Our Library Teaching Philosophy

  • We teach to GCC’s campus information literacy student learning outcomes.
    • We will update this living document periodically, with input from faculty and other stakeholders, to reflect changes in the information environment, and our teaching will change with it.
  • Our teaching emerges from our relationships with faculty members.
    • We seek to cultivate meaningful, collaborative teaching partnerships with GCC faculty.
    • We adapt our teaching to the needs of an individual assignment, course, program, or department.
  • We have high expectations of students.
    • We view students as both knowledge creators and members of a scholarly community.
    • We validate students’ prior knowledge and lived experiences, and use these as a foundation to co-construct new understandings.
  • We believe that the social and emotional aspects of the research process cannot be ignored.
    • We recognize the diversity of identities, background experiences, and challenges that students bring to the classroom, and strive to make all students feel welcome and included.
    • We purposely link our teaching to things that are relevant in our students’ lives, both inside and outside of GCC.
  • We ground every teaching interaction in information literacy concepts, as these are vital to students’ success in the workforce and in future academic coursework.
    • We teach the culture of scholarship, as well as content.
    • We scaffold outcomes and expectations across developmental, 100-level, and 200-level classes.
    • We aim to make our teaching as participatory as possible, utilizing active learning techniques.
    • We make explicit the issues of power, access, and social justice inherent in information creation and retrieval.
    • We will not only teach tools or “where to click.”
  • Our teaching is medium neutral.
    • We offer the same concepts, access, and quality of instruction for students in online, face-to-face, hybrid, and off-site classes.
    • We use technology only when it supports our pedagogy, not for its own sake.
  • We constantly seek to improve our teaching.
  • We limit our teaching workloads in order to be the best teachers we can be.
    • Each instruction librarian will have no more than 2 preps per week.
    • Each full-time librarian will spend no more than 7.5 hours per week in the classroom (pro-rated for part-time librarians).

Finalized spring 2018