In 2020-21 I'm teaching two required courses in the MLIS program: GRADLIS 9004 Research Methods and GRADLIS 9005 Managing and Working in Information Organizations, in both fall and winter terms. These are two of my favourite courses to teach, and it's been exciting to work with my colleagues to develop them as online courses. I've learned so much in my first term and am looking forward to teaching them again in the Winter term
I also supervise individual student projects: theses, Major Research Papers, and individual reading courses and studies. My students have been interested in an incredibly wide range of topics, including in-hospital patient education, LGBTQ2+ picture books in public libraries, K-pop fandom, how people talk about breastfeeding on Facebook, nutrition education for children in schools, academic librarians' information literacy work, the information work people do when caring for loved ones with dementia, the nature of privacy and anonymity in the 21st century, harm reduction education for recreational cannabis use, open peer review, and how people find information about non-hormonal contraceptives. You can find the list of FIMS theses supervised in this profile.
You can read more about my research under the Research tab.
I've got
several major projects on the go. One is about the work parents do to
get their young children "ready for school," like taking them to baby, toddler, and preschool storytime
programs at public libraries and community sites. The second is about
how people "keep track" in everyday life: all those calendars, sticky
notes, journals, objects placed where you'll see them, alarms and
reminder texts. The third is a set of small
studies about the value and purposes of the public library over time and
from a variety of perspectives. Journalism and Communications professor Erin Isings and I are working with a team of undergraduate and graduate research assistants to analyze the representation of public libraries
in the news over the last century. Fourth, I'm part of a team led out of the Faculty of Education looking at how professional program students learn to read scholarly literature. Finally, I'm a co-investigator on a project led by Library and Information Science professor Ajit Pyati called Pandemic, Stress, and Overload: Cultivating Space for Contemplation in the University, which we'll begin in 2021.
