I felt a bit nervous about this first workshop. I thought that as a librarian I may not (and most probably do not) have as many teaching hours as other students on the course. It is because teaching is only a part (however I think that it has become much more pronounced in recent years) of my job. At the same time, I run several events, workshops, online and in person information skills sessions and library induction every year. I also support students with their research daily, whenever they come to the library and ask questions or in one to one tutorials. Thinking about this has helped me to stay positive and deliver my presentation with relative ease. I kept it quite short concentrating on my main interests within librarianship and teaching.
I left the session very inspired by the other participants’ presentations that were followed by questions and discussions. I found sharing our experiences of teaching and our professional identities thought provoking. It has been great to meet everyone and hear about our roles within UAL and where our focus for this course lies. I found that despite coming from different occupations, we have a lot of shared interests. It is amazing how much we could learn from each other during this first (and short) workshop. I cannot wait for our in-person sessions.
Key words and themes that stuck with me: object-based learning, learning through play, not knowing in creativity, empathy, pedagogy, trust, online vs face to face, overwhelming, practice as research.
This coming week I plan to come back to some basic theory of pedagogy and watch a video that fellow student had shared in the workshop.