Kathleen (Kate) McDowell
University of Illinois
Teaching Philosophy
As an adjunct faculty member here at GSLIS at the University of Illinois, I've had the pleasure of teaching Children's Literature and Young Adult Literature, and this semester I'm teaching Principles and Practices in Youth Services for Public and School Libraries. Incidentally, all of these teaching experiences have been in the online context of the LEEP environment. I have yet to teach a class in a face-to-face environment, but I feel certain that the philosophy of teaching I've developed through these experiences will readily translate to the traditional classroom.
In my teaching experiences, my emerging philosophy has been to act as a "trail guide" through varied scholarly terrain, mapping out the route and leading students through a basic understanding while encouraging them to explore their particular passions in more depth. Foremost in my mind is the fact that I am teaching library practitioners, who need as sense of how to cultivate their own professional judgment. I draw on Schon's book, The Reflective Practitioner, to inform my teaching practices.
There are many professional standards that are necessary for practitioners to understand, but every application of such standards requires thought and attention to a particular library and community context. My goal is not to teach my students what to do in terms of professional formulas, but instead to teach them how to assess contexts and situations so that they can generate informed, appropriate, and even creative decisions about how principles translate to practices in particular circumstances.
In pursuit of this goal, I use a number of techniques, such as teaching through demonstration, teaching through use of activities, and using particular cases to illuminate principles. I demonstrate the power of culturally relevant teaching by incorporating their bulletin board postings into my lectures, so that they can easily see how this content is relevant to their lives. I frequently use small group discussions to offer students both a chance to form professional networks and as an analogy to the real world experience of solving library problems in collaborative environments. I encourage my students to bring cases from their own professional experiences, from programs to policy documents, to help explore the ways professional principles inform and improve library services.
Finally, I bring a profound passion for the field of librarianship. I believe that instructor motivation and enthusiasm are key components in teaching success. I take pleasure in the unexpected subjects and issues that come up in discussion and enjoy the challenge of weaving these specific examples into larger pictures of library goals. As a "trail guide," I also bring a profound respect for and interest in the specific goals and accomplishments of my students. The more relevant my assignments are to their professional lives, the more seriously they take the work, which in turn generates an effective learning environment.
Research Interests
In my four years as a public children's librarian at The Urbana Free Library, I prepared and presented many programs for children, from story hours to storytelling and puppet shows to puppet making. Creating enticing programs for children requires not only a strong knowledge of children's literature, but also a keen understanding of developmental levels, strong storytelling skills, and, perhaps most importantly, an ability to quickly sense the needs of the children and parents in the program and address those needs with access to library resources. Because of this experience, I have a number of questions about children's programs: How valuable are these programs? What impact do these programs have within a community? How can public children's librarians measure the value of children's programs? I would like to center my primary doctoral research around these kinds of questions about the contemporary impact and value of the public library and children's departments in particular.
Currently, I have four major directions I would like to explore: 1) researching the history of public library children's programs, 2) exploring the importance of library programs in relation to theories of learning and literacy, 3) surveying the literature on how to do programming in order to partially determine what kinds of activities and foci are most dominant in children's departments currently, and finally 4) developing techniques and strategies for determining the value of children's programs, using both qualitative and quantitative measures. Eventually, I hope to make these four research directions the foundation of my dissertation.
In addition, I have a number of other research interests in the areas of children's literature, readers and reading, and pedagogy. I have long been fascinated by the myriad relationships between readers and texts, and I hope to contribute to the body of professional literature about librarians' strategies and techniques for fostering connections between children and texts. As a GA and reviewer at The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, I have been fortunate to have an inside look at current trends in children's publishing and marketing, and I'd like to research how these trends and changes may impact children's libraries as well as how children's librarians can continue to promote the publication of high quality children's materials.
Finally, some of the most fascinating recent changes in librarianship as a whole are new developments in technology. As an extension of the above research interests, I would like to explore the rapidly developing relationships between children and information technology and use this research to propose directions for technological development that would better serve the information needs of children, with the eventual goal of developing a course about children and information technology. In addition, I have taught 5 courses as an instructor in the LEEP program at GSLIS over the last 6 years. I look forward to exploring and contributing to the practices and scholarship of online education in the field of library and information science. I come from the relatively unique perspective of having taught only online courses up to this point in my teaching experience. In spring of 2004, I'll have an opportunity to teach an on campus course for the first time. I look forward to exploring the differences in teaching strategies and learning best practices for both environments.