This week’s blog post is a piece from Nicole A.
Cooke, originally published in Library
Journal's September 15, 2013, issue and used here with the author’s
permission.
I am fortunate to count Nicole as a colleague and a
friend, and we have many conversations about the possible solutions to the
Whiteness that pervades library education and practice. Together and
individually, we’ve been working on ways we can either create a truly inclusive
and cultural competent field or at minimum subvert the system enough to leave
things better than we found them. (And, in case you missed it, Nicole also had
a thought-provoking
article on the Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship Program in InterActions in 2014.)
Diversifying
the LIS Faculty
By Nicole Cooke on September
25, 2013
LIS faculties need
diversity: more so of
gender, of ability, of thought, and of race and ethnicity. If we as a
profession keep saying that we must recruit more minority students because this
makes us better prepared to serve increasingly diverse patron populations,
shouldn’t we do the same at the faculty ranks?
Considering recent
conversations, including those over editorials “The MLS and the Race Line” and “Diversity Never Happens” by former LJ editor
in chief Michael Kelley, and my efforts to create a for-credit class about
library services to diverse populations, I suggest an additional dimension to
the LIS diversity recruitment agenda: strategic, ongoing, and purposeful
recruitment of diverse candidates to the LIS professoriate.
A
NUMBERS GAME
According to the
latest Association of Library and Information Science Educators (ALISE)
statistics, only 3.83 percent of full-time faculty members are Hispanic,
compared to 16.7 percent of the total population (according to 2011 U.S. Census
Bureau estimates); while African Americans comprise just 5.39 percent of
full-time faculty, compared to 13.1 percent of the population. Another 15.33
percent of LIS full-time faculty are of Asian/Pacific Islander descent,
compared to 5.2 percent of the population; and American Indian/Alaska Natives
comprise 0.84 percent of full-time faculty, compared to 1.2 percent of the
population. Caucasians make up 74.61 percent of full-time faculty, compared
with 63.4 percent of the population.
In an article in Education
Libraries, Paul Jaeger and Renee Franklin propose that increased numbers of
minorities in the LIS professoriate will shape and transform LIS graduate
curricula and programs, which in turn will impact and inform the next
generations of minority librarians, who will then adequately and appropriately
serve the diverse communities that patronize libraries. One hopes the model of
these minority librarians will inspire up-and-coming students to pursue
librarianship as a career.
A
VIRTUOUS CYCLE
Efforts along these
lines already exist, such as the Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship from the American Library
Association (ALA), an outgrowth of ALA’s successful Spectrum
Scholars Scholarship Program funded by the Institute of Museum and Library
Services (IMLS). I was one of 12 inaugural fellows in the program, who began
doctoral study in 2007 and 2008. Fellows were drawn from the four
underrepresented ethnic populations (American Indian/Alaska Native,
Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, or Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific
Islander). Most of the Fellows were librarians, and our interests ranged from
distance education and information behavior to LIS education, technology, and
critical studies to archives, academic librarianship, and medical
librarianship. We fanned out to LIS schools nationwide, and so far three have
graduated and are now tenure track assistant professors teaching in LIS
graduate programs. In fall 2013, a new round of six librarians will begin PhD
curricula.
This program is
special because it aims to increase the ranks of the LIS professoriate with
scholars from underrepresented populations. The focus is on teaching and
research that will put minorities in front of LIS classrooms and facilitate the
creation of research and publications for and about diverse populations.
RECRUITING
FROM WITHIN
Where do we find good
candidates to apply to doctoral study and ultimately join LIS faculties? Kelley
suggested recruiting from the LIS workforce for master’s programs. We should do
the same for doctoral study. Concerted efforts should be made to recruit
practicing librarians who are fired up by research and teaching and are looking
for another dimension of librarianship and perhaps an alternative way to
advance their careers. Where are the instruction and information literacy
librarians, school and youth librarians, and catalogers who bring distinct
expertise to the table? Practitioners’ depth of experience enriches the
classroom experience and can address real-world questions in ways that reflect
an understanding of both theory and practice. Adjuncts should not be the only
graduate school instructors who bring practical experience to the discussion.
This is not to say
that faculty life for diverse candidates does not have challenges. Diversity
issues in LIS schools require care and deliberate attention to retention and
inclusion issues [for example, a new interview series at my school, Reflections on Inclusion].
Our patrons are
diverse and should have access to librarians who themselves represent diverse
populations; similarly, to attract and retain excellent master’s candidates
from diverse backgrounds, there should be faculty members from similar
backgrounds who share their needs and experiences. The better, and more
inclusive, the graduate education experience for diverse candidates, the better
prepared they will be to serve diverse patrons in their libraries.
Thank you!
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely informative and right along with my campaign for the need of diverse librarians (#WNDLibs)! I'm going to add this post to my slideshow as a resource. Finally, thank you for sharing this Plymouth Rock of enlightenment! This mentality resonated within me as I traversed through graduate school to earn my MLS.
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