Legal Research Pedagogy

Well, friends, it's been quite a while since I've written in this venue.  Full disclosure: the fall semester was a tough one--my library was down two teaching librarians and the load was heavy as responsibilities in this and other areas increased.  While I still enjoyed being in the classroom with my students, I didn't have as much time as I'd like to think deeply about cognitive science and educational theory, and I often started feeling badly about myself for not making more time for it, for not pushing forward in my understanding of how we can best help students learn. The truth is that a career is a marathon, not a sprint . This is something that I spout off to others quite frequently, but is something I too often fail to keep in mind for myself.  I often feel like a hypocrite as I speak to my students frequently about the importance of self-care, when I so infrequently practice self-care myself.  Teaching, done well, uses up a huge amount of emotional and cogn...

In academia, we often hear faculty discuss the need to find time to write.  I've recently been reading Helen Sword's Air & Light & Time & Space , in which she discusses the need for those very things in writing.  In the first chapter, she notes, "[A]cademics talk constantly about making time, finding time, carving out time to write. We fantasize about having more of it, and we bemoan our chronic lack of it."[1] I find the same is true for developing and assessing curricular programming. As librarians, true public servants, our profession is rooted in our service to others. Even if we are not scheduled for the reference desk or to attend a meeting, our "availability" is our calling card and in some cases our badge of honor.  It's expected that we will stop what we're doing should a patron come to our door or call on the phone. The problem is that without free time to think, to think uninterrupted, we cannot innovate .  We keep with the...