety of open pedagogy tools and projects. We created a virtual art gallery through a WordPress based SPLOT, a virtual anthology through a WordPress based TRU Writer, and a digital zine hosted in the open access space ResearchWorks. In all of these projects, we have emphasized creative engagement with our texts and themes and leveraged these tools to provide students and community members with an opportunity to publish their work on open platforms. In this presentation, we will discuss the unique challenges of promoting and educating about open pedagogy outside the classroom, emergent opportunities to engage with students across disciplines and perspectives through these projects, and what we have learned from working with digital scholarship and open pedagogy tools.

Author Bios

Alyssa Berger (she/they) is the Science, Math, and Education Librarian at the University of Washington Bothell and Cascadia College Campus Library. They provide information literacy instruction and research support to students across a broad range of disciplines. Her research interests include non-hierarchical and peer mentorship, open pedagogy, and care work in libraries.

Hannah Mendro (she/her) is the Collections Lead at the University of Washington Bothell and Cascadia College Campus Library. She provides back-end support for the library’s processes relating to collections and access (or, in technical terms, does a lot of moving books around). Her research interests include open scholarship, community and counter-archives, and reading and text-based interaction as a community and creative practice.

Kat Wyly (she/her) is a Research and Instruction Librarian at the University of Washington Bothell and Cascadia College Campus Library. She provides information literacy instruction, supports research, and is a member of the Digital Scholarship unit. Her interests include open pedagogy, peer mentorship, emotional responses to information, and incorporating current events and activism into library programming.

Laura Dimmit Smyth (she/her) is the Fine Arts Librarian at the University of Washington Bothell and Cascadia College Campus Library. She provides instruction, research help, and outreach to both undergraduate and graduate students. Her research interests include the ethical application of AI in library instruction and the information-seeking practices of creative practitioners.

Carina Bixby (she/her) is the Reserves and Circulation Technician at the University of Washington Bothell and Cascadia College Campus Library. She provides course support services for students and faculty by ordering and processing reserves material used in instruction. Her interests include open access resources, third places, and integrating community activism and creativity in libraries.

Joanne Chern (she/her) is a Research and Instruction Librarian at the University of Washington Bothell and Cascadia College Campus Library. She provides information literacy instruction and supports students in their research. Her interests include examining and dismantling the role that white supremacy plays in library work, building community and dialogue among library workers of color, and thinking up ways to include pictures of her dog in her PowerPoints.

Comments

DEI Statement:

At its core, the Community Reads team is a program centered around equity work. Our projects foreground intersectional social justice, prompting participants to engage in the practice of decolonizing their minds as they interact with diverse texts and perspectives outside of the classroom. In addition to traditional discussion-based sessions, we center creative projects that allow for a diversity of learning styles, types of representation, and entry points into collective dialogue. We are intentionally seeking to decenter white supremacy culture’s focus on written culture and on “rational” interactions with text, allowing space for the creative and the emotional. Our work centers self- and community care from a perspective that considers oppression and injustice as threats to well-being. We choose open platforms when publishing our projects in order to reduce barriers to entry for publication of traditionally marginalized voices.

Learning Objectives:

In this session, participants will:

-witness examples of the creative engagement on the UW Bothell/Cascadia College campus

-consider opportunities and challenges of incorporating open pedagogy into co-curricular programming

-learn about the ways that open pedagogical tools can be used to encourage community formation and promote diversity, equity, and inclusion

-brainstorm possibilities for engaging with anti-oppressive and open pedagogies in their work

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.