Learn About a Lecturer: Anna Sandelli Teaches Librarians to Teach
Lecturer: Anna Sandelli
Location: Knoxville, Tennessee
Education: MSLS from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
What do you teach at SIS?
This is my first semester teaching within SIS, and I’m teaching INSC 538, User Instruction. It’s really a class for people interested in library instruction, working with adult learners, and curious about learning more. (Associate Professor) Rachel Fleming-May, who developed the course, describes it as being for the “accidental library instructor,” which was definitely my own experience as a graduate student and in starting my academic library career.
When I meet with students, I also describe 538 as a class for the aspiring library instructor. It’s a class I really wish I’d had as a graduate student for the blend of practical experiences, theory, and reflection with others interested in the topics. I went to UNC-Chapel Hill and I had an assistantship where I got to do a lot of on the ground teaching and in-person teaching, and that was a wonderful experience. However, assistantships and teaching experiences may not be available to all students, especially those who are working full-time and now during the COVID-19 pandemic. So when you’re applying for jobs, it’s a catch-22 because they want you to have library instruction experience to get the job but you may need a job to get that experience.
Taking a user instruction class provides a lot of tools that can be used for future experiences and adapted to different types of environments. We’ll also talk about things like impostor syndrome, building relationships with faculty and learning partners, and collaborating to achieve learning outcomes. I think a lot of the skills are applicable to teaching in other contexts, such as working with other librarians or instructors, working in a corporate setting, or in a public or special library. I tell students that the conversation matters as much as the content, and I hope that the semester gives students a chance to reflect on user instruction as a whole and the unique contributions they can bring to the field.
Why information sciences?
My undergraduate degree is in journalism, and after I graduated, I spent about four years working in corporate communications and employee relations. A big part of my job was writing, editing, and posting daily content to the employee intranet to communicate with about 44,000 people around the world. I came to see that I enjoyed the writing part much less than the opportunities to connect people with information in ways that felt meaningful and useful to them. For instance, I really enjoyed planning, interviewing people, and developing resources to help employees understand how they could see themselves in our annual volunteer program as we sought to grow this program and make it more inclusive, and how company initiatives focused on broad concepts like sustainability and innovation related to their specific job or part of the company. Looking back on it now, I realize there was a large teaching and information literacy element to the job. In fact, as I was working on the syllabus for the User Instruction class, I realized that a lot of the things in this class would have been helpful to me in that setting as well.
After about three years of work, I really started to think about graduate school and contemplated a variety of fields, including medical journalism, marketing and business, and public history. A friend who had been a third grade teacher had just finished her first year in a master’s in library sciences program and she told me that I thought I would enjoy programs in that area. I had never thought about libraries, despite walking by our School of Information and Library Science almost every day as an undergraduate, but I went and checked out program websites and talked to current students and found that the degree really resonated with my interests. I applied to graduate school leaning toward academic or special library settings but unsure of what a career could look like in these areas. Then, I was offered a graduate assistantship in instruction and user experience. I had never heard of “user experience,” and as an introvert, I was unsure how I would navigate instruction, but the experience was incredibly rewarding and helped set me on my path. Having opportunities to teach first-year students, work with transfer students, and think about the wider environments that may add barriers to students’ learning helped lead me to my first post-graduate job at UTK, where I’ve been since.
What is your current job?
I came to the University of Tennessee in 2014 as one of our first two student success librarians, which are positions that focus on helping students learn and contribute to scholarship while navigating life at a research university. I’m now head of our Teaching and Learning Programs Department, which is a new department for the UT Libraries. I oversee a team that includes student success and online learning librarians, a teaching and learning librarian, and an instructional designer, and a wonderful graduate teaching assistant from SIS. My department really focuses on information literacy and immersive learning experiences, as well as providing resources and partnership with others involved in teaching, both throughout the libraries and across campus. We focus on contributing to and helping build the learning resources and support structures for students to feel comfortable finding, evaluating, and using information to meet their academic and personal learning goals. Our Teaching and Learning team also focuses on foundational undergraduate courses, such as First-Year Composition, Public Speaking, and Transition 201 for transfer students. I’m regularly inspired by the ways my colleagues work to find ways to meet students where they are, in person, online, or both, especially during this past year.
UT was actually one of the first universities to have student success librarians, so any time I see a student success job, it makes me smile. It’s rewarding to see jobs that focus on recognizing that students don’t just come into the classroom or a Zoom room as “blank slates,” but that they have all these experiences outside of the classroom that affect their life, and then use this understanding to design inclusive learning experiences with the whole student in mind.
What do you like about teaching?
I really like the learning part of teaching. I like having the chance to try out new things and feel like you’re connecting with students. It’s rewarding to see the “lightbulb” moment, the moment where students are making a connection that is meaningful to them and being able to apply that in their own way. It’s not them memorizing dates or feeling that there’s only one right way of doing things; it’s about feeling comfortable navigating and processing information out in the world. There’s so much information out there and, while it can be daunting, I hope students come away from our time together feeling both that they’re able to evaluate and effectively use information available while also thinking critically about what perspectives might be missing and adding their own voice to the conversation.
I also like being able to try out new techniques and different ways of reaching and engaging with students, and I hope I can demonstrate to students that I’m learning with and from them, too – and that you can be an introvert and very much enjoy teaching and engagement. Every time that I teach, I learn something, and I feel fortunate to be in a career where that is the case – even when my learning takes the form of a “Zoom fail” or spilling coffee all over myself to start a class!