I am excited to be embarking on my next adventure in LIS education – this fall I will be joining the iSchool at the University of Maryland, College Park!
At the iSchool, I will be taking action to advance my values through my teaching and scholarship – to support diversity, inclusion and equity and to fight racism and oppression within the information professions and our educational system. I will continue learning about and addressing these issues in my own teaching, to help all of us – teachers and learners – develop the knowledge and skills needed to navigate, resist and dismantle systems of racism, sexism and other forms of oppression as they manifest in the information fields. I’m particularly excited to start applying what I learned this summer at the National SEED Project’s educational equity and diversity seminar.
I am also helping to launch the iSchool’s undergraduate major in information science by teaching our inaugural course in object oriented programming, and supervising the year-long capstone project for students completing the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Masters program. And I’ll be continuing my work with UMD’s Teaching and Learning Transformation Center on a multi-disciplinary project with colleagues from across the university to help students develop critical thinking skills. We are exploring how critical thinking intersects with with our own disciplinary-specific modes of thinking, (like computational thinking in computer and information science or information literacy in LIS) and how this can improve our own teaching.
As I move forward, two questions continue to guide my work:
- How does my teaching and scholarship advance individuals and society?
- How can I most effectively help students learn and grow?
These questions help me stay focused on the things that really matter to me: making a difference for my students and my colleagues, and contributing to a more equitable and – dare I say it? – joyful world. I know that I cannot do this work alone, and that I am in good company. Wish me luck!
–Bill