1. Decolonizing Databases
A Scalable Critical Pedagogy Activity
Lori DuBois & Emery Shriver
Williams College
NELIG 2019

2. Agenda and Objectives Agenda Objective: - you’ll be able to:
Institutional Context
Demonstrate activity by doing it
Brainstorm and discuss how you could use your library
Questions
Objective: - you’ll be able to:
articulate how this activity could be adapted for use at your institution

3. The Setting About Williams: About Library Instruction:
Highly-selective, low faculty/student ratio
Lots of new/visiting faculty
No required courses
Colonialist past
About Library Instruction:
Well-resourced
Mostly one-shots
Highly-customized
New to critical pedagogy
Williams is:
Highly-selective college with low faculty/student ratio. Our class sizes generally range from 4 to 20 students in the humanities and social sciences.
Retirements and generous leave program have brought in new faculty with new ideas and approaches to teaching.
No required courses, so no ENGL 101 course we have to teach in a similar way. And lots of new courses every year allowing us to experiment with different approaches.
Institution is struggling to acknowledge and come to terms with colonialist past, making it a good time for the library to talk about systems of oppression and teach with a critical pedagogy lens
Williams Libraries Instruction is:
Well-resourced
Lots of instruction librarians with liaison roles. Lori: Africana Studies, American Studies, History, English, Theatre and Dance. Emery: Latinx Studies, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, Asian Studies, Art, Music, Classics,
230+ databases, including Ulrich’s
Discovery layer (Primo)
Mostly one-shots, with a variety of course topics, levels, and assignments
Williams has a tradition of personalized service, so our instruction sessions are highly customized based on the needs of the course.
New to critical pedagogy
Colleague attended 2017 NELIG fall program on critical pedagogy
New colleague
Critical pedagogy reading group

4. The Activity: Let’s do it!
What’s happening:
You’ll explore how the same source is categorized differently in different research tools.
Each group is given:
the first page of the same article:
Hill, Marc Lamont "’Thank You, Black Twitter’: State Violence, Digital
Counterpublics, and Pedagogies of Resistance." Urban Education 53 (2):
a record for the article from one or more databases

5. With your group Compare: Discuss: author-supplied keywords to
those assigned by the database
Discuss:
why they are different

6. What differences did you notice?

7. Author keywords

8. Web of Science

9. ProQuest Central

10. PsycINFO

11. ERIC

12. Overlap

13. Discussion Questions Topics
What differences in descriptive terminology did your group notice?
What reasons might be behind these differences?
Subject terms are discipline specific
Some tools use controlled vocabulary (ERIC)
Humans vs. machines (ex: Web of Science vs. ProQuest)
What is a database? What makes them different from other research tools, like Google?

14. On your own - brainwriting - 3 min
Write anything that pops into your head
about how you could use this your library.
Suggested topics:
In what courses would this fit?
How would you do it with/without technology?
How would you expand it?
How could you relate this to the ACRL Framework?

15. Share your ideas from the brainwriting exercise
With a partner - 5 minutes
Share your ideas from the brainwriting exercise

16. THOUGHTS?

17. Our adaptations Using an article from class readings
Students write down their keywords for the article and then compare to database subjects
Using an article written by the course professor
Ask them to comment on the assigned subjects
In a tech-enabled classroom
Students find the article in the assigned database
Students examine the creation process for the database
How are journals included in the database?
How are subjects assigned?
In area studies courses
Discuss feelings related to how (their) marginalized identities are described
Discuss the need to use the oppressor’s language, especially when searching for primary sources

18. QUESTIONS?

19. Want more information? Contact:
Lori DuBois
Emery Shriver
THE END