A timeline of my dissertation inspiration📓📝

For AcWriMoments Day 8, Margy Thomas and Helen Sword encouraged us to trace a lineage of the ideas we work on. I decided to do this with my dissertation because I knew it would be fun, but I didn’t realize how fun.

1984 Kimberly’s mom makes a gorgeous Blue Fairy (from Pinocchio) costume for Kimberly, launching a lifelong delight in dressing up in exquisite costumes (as opposed to whatever’s lying around) and admiring the exquisite costumes of others. Around the same time, Kimberly’s parents take her to the library often.

1988 Kimberly’s dad starts library school. Kimberly hangs out at the library school, a lot. She loves it there.

1994 A guidance counselor who is completely at a loss for what extracurriculars to recommend when she asks Kimberly what she’s into and Kimberly answers, “Reading,” suggests volunteering at the library, so Kimberly does.

1999 W. (then-boyfriend, now-husband) introduces Kimberly to Final Fantasy, a lovely video game series with gorgeous music. O., the then-boyfriend now-husband of one of W.’s housemates, says to Kimberly while they’re in the middle of playing some board game, “You should be a librarian.”

2007 Completely stressed out by being an early career high school teacher, Kimberly starts researching library schools.

2008 W. comes home from work and tells Kimberly that his current boss has inspired him to go to library school so they’re going to library school together.

2009 Kimberly and W. start library school. Kimberly’s advisor is Sandra. Kimberly loves Sandra. Kimberly gets a job as an RA in an outreach program of the School of Education, providing resources and professional development to K-12 educators. (Resources from this department saved her bacon many times when she was a teacher.)

2011 Kimberly gets a job as a school librarian split between two middle schools.

2012 Kimberly’s supervisor from her RA job tells Kimberly, “I’m taking a different job so they’ll be posting this one eventually if you want it.” Kimberly does. The school librarian situation she’s found herself in isn’t what she dreamed of. Eventually Kimberly gets that job and starts working for that outreach program full-time.

2013 Kimberly starts working on projects where she gets to interview teachers about their work. Her office is down the hall from where the School of Ed hosts all of their brown bags and she goes to a lot of them. She decides she wants to pursue a PhD so she can understand what they’re talking about better and maybe publish research about educators’, including school librarians’, good work. She figures she’ll do it part time with the tuition remission she gets as a benefit of her job.

2014 The executive director of the outreach program is fired. (Without cause as far as Kimberly knows.) Kimberly decides that instead of doing the PhD part-time, she’d like to do it full-time, since her program is probably going to be dismantled. She talks to Sandra about the PhD program where she got her master’s in library science and says she wants to work on the library as a place for writing and pop culture engagement. Sandra says there’s a model for this and it’s called Connected Learning. Kimberly applies to the PhD.

2015 Sandra invites Crystle Martin, a scholar of connected learning and leader in the Young Adult Library Services Association, to talk to students at the library school and invites Kimberly to come to the talk and then join them for lunch. Kimberly and Crystle talk about spending way too much time playing video games.

2016 - 2017 Kimberly messes around with different dissertation possibilities. She includes a chapter on gaming and libraries in her comps plan.

2017 Kimberly decides to go to Cosplay America, a costuming convention.

2018 Kimberly starts work on the gaming comps chapter. She attends a Final Fantasy orchestral concert. People have dressed up in gorgeous costumes as characters from the games. They’re so great it kind of makes her want to cry. The next day, she reads Crystle’s dissertation about the information literacy practices of World of Warcraft players. In the conclusion, Crystle suggests that people could replicate her methods to help validate her information literacy model. Kimberly thinks, “I could do that, but with cosplayers!” She bangs out a dissertation prospectus in 2 hours after literal years of hemming and hawing.

2019 Kimberly writes her comps, now with a changed set of chapters. She assembles her committee, including Crystle. She writes a blog post about the process and uses a Final Fantasy screenshot in it. She writes and defends her comps. She writes her proposal in November for AcWriMo. She attends a local con and introduces herself to the cosplay guests, telling them she may contact them to participate in her dissertation.

2020 Kimberly defends her proposal. In freaking February. She has this whole plan that involves going to conventions to talk to cosplayers. AHAHAHAHA. There are no conventions. But she interviews the cosplayers over Zoom.

2020-2021 Kimberly conducts research, scales her design way back, conducts more research, writes, defends, and graduates. She applies for a postdoc at the Connected Learning Lab, where Crystle worked when they first met. She gets the job.

2022-present Kimberly hasn’t touched the cosplay work in a long time but has worked on connected learning in libraries for the whole postdoc.

📝 Revising is hard work, and other thoughts on writing

I’m participating this year in AcWriMo, which is a month of focused academic writing work inspired by NaNoWriMo.

I’m doing this work with support from coach Katy Peplin at Thrive PhD and the AcWriMoments series stewarded by Margy Thomas and Helen Sword.

My current project is something I’m calling The Report: a culminating document sharing what we’ve learned over the course of the grant I’ve been working on with the Connected Learning Lab for the past couple of years.

My first draft was just a very straightforward recitation of the challenges library staff face when they try to implement connected learning and the strategies library staff experienced with connected learning have used to address those challenges.

After I shared that draft with my colleagues, we determined that the challenges and strategies should be integrated.

In trying to write the next draft, I found that all the pieces of the earlier draft were connected in ways that made it hard for me to parse out a linear way to write about them.

So I made a concept map and shared that with my colleagues, asking for their help in creating a structure for the next draft. One of my colleagues reorganized the concepts, creating a clear structure that I thought would work well for the next draft.

So I started the next draft. But as I was writing that, I found that the structure we’d determined for one section didn’t really make sense for that section. So I met with the colleague who has the strongest understanding of the work to talk through the idea of changing the structure of that one section.

After talking with her, I was able to get back to writing.

But all of this revision has been the opposite of flow. Every word felt like I was having to pull up a tree by the roots.

I tend to be a two-draft writer, one draft to get ideas out and then one to make it make sense. I love the feeling of breezily generating new text, something that usually happens after I’ve dug deep into a topic and created a solid and super-detailed outline.

I don’t like revising but if I want my work published anywhere besides my blog, I need to get okay with it.

This whole process has reminded me of the last time I had to revise like this. I banged out a draft of the discussion chapter of my dissertation over the course of one week in a dissertation bootcamp so intense that I couldn’t do much writing for the next two weeks because my brain was fried.

I sent that chapter off to my advisor and one other member of my committee and they came back with a gently worded statement that basically came to, there’s really not much here.

They weren’t wrong, and I wonder if I’d written on my own timeline if that chapter draft would have been better.

But I got through the hard work of revising and ended with a discussion chapter that makes me really proud.

I suppose the best way to get okay with something is to do it a lot, so… I should probably do a lot more revising.

📚 Reading Notes—Collection Management for Youth: Equity, Inclusion, and Learning)—Chapter 1: Why a focus on equity?

Collection Management for Youth: Equity, Inclusion, and Learning

Here’s the publisher’s summary of this book:

With a renewed emphasis on facilitating learning, supporting multiple literacies, and advancing equity and inclusion, the thoroughly updated and revised second edition of this trusted text provides models and tools that will enable library staff who serve youth to create and maintain collections that provide equitable access to all youth. And as Hughes-Hassell demonstrates, the only way to do this is for collection managers to be learner-centered, confidently acting as information guides, change agents, and leaders.

I’m reading an ebook so quotes won’t have page numbers.

⭐ systemic inequalities ⭐

“Advancing equity must be our goal.”

⭐ “Equity means that everyone gets what they need to thrive no matter their identity or zip code. When we focus on equity, our ultimate goal becomes justice.” ⭐ GREAT DEFINITION OF EQUITY

demographic data = useful for trends, not getting to know individual youth & communities

opportunity gap: marginalized youth disproportionately experience it

EVEN IN HIGH-RESOURCE ENVIRONMENTS:

  • special ed
  • discipline
  • school climate

“Libraries are not immune to perpetuating inequities.”

disconnection & exclusion

outsider in the library

behavior control → denied access

LIBRARY MAY BE ONLY SOURCE OF INTERNET ACCESS

< ½ LGBT YOUTH CAN FIND INFO @ SCHOOL

in/accessibility

chilling effect of book challenges

LIBRARY STAFF MUST FACE SYSTEMIC INEQUITIES

GORSKI equity literacy framework

“BE A THREAT TO THE EXISTENCE OF INEQUITY”

  1. RECOGNIZE
  2. RESPOND → immediate term
  3. REDRESS → long-term
  4. CREATE & SUSTAIN bias-free & equitable environments & cultures

STRUCTURAL IDEOLOGY MODEL

it challenges:

  • deficit view → asset
  • paradigm → abundance

DEVELOP COLLECTION POLICIES THAT DON’T REPRODUCE INEQUITIES

Focus on what you CAN DO

MOVE BEYOND MAKING SPACE → YOUTH MUST BE ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS & LEADERS

Other reading notes for this book: Introduction

Reading Notes—Collection Management for Youth: Equity, Inclusion, and Learning—Introduction

The cover of the book Collection Management for Youth: Equity, Inclusion, and Learning

Collection Management for Youth: Equity, Inclusion, and Learning by Sandra Hughes-Hassell

Here’s the publisher’s summary of this book:

With a renewed emphasis on facilitating learning, supporting multiple literacies, and advancing equity and inclusion, the thoroughly updated and revised second edition of this trusted text provides models and tools that will enable library staff who serve youth to create and maintain collections that provide equitable access to all youth. And as Hughes-Hassell demonstrates, the only way to do this is for collection managers to be learner-centered, confidently acting as information guides, change agents, and leaders.

Roles held by the manager of a learner-centered collection:

  • change agent
  • leader
  • learner
  • resource guide

Goals of the learner-centered collection manager:

  1. Ground collection development decisions and practices in an equity framework.
  2. Adopt a learner-centered model of collection management that guides collection decisions and demonstrates accountability in the learning process.
  3. Redefine the role of collection manager to support the concert of library staff serving as a teacher and information guide who actively centers equity in their collection development practices.
  4. Apply appropriate strategies and tools for working in the learner-centered, equity-based paradigm that demonstrates knowledge of the learner, recognition of equity issues, familiarity with educational theories, awareness of resources, and attentiveness to the uniqueness of the community the library serves.
  5. Form a community of practice that shares responsibility for defining, developing, and evaluating the development and delivery of library resources to facilitate youth learning and advance equity.

The equity framework:

  • learner-centered
  • library staff as teacher
  • library staff as information guide
  • educational theories
  • unique community
  • community of practice

An equitable access environment reflects:

  • learner characteristics
  • best practices in pedagogy
  • changes in resource knowledge base
  • partnerships with the broader learning community
  • commitment to equitable access