Session Description:
The open education movement wants to be a force for equity. The argument is straightforward and powerful: Widen access to educational resources and marginalized students who disproportionately suffer at the hands of the exploitative business models of commercial textbook publishers will disproportionately benefit, in both economic and educational terms. However, as the open education movement has matured, its vision has expanded beyond an emphasis on free open educational resources to the freedoms that flow from open educational practices. The contemporary open education movement thus represents an access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education, a force for the democratization of knowledge that challenges neoliberal forces that pit increasingly precarious faculty against increasingly precarious students. However, open is not a panacea and an uncritical approach risks perpetrating harm with the best of intentions. As natural leaders of campus OER initiatives, academic librarians should recognize that adopting digital technologies (even those branded as “inclusive”) solve some access issues while masking and exacerbating others, that accessibility is not a retrofit to access, that open is not the opposite of private, and that not everything could (or even should) be open. This presentation outlines a social justice vision for open education that is both broader and more critical, one that contemplates its true potential while being mindful of its pitfalls. Sponsored by Iowa State University

Session Description:
Vocational awe describes the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique. It is a term that openly exposes the exploitative nature of common rhetoric around librarianship and libraries, and allows for the opening up of what it means to be a “good” librarian. According to Deborah Hicks, the professional identity of a librarian “transcends other non-professional identities, such as one’s gender or race identity…” (2016). Taken to its extreme, this means that the ideal librarian is one whose other identities are subsumed by the “noble calling” of library work to the exclusion, and even detriment, of anything else. Librarianship, as a field, also has an identity – one tied to its purported values. A common rhetoric is that libraries, and librarianship, are the last bastions of democracy. Vocational awe permeates the narratives surrounding the ideal identities of librarians and librarianship. Because vocational awe also intersects with the problematic rhetoric of “do what you love” (Tokumitsu 2015), which enables the exploitation of librarians as workers by eliminating the distinction between personal and professional identities, librarianship cannot be critiqued without the critic being labeled a “bad librarian.” Indeed, vocational awe is threaded so tightly throughout the professional narrative of librarianship that it is weaponized against those who might highlight the ways librarianship has, does, (and inevitably will), flounder and fail in fulfilling its professed values. When there is immense resistance to merely acknowledging flaws in our professional values and practice, how can we work towards meaningful change? I argue: only through dismantling vocational awe and recasting the narrative of what it means to be a librarian. Sponsored by the Five Colleges of Ohio, Inc.