Monday, August 28, 2006

Campus Cultures

From Immersion '06, July 30, 2006

Faculty Lead: Craig Gibson

A culture includes a combination of explicit knowledge (factual and recorded) and tacit knowledge (attitudes and beliefs). The “five core academic values of faculty” are 1) collegiality, 2) autonomy, 3) academic freedom, 4) specialized expertise, and 5) reason/scientific method.* They see librarians as “process, procedure oriented; rule-bound; service role rather than educational one; not seen as equals;” and “not aware of instruction that librarians already do.”

The campus culture also consists of a student culture, a library culture, and an administrative culture. In order to integrate information literacy into the curriculum, we need to “tap into all the cultures” and “bring them together.” Gibson quoted the “core changes strategies within the academy” from an article in The Journal of Higher Education (July/Aug. 2002) by Kezar and Eckel: “senior administrative support,” “collaborative leadership,” “robust design” (a collaborative and evolving blueprint of the future), “staff development,” and “visible actions” (actions that “show the culture is changing”). He emphasized robust design and visible actions.

* Barbara Walvoord. Academic Departments: How They Work, How They Change. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report, v. 27, no. 8. San Francisco: Josey Bass, 2000, pp.15-17.

No comments: