In class on Thursday, we presented our one-shot workshops. I'm still figuring out how I feel about the whole thing. I see definite areas for improvement in my own workshop, and really loved some of the others. One of the issues that some (not all, but including my own) of the workshops had was trying to find relevance for everyone in the room. As we have learned throughout the course of the semester, there are so many different types of librarians. We do wildly different things in the course of our work, hold different job titles, work with different users, and have access to different levels of resources (think of the difference between the spending power of the average school librarian and the librarians in the University of Michigan library). Though we have some core tenets (and as we have discussed, a notable lack of diversity), we are far from monolithic. Which is wonderful in class, because we get so many different viewpoints. It is, however, more difficult when planning a workshop because what is deeply relevant and useful to one person is mostly useless to the person sitting next to them. Which brings up the issue of how we deal with this in the real world of libraries.
We talk a lot about the relevance of libraries, even if we don't always use the word. People (who are mostly not librarians) talk about libraries being dead, i.e. no longer relevant. We talk about how print journals are mostly dead, i.e. no longer relevant. We talk about how books need to be relevant to the user population, or else they don't circulate. We talk about how libraries need to be relevant to their communities.Workshops need to be relevant to users in order for them to be a good use of resources. We have discussed evaluation forms in the context of figuring out what is and is not useful for workshop participants, and counting the number of participants in workshops over time is a good way to find out who is interested in the topic. However, I'm still not clear on how to deal with workshops (particularly in public libraries) that may draw participants with a wide range of expertise and/or reasons for learning about the topic.
For example, a one-shot workshop on the software Photoshop could draw participants with a wide range of prior experience and many different reasons for attending the workshop. You can partially deal with the issue of levels of expertise by labeling the workshop Beginning Photoshop or Intermediate Photoshop and hope that participants will sort themselves out accordingly. But if one participant wants to use Photoshop to create ads for their small business and another wants to use Photoshop for family vacation photos, it may be difficult to make the workshop equally relevant to both participants. This is, in essence, what we were dealing with in a smaller setting with the one-shot workshops in class. I'm not really sure of any good solution to this problem. Knowing your community as well as you can would likely help, as would getting feedback from participants and using it in future planning. But overall, the issue of how to make a single topic relevant to everyone who is interested in it is still one that I'm struggling with.
First off, let me say that I enjoyed working with you on this assignment. I think you are absolutely right in stating that it is hard to create a workshop that is relevant to a diverse audience. In some ways, I think that what made this assignment difficult, at least for me, was that we had a forced captive audience. If it was an open workshop, theoretically the attendees would have a personal interest in attending, and the presenters would worry less about trying to engage a diverse audience like our classmates. Nevertheless, I have been to several workshops at conferences that were pretty boring. And I signed up for those. I don't know, maybe people don't learn this way anymore. This may sound like me saying, "this is too hard for me, so obviously the process is flawed," but the expectation to effectively teach in this manner may be exaggerated. Or, maybe I need lots more practice.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it's difficult to plan any kind of teaching session when the "class" is so diverse in their interests. This can sort itself out in the real world - if people aren't interested in the workshop's material (hopefully you have a good description posted somewhere) they won't come. Ideally.
ReplyDeleteThere's also a tension, I think, between what people often want to learn and what we as librarians often want to teach them. But that's not a new issue, by any means.