I was selected as a member of the first cohort of Leadership Development Scholars by the UNC Graduate School. The program involves the implementation of a proposed professional development project, participation in a leadership workshop, and the creation of a personalized leadership development plan. I will be organizing and moderating a panel discussion with prominent leaders in library and information science, which will take place in March 2014.
The AMICAL (American International Consortium of Academic Libraries) 2013 Annual Conference took place June 12-15 at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. I gave a talk titled “Cross-Campus Collaboration for Academic Integrity,” addressing the ways that librarians, teaching faculty, administrators, and IT staff, can collaborate to ensure that undergraduate and graduate students understand academic integrity and develop necessary research and writing skills.
Claire Walker, Research & Instruction Librarian, and I used the photovoice method to conduct a comparative study about student perceptions of academic integrity issues at Belmont University and the American University of Cairo. We presented our findings at LOEX 2013, a library instruction conference, in a talk called “Picture This! Instruction Librarians Promoting Academic Integrity.”
Click here for the presentation PowerPoint.
Cleveland State Community College was one of the recipient libraries of the Muslim Journeys grant, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association. As part of the promotion for Muslim Journeys, the CSCC library invited me to give a talk called The Arab Spring: Social Movements & Social Networks. You can view the announcement for the talk here.
Along with Claire Walker, Reference & Instruction Librarian at Belmont University, I gave a presentation called Authentic Teaching: Lessons from Instruction Librarians at the Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy. The Conference took place at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA on 6-8 February 2013.
Abstract: Librarians, like many scholars, often leave graduate school with little teaching experience or pedagogical training. Those who become academic librarians are immediately and regularly asked to teach information literacy sessions on conducting research and library resources, and can find themselves feeling unprepared and overwhelmed. Certainly the teaching experience of instruction librarians differs from that of faculty members, in everything from contact hours to course content. However, the lessons learned in library instruction sessions can often be applied to the traditional classroom, and the focus on authentic teaching benefits all types of instructors. This practice session will include discussion of deep modeling, transformative learning, and authenticity. Participants will learn about the use of these ideas in higher education pedagogy in a big picture context, work and learn in groups in order to apply these concepts, and take home a plan to develop individual authenticity in teaching.
Meggan Houlihan, Coordinator of Instruction at The American University in Cairo, and I published “Teaching Literacy: Methods for Studying and Improving Library Instruction” in Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. The article is available online.
Full citation: Houlihan, M., & Click, A. (2012). Teaching Literacy: Methods for Studying and Improving Library Instruction. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice,7(4), 35-51.
I was awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) scholarship to study Arabic in the summer of 2012, and enrolled in an intensive language program at the Hedayet Institute for Arabic Studies in Cairo, Egypt.
In April, I was invited to give a talk at Belmont University in Nashville, as part of National Library Week programs. Details on the talk are below:
“Social Movements and Libraries: From Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street”
2011 was a year of social movements, bringing change and upheaval all over the world, from the Middle East and North Africa to the United States. The Arab Spring, and particularly the Egyptian Revolution, are considered by some to have been successful as a result of protesters’ use of technology and social networking tools. There are many ways to support a social movement, and the efficient and effective sharing of information is one of them. Libraries, librarians, and other information professionals have been essential participants in both promoting and preserving these movements. The Occupy Wall Street protestors developed The People’s Library to support the movement. Librarians in Egypt continually work to save the artifacts of the revolution, from photographs to flyers to oral histories. This talk will discuss the different ways that the creating, sharing, and preserving information has played an important role in the recent social movements.
More information:
An article in the campus newspaper, The Belmont Vision
I had the opportunity to collaborate with six authors from AMICAL institutions to conduct a study on the ways that students use the library and other learning spaces on campus. Our findings were published in the International Journal of Library Science. The article is published online.
Full citation: Click, Amanda, et al. “Studying Students across Borders: An Ethnographic Study of Research Behavior.” International Journal of Library Science 5, no. 1 (2012): 1-13.
I was an invited panelist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro iDEAL Summit. The panel also included Dr. Peter Johan Lor, Professor at University of Pretoria and former Director of the National Library of South Africa, and Dr. Ismail Abdullahi, Associate Professor at the School of Library and Information Sciences, North Carolina Central University. The theme for this year was Rethinking the Local: Re-imagining Libraries in a Flattening World; read more about the Summit here.