When I was preparing to submit for Fellowship (FHEA), I struggled to find enough examples of written applications which weren’t from an academic lens, particularly in a librarian context where our relationship to certain aspects of the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF)—such as assessment—is somewhat different.
I’ve made my written application and my feedback available here so that other librarians have an open example of what a successful written application looks like. This is just one example of an application, so please take this alongside other examples you find, or are provided with from your mentor or institution.
This application was prepared over the course of 2019-2021. Part of this was initially submitted through portfolio for Associate Fellowship (AFHEA) in 2020, and then was expanded for written application for Fellowship, and assessed in mid-2021. This application was prepared against the 2019 UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF)—you will find this cross-referenced through markers for the Dimensions of Practice in square brackets (A1-A5, K1-K6, V1-V4). The written application was submitted alongside two references, which I haven’t included here.
You should use this section to describe how through your career you have developed your teaching practice and in the case of Senior Fellowship, influenced other’s practice. You may identify specific career milestones, influential professional development activities, engagement with significant others, etc. You should complete this section against the relevant descriptor statements (D1-D3) in the UKPSF, making sure that you provide evidence against appropriate Dimensions of the Framework. Those making a claim for Senior Fellowship should pay particular attention to descriptor statement 3.7.
Word count requirements
Associate Fellow (D1) – 400 words
Fellow (D2) – 1000 words
Senior Fellow (D3) – 2000 words
Education
Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies – IAAP, candidate 2021.
MSc Information and Library Studies, Robert Gordon University, 2019.
MMus Music, The University of Huddersfield, 2015.
BMus (Hons) Music, The University of Huddersfield, 2013.
Membership
Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) – 2020
International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) – 2020
Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) – 2020
I am the Academic Liaison Librarian for the subjects of: Languages, Linguistics and TESOL; Fine Art, Photography and Illustration; Design; Music; Music Production; Media Production; Drama, Theatre and Dance; Computer Sciences; Data Science; Mathematics.
I teach across all programmes in an area best summarised as information literacy – most recently updated to be defined as “The ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use. It empowers us as citizens to reach and express informed views and to engage fully with society” (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, 2018). Having previously taught in Early Years, Primary, Secondary and Further Education, as well as community theatre education and private music tuition, I have now been teaching in Higher Education at York St John since 2017.
Since September 2020, I have been a copy editor for the Journal of Information Literacy, a leading international, peer-reviewed open access journal for the theory and practice of information literacy. In this role I am improving the accessibility of information literacy research to improve and enrich the teaching of librarians internationally [V3, V4], and access to this pedagogy and information behaviour scholarship has further enriched my understanding of teaching in this area.
As a teacher librarian, my aim is to motivate and empower students with purposeful, appropriate and ethical information behaviours for whichever contexts they may find themselves in. To achieve this, I practice, reflect upon and refine my approaches to pedagogy in ways which place students at the centre with a keen understanding of how they arrive at my classroom in terms of their knowledge, skills and desires.
I centre my pedagogy around a basis in constuctivism, particularly social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978), with a humanist lens. This is built upon and shaped by two particular theories in the field of information literacy which are used by teaching librarians to specifically inform librarian pedagogy. The first is the theory of information landscapes (Lloyd, 2010) which aims to theorise and understand the ways in which people move contextually in, amongst and between socially constructed information in their lives, which itself relies heavily on social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978). The second is critical information literacy (Elmborg, 2006; Tewell, 2015; Tewell, 2018) – which itself is drawn heavily from critical pedagogy and the writings of Freire (1985) – to theorise the discernment and interrogation of power structures in information and its use [A5, K3, V1, V2, V3].
Both critical information literacy and information landscapes centre the importance of lived experiences and that our experiences of information are contextually influenced by our existing knowledges and practices, and in this light, lend themselves well to the constructivist approaches to teaching I employ [V1, V3]. This idea of connected experiences and journeys in knowledge creation/discovery as part of information work is also part of my philosophy to move away from traditional forms of ‘library instruction’ in one-shot paradigms, to the scaffolded building of knowledges. As my relationships with academics and programmes have deepened, so has my ability to teach within these paradigms.
In one-to-one tutorial settings, I aim to approach my teaching and support around the student’s own personal epistemology (Billett, 2009) – as evolving out of constructivism – again being shaped through its relationship with information literacy (Swanson, 2006) V1, V3].
In order to facilitate the kind of pedagogy outlined in this philosophy, my classroom (and by extension, my librarianship) is:
I am also engaged in research and the sharing of this research. I have researched and presented on copyright education (Peach, 2018) and, most recently, conducted postgraduate research into art pedagogy and its implications for librarians’ information literacy pedagogy (Peach, 2019) [A5]. The latter has featured as part of wider doctoral research into information literacy at York St John University (Dean, 2019) [A5] which has resituated my own understandings of my teaching as part of the wider teaching community, helping me to navigate how to talk about information literacy with academics in more nuanced ways [V3].
I am applying to start a PhD programme to research disabled students’ experiences of information and research during their University study, using democratic participatory methods to co-create research and outcomes. My current research is investigating UK HE teaching librarians’ contextual and nuanced knowledges of screen-readers and screen-reader accessibility to understand the extent to which the pedagogies of information literacy are sufficiently developed with a disability lens. My intention is to create training resources for teaching librarians to improve the accessibility of their teaching when it comes to visually impaired students. My research and practice in accessibility has particularly developed my approaches to social constructivism so that a disability lens helps me to see where inaccessibility is a barrier to constructing knowledge, how this introduces inequity into my classroom, and asks me to rethink my teaching to reduce such inequities [A4, A5, K2, K3, V1, V2].
More strategically, I sit on School Quality Panels for some of my subject areas, where my advice and experience is drawn upon as part of those quality processes. Specifically, I have increasingly been called upon to comment on accessibility, and on information equity, as it pertains to the teaching and learning in those Schools. As a result, I have become more engaged with the practices within those schools, and my position as a teaching colleague is more respected [K1, K5, V2].
References
Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (2018) Definition of information literacy. Available at: https://infolit.org.uk/definitions-models/ (Accessed: 2 October 20190.
Billett, S. (2009) ‘Personal epistemologies, work and learning’, Educational Research Review, 4(3), pp. 210–219.
Dean, C.J. (2019) Identifying and facilitating a community of practice in information literacy in higher education. DInfSc thesis. Robert Gordon University.
Elmborg, J. (2006) ‘Critical Information Literacy: Implications for Instructional Practice’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(2), pp. 192–199.
Freire, P. (1985) Pedagogy of the oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lloyd, A. (2010) Information literacy landscapes: information literacy in education, workplace and everyday contexts. Chandos information professional series. Oxford: Chandos.
Peach, T. (2018) ‘“If you could, how would you?” – educating your staff and students about copyright’. Copyright Information & Technologies in Education (CITE) Forum for Higher Education (HE). University of Sheffield. Available at: https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/3258/. (Accessed: 19 December 2019).
Peach, T. (2019) A contextual exploration of attitudes and approaches to art pedagogy, information literacy and employability at a Higher Education Institution: identifying opportunities for a librarian through an interview with faculty. MSc thesis. Robert Gordon University.
Swanson, T. (2006) ‘Information Literacy, Personal Epistemology, and Knowledge Construction: Potential and Possibilities’, College & Undergraduate Libraries, 13(3), pp. 93–112.
Tewell, E. (2015) ‘A Decade of Critical Information Literacy: A Review of the Literature’, Comminfolit, 9(1), pp. 24-43.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
In this section, you should provide examples of work, in the form of case studies, to evidence your effectiveness in relation to your role. You should complete this section against the relevant descriptor statements (D1-D3) in the UKPSF, making sure that you provide evidence against the relevant Dimensions of the Framework.
Word count requirements
For Associate Fellow, please write two 500 word case studies
For Fellow, please write four 500 word case studies For Senior Fellow, please write two 2000 word case studies
Referencing, as both a skill and representative of a wider set of ethical information behaviours, is one of my primary areas of teaching and my approach has evolved significantly over the past 2 years to its current iteration. This evolution has occurred as my confidence has increased and the demand for my time in the number of workshops delivered increases, leading to the need for developing workshops which form a universal base that can be adapted easily and quickly to suit the subject area, the subject’s ways of learning, the level of study, and the physical learning environment [A1, A2, A4, K2, K4, V4], in an effort to make efficient use of my time and begin to ‘teach smarter’ (Race and Pickford, 2007, p.1).
I developed an option bank over the course of term one in 2019 by investigating different ways of teaching, consolidated into the main methods I designed, so I had choice. Particularly important was the variety in teaching rooms which I was scheduled in, which meant that developing different variations of activities using both technological and non-technological solutions [A1, A2, K2, K4]. Using different technologies, particularly Padlet and collaborative Word documents has allowed me to achieve collaborative participation in PCs rooms and lecture halls – good practice identified by Brodie (2013) – spaces which would normally find particularly challenging for this kind of knowledge. A particular focus that term was to move away from lecture or seminar formats which require me to stand and tell students about the mechanics of referencing for the duration, which has been the request from academics in previous years. Referencing as a skill is one which often requires problem solving, and as such, I moved towards a Problem-Based Learning model (Brodie, 2013) [A2, A4, K2]. In this way, students were given key materials (the referencing guides and some resources) and asked to problem-solve how they would reference these resources. This was always delivered as a group learning activity to support the social construction of knowledge, particularly for 1st year students still forming cohort bonds [K2, K3, V1]. This activity more accurately reflects the natural way in which they will need to approach referencing in future – a process of decision making using the information to hand as well as your past experiences and knowledge [K2, K3, V1]. It also allowed the students to explore the reasons why they made certain decisions in their choices when questioned by myself. Students were more actively engaged with these tools and ways of collaboratively learning as referencing became a co-construction of knowledge, and gave them practical examples of referencing which I found them referring back to in tutorials.
As this was developed over this term, I am now in a position to more clearly articulate and explore teaching options with academic staff I work with, as well as provide examples of how these sessions function based on the 32 times I have now taught variations on this workshop (conversations which have started to happen more clearly). Not only does this create much more flexbility in the kinds of teaching I do (and the confidence with which I teach), but also will help to continue building relationships with academics so that I am working towards being a more valued partner in the students’ learning [A2, A4, A5].
Brodie, L. (2013) Problem-based learning. In: Chalmers, D. and Hunt, L. eds. University teaching in focus: a learning-centred approach. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 145–163.
Race, P. and Pickford, R. (2007) Making teaching work: ‘teaching smarter’ in post-compulsory education. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
As much of my teaching is confined to single sessions, I have been developing ways to engage in self-assessment to inform the teaching within the session, as well as how I can engage the class collaboratively in assessing their work and giving feedback [A3, A4, K2].
The point at which I see the students in their learning journey is before any summative or formative assessment, and usually the academics have no initial assessment of their referencing skills or knowledge. In previous years, I have not engaged in any form of assessment or self-assessment for this workshop, however in developing a new workshop (as outlined in Case Study 1), the Problem-Based Learning aspect (Brodie 2013) allowed me to plan the workshops with differentiated activities/resources to account for variations in prior experiences [V3].
Rather than conduct a more formal assessment, I devised a self-assessment which asked the students to rate themselves on a knowledge-confidence spectrum at the start of the class and then again at the end. This allowed me to not only quickly and informally assess the class to determine the levels of differentiation needed in the planned activities, but also allowed me to track the distance travelled in terms of the students’ knowledge construction (coupled with my own personal assessment whilst supporting each group during the activity) [A3].
The spectrum chosen initially was a spectrum from ‘I don’t know anything’ to ‘I know everything’, which whilst seemingly effective, I realised was placing my self-assessment activities in a deficit model of learning – that the students are lacking and need me as an educator to complete them – whilst prioritizing knowledge over the practical application of that knowledge [A2, A3, K3]. During this term, I switched to a spectrum which asks student to rate their confidence in their referencing skills and knowledge, to purposefully centre the student and their emotions without prioritising knowledge over skills or centring a deficit model of knowledge [A2, A3, K3].
The purpose of the self-assessment was also to encourage students to identify what they needed to do next to develop their learning or their confidence, such as to consolidate the class learning through practice, or to seek further support from me [V1].
The collaborative reference lists produced as a result of the problem-based learning in Case Study 1 also provided a great opportunity to explore ways to get the students to peer-review and assess the list against the criteria set out in the referencing guidance used [A3, K2]. Once the list was completed, I would ask the class to review the list against the referencing criteria and point out to me and the class what could be improved. In previous years where I would have suggested improvements myself, changing this dynamic has allowed me to informally assess the extent to which they will be able to apply the same criteria to their work as their lecturers will, and to be able to improve their work as a result. Participation in this aspect of the activity was moderate, so for next year I need to explore classroom power and the ways in which I can encourage students to voice their critiques of class work.
Brodie, L. (2013) ‘Problem-based learning’. In: Chalmers, D. and Hunt, L. eds. University teaching in focus: a learning-centred approach. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 145–163.
Hattie, J. and Timperley, H. (2007) ‘The Power of Feedback’, Review of Educational Research, 77(1), pp. 81–112.
Lochtie, D., Stork, A., McIntosh, E. and Walker, B. (2018) Effective personal tutoring in higher education. St Albans: Critical Publishing.
Price, M. (2012) Assessment literacy: the foundation for improving student learning. Oxford, ASKe: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development.
Wisker, G. ed. (2008) Working one-to-one with students: supervising, coaching, mentoring, and personal tutoring. Key guides for effective teaching in higher education series. New York: Routledge.
This case study draws upon Case Study 1 and 2 within the context of becoming a remote worker during the COVID-19 pandemic, to explore my approach to transforming the pedagogies outlined there into a remote, online environment.
Moving to teaching remotely in 2020, I worked with my team to emulate a team-based community of practice (Wenger, 2008; McCluskey-Dean, 2019) – as a new area, team based idea generation and sharing became particularly important for creating space to co-evaluate our teaching practice and its effectiveness as a team [K5], comparing outcomes and critiquing each others’ teaching decisions [K6], particularly where these have disciplinary implications or explanations [K3]. Within this dynamic, I explored questions around engagement, particularly with others who had reused my referencing teaching methods I explored in Case Study 1, and decided that recapturing the co-created community with appropriate learning technologies was a key priority.
Due to practical considerations about home WiFi and students feeding back that they struggled with live attendance living at home, I decided upon to asynchronous delivery but in a way that retained the group collaborative learning aspect, specifically for referencing learning. I reused the self-assessment tools developed in Case Study 2, and new communication channels added via the Questions function in Mentimeter, and by adding questions drop-boxes to Moodle, so that feedback points for students were included to submit learning questions for further development. I used the structure and technology of Case Study 1 (such as collaborative Word Documents) but reimagined for online learning, which consisted of guided talking head videos and a presentation, which gives space for more self-paced and self-referential learning than in-person teaching (Forsey et al., 2013; Hsin and Cigas, 2013; Li, 2020) [K1, K3, V3]. This approach also improves accessibility for a variety of students including those with processing and cognitive disabilities, and many disabled students have reflected with me that they have appreciated the availability of these to breakdown and repeat their knowledge learning [V1, V2].
The collaborative learning maintained here was particularly effective where this mirrors assessed group working. In my work with first year English Language students, students were grouped by their weekly working groups and received engagement marks for their participation and engagement with the learning tasks, receiving marks for submitting 2 finished references to the group document. Utilising Teams Breakout rooms, I monitored the progression of all 27 groups over the course of a week, supplementing feedback on questions and ideas as they problemed solved referencing together. Though engagement was good, assessment of the Collaborative Word documents became more generalised (to avoid giving individual feedback in a mass group setting which may not be appropriate) which is not ideal, but gives space for students to assess their own submissions against the generalised feedback. In future, I will develop this further for students to self-assess to further the knowledge construction. This would re-introduce the kind of knowledge construction I did on-site with peer-review exercises. Students fedback enjoyed the breakout rooms and joint experience in Word in this module, but some experienced their submissions being accidently deleted which introduced assessment anxiety to the process, and I decided that in future, engagement marks would need more consideration when using open tools [K4, K5, K6].
Dean, C. J. (2019) Identifying and facilitating a community of practice in information literacy in higher education. DInfSc thesis. Robert Gordon University.
Forsey, M., Low, M. and Glance, D. (2013) ‘Flipping the sociology classroom: Towards a practice of online pedagogy’, Journal of Sociology, 49(4), pp. 471–485. doi: 10.1177/1440783313504059.
Hsin, W.-J. and Cigas, J. (2013) ‘Short videos improve student learning in online education’, Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 28(5), pp. 253–259.
Wenger, E. (2008) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Disabled students routinely experience difficulties with university structures, bureaucracy and systems which are not designed around them – this includes pedagogy and support mechanisms (Blunkett, Mitchell and Norton, 2020) [V1, V2, V4]. The YSJ Access and Participation plan (York St John University, 2019) outlines an above sector average proportion of disabled students (17.9% in 2017-18) with above average continuation rates but lagging attainment – the disabled / non-disabled gap has increased over the last reporting period. Ableism is also highly prevalent in academia itself (Brown and Leigh, 2020), with Gillberg (2020) specifically critiquing how ableism creates and maintains knowledge production and disciplines itself (Liersh, 2019) – critical librarianship asks me to extend this to the work of librarians in HE, and bring disability out of being silent and sidelined (Williams and Hagood, 2019).
Through a disability lens, and my experiences of working with disabled students, I consider referencing stylistics as an ableist practice for particular disabilities (dyslexia, blindness etc), and by extension I see how library referencing support (whilst adhering to the Accessibility regulations and WCAG standards) is not actually pedagogically accessible [A2]. For instance, if screen-readers do not read out punctuation, then it is failing its core purpose [A4, K2, K4]. This does not, however, change the fact of referencing styles as exclusionary and these access methods are not full disability justice (Kumbier, A. and Starkey, 2016) [V4].
Working with a disabled staff member who uses a screenreader, I have been re-developing referencing guidance through aspects of Universal Design, but critically applied so it re-centers disabled people in its focus without deficit thinking (Baglieri, 2020; Connor, 2020; Douglas and Santinele Martino, 2020). By understanding how screenreader users experience education through technology (Goodley, D. et al., 2020), I have redesigned guidance so that auditory ways of knowing and learning referencing become possible – something which, from my research, is a new approach in academic libraries [A4, A5, K2, V1, V2, V3, V4]. The new guidance has been used with focus groups of disabled students and the feedback has been incredibly positive, including feedback such as “this would have helped my understanding of referencing so much” and “I would have been much more independent with this” – the latter is incredibly important for students’ self-determination and independence without asking for accommodations (Bruce, 2020) [V1, V2, K5, K6]. Given this initial feedback, I hope to release this guidance to the wider university this year, to seek feedback from more disabled students, and also present with disabled staff and students at a conference later this year to share these developments with the sector [V4].
By developing these guides, it has fostered more conversation within our librarian team about what accessible referencing teaching means, particularly in how we describe referencing in our classes so that it relies less on wholly visual information. As a result of these conversations, I have begun drafting guidance for our team on what inclusive pedagogy in referencing classes could look like, so that this work impacts on students beyond just my areas of support [A4, K3].
Brown, N. and Leigh, J. (2020) Ableism in academia theorising experiences of disabilities and chronic illnesses in higher education. London: UCL Press.
Gillberg, C. (2020) ‘The significance of crashing past gatekeepers of knowledge: Towards full participation of disabled scholars in ableist academic structures’, in Brown, N. and Leigh, J. (eds) Ableism in academia theorising experiences of disabilities and chronic illnesses in higher education. London: UCL Press, pp. 11–30.
Kumbier, A. and Starkey, J. (2016) ‘Access Is Not Problem Solving: Disability Justice and Libraries’, Library Trends, 64(3), pp. 468–491. doi: 10.1353/lib.2016.0004.
Liersch, U. (2019) ‘Dyslexia: Shackles far beyond the written word’, in McIntosh, M., Nicholas, H., and Huq, H. A. (eds) Leadership and Diversity in Psychology: Moving beyond the limits. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 105–117. doi: 10.4324/9780429432606.
Williams, T. and Hagood, A. (2019) ‘Disability, the Silent D in Diversity’, Library Trends, 67(3), pp. 487–496. doi: 10.1353/lib.2019.0008.
Overall Assessor’s Decision: Accept.
Tom, your written claim for Fellowship (D2) was very enjoyable and engaging to read. Your contextual statement gave a good sense of your learning and teaching philosophy, highlighting your commitment to inclusive, student-centered learning. You articulately framed your claim for Fellowship at D2 in relation to your professional role, straddling the boundary between professional support and academic engagement. You are clearly a very reflective practitioner who puts the student experience at the heart of your work and you commitment to all of the professional values came through in abundance. You made appropriate reference to both the dimensions of the framework and the scholarship of learning and teaching – an impressive aspect of your work that continued throughout the claim. Further, your contributions towards scholarship through your own research outputs and your editorial contributions demonstrate how you routinely incorporate the outputs from research into your practice (D2.5). Finally, we liked how your ideas were extended with lived-experience examples and developed into practical tools and teaching practice.
In the case studies that followed the contextual statement, it was made clear how you engage in all of the areas of activity. Your explanation of planning, creation of learning environments for learning and delivery of sessions all aligned nicely with your philosophical position.
For future development, consider sharing your findings not just within academic librarianship but everyone who is engaged with developing academic thinking. It would be nice to showcase some of the teaching sessions and key ideas within them to help new or novice lecturers build interactivity and inclusivity into their sessions. Overall, we were confident that you meet the benchmark standard for Descriptor 2 and wish you much success in your future teaching career.
Descriptors, outcome (Accept / Borderline / Refer), and any special comments:
2.I Successful engagement across all five Areas of Activity—Accept
2.II Appropriate knowledge and understanding across all aspects of Core Knowledge—Accept
2.III A commitment to all the Professional Values—Accept
This was a particularly impressive aspect of your claim which you demonstrated in relation to both scholarship and practice.
2.VI Successful engagement in appropriate teaching practices related to the Areas of Activity—Accept
2.V Successful incorporation of subject and pedagogic research and/or scholarship within the above activities, as part of an integrated approach to academic practice—Accept
2.VI Successful engagement in continuing professional development in relation to teaching, learning assessment, scholarship and, as appropriate, related academic or professional practices—Accept