RTEL redux.

In 2009 I started work on a book I published in 2011, Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning: Instructional Literacy for Library Educators. It was a labor of love/hate to create, the book I wish I’d had when I started teaching way more frequently than I ever imagined I would. It utterly consumed my life for two years, but thanks in large part to skillful editing by Chris Rhodes (who passed away far too young) it ended up being something I was proud of. I’ve been extremely gratified by feedback from readers who have found it to be a productive text for learning pedagogy on the fly and praxis on the ground.

I had so much fun breaking myself into tiny pieces the first time around, I’ve decided to revise and expand RTEL into a 2nd edition that will be available in 2019. While much of the foundational content of the 2011 version (e.g., instructional design) is sill relevant/solid, many parts are temporally and experientially outdated.

Specific technologies referenced have reached the point of near-irrelevance, but more pressingly I wrote from a personal narrative perspective that represented my experiences in the jobs I’d held to date at Ohio University and UC Berkeley. The first edition therefore leaves out years of productive experimentation by myself and my colleagues at the Claremont Colleges, perspectives I’ve gained as an ACRL Immersion faculty member and administrator at CSUSM, and a lot of consciousness-raising and pedagogical/theoretical grounding that I simply did not possess due to gaps in my own early knowledge base. This accumulation of experience gives me an opportunity to address and expand essential components that received short shrift the first time around, such as critical/feminist pedagogy, program/project planning, and many more facets of learning assessment and technology.

When you write something, you (hopefully) want it to be of a) use and b) quality – this book is used as a course text in a fair number of IL-focused LIS classes, so I also figure it’s in our collective best interest to not mess around. To revise RTEL in alignment with these principles, I’m asking for libraryland’s brainpower in two ways:

1) If you’ve ever read some or all of RTEL and want to communicate your impressions/critiques/suggestions to help inform the 2nd edition, please do so via this survey (also embedded below). It should take 10 minutes or less:

 

2) Whether you’ve read the book or not, please share your insights into how you were (or weren’t) trained to be a teaching librarian. This one is a bit longer, 15-20 mins max – survey available here and is embedded below:

Participating in these by March 1st would be hugely useful. By way of incentive, if you complete one or both of the surveys send your email address to charbooth at gmail dot com to let me know. For each completed survey you’ll be entered into a drawing for one of 10 preorder copies of the new edition, paper or digital (emailing me directly helps preserve anonymity of responses).

In sum: thanks a million for helping me practice what I preach, and I’m looking forward to integrating your ideas into RTEL redux – your time/energy/wisdom are much appreciated, as always.