Teaching librarians should create lesson plans that highlight the knowledge and stories of marginalized people in order to encourage students to interrogate the notion of "traditional academic research." Instruction sessions should illustrate different types of knowledge from diverse communities when teaching students how to research and whose voices they privilege. By promoting diverse ways of knowing in our lesson plans, we show our students that whiteness is not a default for scholarship. This session will offer several strategies for conducting instruction sessions that focus on the histories and knowledge of marginalized communities as a central learning objective, from the visuals used in presentations to in-class research activities to curating research Spotify playlists in order to decenter whiteness as traditional academic knowledge for any class type.
Participants will:
- Learn ways to diversify library lesson plans for any discipline;
- Learn different techniques for incorporating information, media, and art by and about Black, Indigenous, and people of color into library instruction sessions; and
- Reflect on the types of knowledge they privilege in their own library instruction sessions.