A few months ago, we promised to donate our proceeds from our ALA course to Planned Parenthood and United We Dream, as a small way to give back to our community. At that time, we said we’d post the receipts here, in case that was an incentive for anyone to take the class, so, with no further ado, the receipts!:
Thanks again to all those who took our course; we had a blast, learned a lot, and look forward to offering it again!
Filed under On Being Human
There’s no such thing as a creative type. As if creative people can just show up and make stuff up. As if it were that easy. I think people need to be reminded that creativity is a verb. A very time consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work
-Milton Glaser (via NITCH)
Filed under Education, On Being Human, Posts by Kevin Michael Klipfel, Quotes
We wanted to share something we’re quite excited by, that our book Learner-Centered Pedagogy was reviewed and recommended by Karen Muller in her “Librarian’s Library” column for American Libraries Magazine.
We’re particularly pleased that the review considers the book useful for school librarians in a K-12 educational setting: though we wrote it, in some sense, with academic librarians in mind (since we’re academic librarians), we do think that the book is applicable for all kinds of libraries, and transfers to any context where librarians are connecting with learners or other educators in some way.
Happily, the review agrees:
Learner-Centered Pedagogy: Principles and Practice, by Kevin Michael Klipfel and Dani Brecher Cook, is intended for academic librarians, but the concept of having empathy for the learner and what that person needs or wants to learn has broad applicability.
We promise we won’t share every review of the book, but we may share some so it’s not just us saying that we think the book is good!
Also exciting, I might add, is the column’s general focus on the importance of librarians as educational leaders.
In advance of the former heavyweight champion’s appearance Saturday night at the Seminole Coconut Creek Casino, where he will perform his one-man stage show, “Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth,” I asked Tyson if he remembered the origins of that quote.
“People were asking me [before a fight], ‘What’s going to happen?,’ ” Tyson said. “They were talking about his style. ‘He’s going to give you a lot of lateral movement. He’s going to move, he’s going to dance. He’s going to do this, do that.’ I said, “Everybody has a plan until they get hit. Then, like a rat, they stop in fear and freeze.’ ”
What I like so much about the quote is that its application stretches far beyond boxing. It really has meaning in any area of life, whether the blow comes from a health issue, losing your job, making a bad investment, a traffic jam, whatever.
It’s how you react to that adversity that defines you, not the adversity itself.
“Exactly,” Tyson agreed. “If you’re good and your plan is working, somewhere during the duration of that, the outcome of that event you’re involved in, you’re going to get the wrath, the bad end of the stick. Let’s see how you deal with it. Normally people don’t deal with it that well.”
He laughed. There’s another way to spin his famous quote:
“How much can you endure, buddy?” he said. “Most talkers, they can’t handle it.”
In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature?
-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chapter Three, “Of Individuality, as One of the Components of Well-Being,” 1859
In my relationships with persons I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to act as though I were something that I am not. It does not help to act calm and pleasant when actually I am angry and critical. It does not help to act as though I know the answers when I do not. It does not help to act as though I were a loving person if actually, at the moment, I am hostile. It does not help for me to act as though I were full of assurance, if actually I am frightened and unsure. even on a very simple level I have found that this statement seems to hold. It does not help for me to act as though I were well when I feel ill.
What I am saying here, to put in another way, is that I have not found it to be helpful or effective in my relationships with other people to try to maintain a facade; to act in one way on the surface when I am experiencing something quite different underneath. It does not, I believe, make me helpful in my attempts to build up constructive relationships with other individuals. I would want to make clear that while I have learned this to be true, I have by no means adequately profited from it. In fact, it seems to me that most of the mistakes I make in personal relationships, most of the times in which I fail to be of help to other individuals, can be accounted for in terms of the fact that I have, for some defensive reason, behaved in one way at a surface level, while in reality my feelings run in a contrary direction.
-Carl Rogers, from “This is Me” in On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy, pp. 16-17. Full chapter available here.
The third core condition of humanistic counseling is called congruence, which we understand as being authentic and genuine in our relationships with learners. In the psychological literature, this state is often described as when what individuals are experiencing on the inside is in harmony with their outer expressions. For example, you would be congruent if you expressed joy over a Dodgers victory when you were really excited, but not if you pretended to be happy that the Dodgers lost because you were trying to impress a Yankee fan. When individuals are congruent in their relationship with another person, there is a sense of emotional realness present in the relationship, which is lacking in relationships where individuals act on either an internal or external pressure to put on a facade […]
The revolutionary American photographer Walker Evans spoke about his time teaching at Yale University, saying that his attitude toward students was, “I don’t really know a hell of a lot more than you do except I’ve been around longer and I do have experience and if I can articulate it some of it will rub off and do you some good.” Evans was straightforward with his students about his role as a facilitator of learning rather than a “sage on the stage,” positioning himself as a partner rather than an all-knowing expert. This congruence of feeling and action requires a certain amount of vulnerability, which Rogers locates as integral to learner-centered pedagogy. In “Questions I Would Ask Myself if I Were a Teacher,” Rogers states that one of the central applications of humanistic counseling to education leads him to ask himself if he has the courage to risk himself emotionally in his relationships with his students: “Do I dare to let myself deal with this boy or girl as a person, as someone I respect? Do I dare reveal myself to him and let him reveal himself to me?”Though Rogers recognizes that this may be difficult – it requires courage to reveal your true self in any interaction with another person – he nevertheless concludes that “if the relationship between myself and my students was truly a relationship between persons, much would be gained […] I could step off the pedestal of ‘teacher’ and become a facilitative learner among learners.”
Indeed, often the best learning tools we have at our disposal are simply our own experiences. The challenge [for the librarian] is to take a risk and share them in a productive way that might be helpful to another person. For instance, a few years ago Kevin met a student who had been invited to work on a psychology research project with a faculty member while still a junior. It was a huge honor for the student but also came with pressure, so the student asked to set up a time to meet with Kevin for some research help. Kevin and the student met over coffee, and as is often his tendency, he engaged the student in a discussion about his life before getting into the nitty gritty of the research project. It turned out that the student was really struggling with feelings of fraudulence. Most of the kids in his research methods class were white students who he felt “really fit in,” so of course they’d be asked to do research! But why had this professor asked him – the student described himself as just a Mexican kid from the middle of nowhere – to be a research collaborator?
It was a true moment of rapport, not only because the student felt free to share a deeply vulnerable piece of himself, but also because Kevin had felt the exact same way so many times in his life. He too had felt like school was not a place for “someone like him”: a “bad” kid who never seemed to fit in. These feelings of fraudulence continued, and even increased, the further he progressed in his education. Kevin not only expressed that he related to how the student felt, but also shared some of his own experiences. He talked about his high school experiences of being told to drop out of school, his feelings attending schools where the vast majority of students were wealthier, and having grown up with a single mother who worked as a waitress while attending graduate school herself.
In this case, sharing certain elements of personal experience led to congruence of emotion for both of them and helped the learner feel unconditional positive regard from the librarian after sharing challenging feelings. They discussed how they didn’t have to change their innermost selves just because they were working on research in a college setting and that their backgrounds could even be an asset in imagining interesting research projects. In this way, revealing certain personal experiences helped to facilitate a significant learning interaction […]
We hope to make clear that being vulnerable with a student in a learning context does not require sharing either things you deem inappropriate to share (things that would be too personal, which are hard to articulate but, like with the test for pornography, you know it when you see it), or things you feel emotionally vulnerable with sharing (for whatever reason). In the above example, Kevin was comfortable sharing the facts about his educational life with the student, both because he felt no shame or embarrassment nor any questions about the appropriateness of the content, and also because it seemed to be, in that context, of pedagogical value to do so.
Addressing a similar point about congruence within the context of psychotherapy, Schneider and Krug set a litmus test for self-revelations based on the following principle: “The guiding therapeutic question is, To what extent does encounter build the therapeutic relationship … or, on the other hand, to what extent does [it] do the opposite, and defeat or stifle facilitative process?” Similarly, in the information literacy context, we can ask ourselves, To what extent would revealing oneself facilitate the process of significant learning? To what extent would it hurt it?
There are certainly cases where Kevin sharing how much he hated school when he was younger could have negative pedagogical consequences. For example, if Kevin had told the eleventh-grade English student [discussed in Chapter Two], “Look, I hated all my English class assignments and thought my teachers didn’t ‘get it’ when I was your age too,” it could have further undermined her teacher’s authority without making any gains toward significant learning in return. For this reason, Kevin didn’t abandon being congruent, he just found a more pedagogically productive way to be real in the relationship with that student [by helping her do research that she did personally connect with].
Sharing our stories and narratives with learners is not only an effective way to encourage authenticity in students’ own research, as we saw with the narrative modeling approach discussed in chapter three, but it is also an effective way to build rapport by presenting as real, individual people. The contributions this can make to learning may often be subtle but have the potential to be profound.
-experts from Chapter Four: “Relationships: The Heart of Learner-Centered Pedagogy,” from Learner-Centered Pedagogy: Principles and Practice by Kevin Michael Klipfel and Dani Brecher Cook.
It is an intriguing comment on our educational system that it is assumed that only under the most dire circumstances would a professor reveal himself in any personal way […]
I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others.
-Carl Rogers, from “This is Me,” in On Becoming a Person. (pp. 3 and 26, respectively).
This chapter is a great read – full PDF available free online.
[H]appy people don’t believe that life is good because they’re just lucky. They don’t believe that they’re mere reeds in the winds of fate. Rather, happy people believe that they can influence what happens to them in the future, and they tend to take responsibility for the important events in their lives.
“What Are Happy People Like? the Characteristics of Happiness.” Positive Psychology 101, Philip C. Watkins, Springer Publishing Company, 2015.
“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
[…]
“To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves–there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”
-Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect“
Our book, Learner-Centered Pedagogy, which has been available for pre-order for a little while, is now going to be officially released by ALA and begin shipping on June 22. And if you’re going to be at ALA annual, the ALA store will have some copies for sale.
Both Dani and I now both have copies in our hands, and we must say that we’re extremely pleased with the book. ALA took really great care with the cover, layout, and presentation of the book. We’d like to thank everyone involved, and give special thanks to our acquisitions editor at ALA, Patrick Hogan, for supporting the project, and for the high and somewhat unusual degree of autonomy he gave us over the book.
The book is something we worked really hard on, writing it mostly at night and in our free time, and it’s crazy to see something of this scope go from its initial stages to come to fruition in an actual, published book. We both really put our selves into it, and feel proud to have written an evidence based book that puts students first in our instruction and practice of librarianship.
If you’re interested in ordering a copy, you can use the following code to get $5 off our purchase if you acquire the book directly from the ALA Store:
COUPON CODe: LCPP17
I’ve gone ahead and pasted the text of ALA’s Press Release for the book below ( and if you’re so inclined you can see the whole thing here).
Rule Number One: A Library Blog 