“Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?”
Sabriel by Garth Nix.
Sabriel is a defining novel of my childhood. The first of a series, Garth Nix paints a land split in twain by a Wall, in which the dead roam and an Abhorsen, bound by ancestral duty, lays them to rest. The quote pinpoints a dilemma the protagonist faces, and it becomes something of a recurring theme in the rest of the series as well: whether they had a choice regarding their duties and responsibilities, or were they always intended to fulfill this purpose?
I also believe that the quote also has some application to my current situation. When I finished my first Master’s, in Information Science, I didn’t do so with the intention of becoming an instruction librarian or developing my capacity for teaching in any way. Pure circumstances led me into library instruction, but I chose to develop my skills as my responsibilities and role changed and expanded, including enrolling into this program. Instruction design can serve as a natural extension of my capabilities.
The way people access information is continually evolving and the information landscape is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. Merill noted the issue while sharing his thoughts on instruction design, referring to the ease in the dissemination of information online, leading to the enormous, often overwhelming, amount of information on the internet.
Part of my responsibilities is teaching information literacy: teaching users how to navigate that landscape: to find what they need, how to evaluate what they find, and how to incorporate it into their work. As Piskurich said in Rapid Instructional Design, instruction designers help create a path for learning.
Effective instruction design would allow me to work with students and faculty on a different level, in a variety of ways. Often, we’re just asked to come into a classroom and give an instruction session on how to find the library resources and demonstrate some searching techniques, but we can and should be teaching more than that. I want to build a different relationship with faculty, by working with faculty and my fellow librarians to design instruction to help incorporate information literacy into the lesson and into the overall curriculum, to shape students into successful scholars and instill skills that would last a lifetime.
References
Merrill, D. [Mdavidmerrill]. (2008, Aug 11). Merrill on instructional design [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/i_TKaO2-jXA
Nix, G. (1995) Sabriel. HarperCollins.
Piskurich, G. M. (2015). Rapid Instructional Design: Learning ID Fast and Right (3rd ed.). Wiley.