This year, SILC completed the following projects: rebranded the committee; updated our charge; hosted a series of 5 community conversations; and is sponsoring a SUNYLA 2020 workshop titled "Are They Learning? Information Literacy Assessment in the Library Classroom" that is being facilitated by Logan Rath (Brockport) and Nancy Sarah Murillo (Orange CC).
Our SILC Community Conversation Series emerged as a way for SILC to help instruction librarians connect during our period of remote learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Each conversation was held via Zoom as a one-hour discussion about various topics impacting instruction, including asynchronous teaching methods, best practices, and planning for the fall. At the first four sessions, we had an attendance of 27 to 29 librarians, which we were thrilled about. Our 5th conversation in May had about 20 participants.
One of our attempts this year was to revitalize the WGIL blog that was created a couple of years ago. We solicited for topics to populate the blog, but we did not receive any interest from the SUNYLA community. We will continue to investigate ways to communicate.
Plans for 2020-2021
Membership:
Co-chair Alice Wilson (MCC) has decided to step down as Co-Chair of SILC. Brandon West (Geneseo) will continue to serve as the Chair.
Don Simmons Jr. (Westchester CC) has enthusiastically volunteered to serve as a member of the committee, which also includes Megan Benson (Binghamton) and Holly Kuhl (Cayuga CC).
Projects:
SILC is planning the following projects because we believe they will help us achieve our goal of building community around IL/teaching within SUNYLA. These activities provide the SUNYLA membership different ways to interact, whether that is more active or passive.
-Given the positive response to the Community Conversation Series, we are going to continue to hold a once per month session (open to everyone) to discuss a designated IL topic.
-We are going to hold a "Back to School" Educational Technology webinar series in August to showcase tools librarians may want to consider using in their instruction.
-We are planning a book club to discuss anti-racist teaching practices (title TBD). We anticipate to meet once a month to discuss the book and discuss how it applies to teaching in libraries.
-We are also going to focus on developing a resource toolkit for liaison outreach. Specifically, librarians have articulated struggles with effectively providing outreach and communicating with faculty throughout our community conversation series.
-We will also sponsor another information literacy workshop for SUNYLA 2021.
