This morning’s email from my contact: “We are also looking into organising for you a one day workshop where you will teach some selected liberians here in Ho Municipality how to go about the practices here. So please when coming if you will need any materials for the teaching you can bring it along.”
Assuming he means librarians and not Liberians…HOLY COW! On the one hand, that’s fracking awesome! But on the other hand…I didn’t have enough to do in the next 13 days? Now I need to plan a one-day library curriculum, having never taught anything remotely like library organization before in my life, using only what I can carry with me, to a group of people about whom I know nothing, who work in libraries about which I know nothing??
I have no idea if these people are trained librarians - and if so, what that means in Ghana - or if they’re community members who hang out in the library and give out books. I don’t know if they’re community libraries or school libraries or what, and “Ho Municipality” encompasses (as far as I can tell) everything from a decent-sized town to the most rural of villages, so there could be a huge range of libraries as well. I don’t know what organizational system the libraries use, if they have one at all. I don’t know if they have an Excel spreadsheet of books or a physical card catalog or no written record of their collection whatsoever. I don’t know anything about their circulation policies or where their collection comes from or if the library is a separate building or just an addition built on the back of someone’s hut! It’s ludicrous for me to walk in and be all, “Here’s how you should run your library”!
Now…now is the time for panic.
(And as a side note, my school gives educational grants to teachers for the summer. If I’d known this was going to be so career-related, I could have gotten them to pay for a chunk of my trip. But now the grant application deadline is long past. Rats.)
Question: Ok, librarians and teachers and people who’ve been to West Africa and people who are good at flying by the seat of your pants…help! What would you do? First order of business is clearly to email and ask for more info about who I’m teaching and what their libraries are like, and see if I can maybe visit some of them before I have to teach this thing. But beyond that…any suggestions?
10 responses so far ↓
1 Arun // Jun 9, 2006 at 10:39 am
aaaah.
Wow. I have no idea. Tell me more when you know more. But if you don’t find out anything, then assume that they don’t know much. I would start with things like ethics and such, but that’s me. eeep.
2 Jessie // Jun 9, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Ack! Yeah, let us know when you know more.
My thoughts - if they know nothing, I’d start with walking them through some basics of “what a library is for” - what do people want when they come to the library? Then once you get people to brainstorm some of that, you can move on to targeted “how we can make those things happen” like keeping a card catalog of some sort - focusing mainly on the practical - what information do library users really need?
I also agree that talking about ethics is good, too. Do they have to buy books based on some fundraiser’s political agenda? If so, that might be an interesting topic. If not, do people sometimes check out books that they wouldn’t want their neighbors/parents/the gov’t knowing about? That could be good, too.
Can’t wait to hear more!
3 frog // Jun 9, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Ha — it’s kinda like my experience last year on the first day of school… “Hey, how about you teach a poetry class this semester–we’ve got eight kids who will be waiting for you during fourth period.”
Here’s where all kinds of student centered teaching come in handy… Intros, get them to tell you about their libraries, what they currently do and what they’d like to do. Have them brainstorm as a group what their goals are for the day and then facilitate a discussion based on those goals.
You can totally do that. And check with your school to see whether they’d give you money after the deadline has passed.
4 Dima // Jun 9, 2006 at 12:36 pm
If you aren’t able to find out in advance very much about how much they know, you might consider opening the day with a “getting to know each other” kind of session, where you can find out how much they know and what they’re interested in. You would have to have some alternative outlines of what you would do, based on likely responses. Obviously, you could not plan this to the same level of detail you would if you knew in advance exactly who your audience was, but that’s ok — the expectations on their side would probably not be so high either.
And doing it this way would reduce the perception of “here’s a rich foreign consultant coming in a for a brief visit to tell us how to run things while herself having no clue about our conditions,” which is often the initial reaction of locals in the less developed world to people who come in from the US or Europe to give advice.
Good luck!
5 tom // Jun 9, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Very tricky situation. You certainly want to begin by finding out what they already do and know — on the spot, if necessary. You also want to make sure that if the librarians who show up have particular questions or needs, you know about them (either by asking first thing or finding out in advance).
For me, the worst trainings have always been where the person never asked what we already knew and never asked what we wanted to know. Granted, those questions can seem annoying (why are they asking me what I want to know? Aren’t they supposed to know what they’re teaching?), but I think the biggest risk any workshop, anywhere, runs, is that the people leave saying “why’d she tell me what I already knew” followed by “and why didn’t she ever explain X”.
So if I were you and had nothing more to go on, I’d plan to start with some questions about what problems they face and what they want to learn, and, in the absence of immediate responses, perhaps use something like a pair-share to get that info out of people (e.g. talk with the person or two people next to you and come up with a list of 3-5 problems you have in your libraries or 3-5 things you want to learn about how libraries are run in the U.S. or whatever).
6 Lance // Jun 9, 2006 at 12:58 pm
All the same, “Liberians” is such a wonderful typo for “librarians” when the message is coming from Ghana. (Though they’re separated by the Ivory Coast, so it’s unlikely that these really are Liberians who wandered over the border to learn a thing or two.)
7 Mieke // Jun 9, 2006 at 2:26 pm
Does a 2nd hand resource count? My dad is uh, I guess an “information specialist”. He has helped set up a few libraries in India, China and Ethiopia, which may help you get some ideas. And I’m sure he’ll be very happy to help.
Let me know!
– Mieke
8 fairdice // Jun 9, 2006 at 3:02 pm
Wow, quite a shock.
I certainly agree that the first order of business is getting them to tell you about what their existing library situation is. It seems to me that this does three important tasks:
1. It gets you information, which you clearly need. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll have had the time to observe a bit before the workshop, but even if so, you’ll have very little to go on.
2. It tells them how little you know, which first of all is fair to them, and second of all puts them in a better position to help you out as things progress.
3. Here’s where I get all pedagogical. Even if you knew what you wanted to tell them about in advance, this would still be worthwhile, because listening to the way they talk about what they do provides you with invaluable insight into how to talk to them, how to convey your ideas so that they make sense from the point of view of your audience. If you’re going to teach a semester-long class on X, you have the opportunity to build in your students’ heads a “way of thinking about X” — a lot of good teaching is all about this. But you don’t have that luxury; you have to work within the “way of thinking about X” that they have already — so it’s vital to start with a crash course in that way of thinking, with them as teachers.
Good luck. Yow.
9 Dave // Jun 11, 2006 at 6:14 pm
About half a dozen students from Simmons went to Nicaragua last summer for two weeks to teach a series of workshops for local librarians. You could ask Denise Davis or Amy (Mimi) Kolosseus for advice using their Simmons.edu accounts. They are very friendly and I am sure that they would be willing to help. Good luck! It should be great!
10 Erik // Jun 14, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Maybe this’ll be of use? Sometimes I get asked to teach a workshop for a troupe, and what usually works for me is:
Throughout the whole experience, I try to be ready to be impressed by what they do well, and look for as many opportunities to compliment them as I can find.
After the usual introduction stuff, I start the session by asking them what kinds of problems they find themselves running into during their rehearsals and shows. People start talking about what kind of trouble they’re having, a consensus forms on what the biggest problem is, and I work with them on how to fix it. Sometimes that’ll lead in a direction everyone is excited about and we can work on that for the whole workshop. If not, I find the problem that’s shared by the next highest number of people and we work on that. And so on.
Have fun with it. :) I expect it’ll be a great time.
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