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Sometimes, I love watching home improvement shows on TLC and HGTV. I like thinking about how to make spaces more useful, more beautiful. I think functional spaces inform and inspire good work. My office at Hampshire has been an evolving project towards functionality and beauty, or as much beauty as concrete and Styrofoam walls can offer. And those home shows inspire me to think about low-cost solutions to dysfunctional spaces. Discussions about space informed much of my thinking about my work and teaching during the past year. From decisions about teaching with my iPad rather than my laptop, to visiting our new classrooms in Emily Dickinson Hall, to the ISIS session we recently hosted about classrooms, space remains at the forefront of my thoughts about the library.

At Hampshire, we don't have a lot of money to make major changes. However, that's not to say we couldn't make any changes, something I realized after the ISIS session where Nick Baker from Mount Holyoke College talked about the pop-up media lab he created in the art building. That space was built on the idea of flexible, transient spaces that meet immediate needs as opposed to long term and possibly unknowable needs. With all of this percolating in my mind, a couple of things transpired simultaneously at Hampshire:

1. It was time to weed print reference. It was clear from the amount of dust on the books in our reference collection that it was time to do some weeding. And those texts took up valuable real estate on the first floor; space that can eventfully be used for student study space.
2. Our outer office was a mess. Over the course of my first year at Hampshire, I sometimes wondered if the dysfunctional outer office made students less likely to come into our space to ask questions. In addition, the space was dysfunctional for the librarians. We didn't have a place where the team to could sit together and meet. We didn't have a functional space to sit with students if they needed advice from more than 1 librarian at a time. And it was sad. We needed to do something with that space.

At some point during the summer - probably while putting books on trucks and coughing up dust - we decided that the core reference books that will help us help more students should live near our offices. When that decision was made, we put in work orders for shelving (wouldn't you know we had extra ones in the storage closet in the basement?) and to paint the walls. Our director ordered some Eames chairs over the summer to replace old carrel chairs, and we threw in some spare chairs and a table we commandeered from other parts of the library. The Facilities staff removed the door to our suite. Voila! Instant interdisciplinary consultation space!

My colleagues get me.

I made a slide show of Div III carrels today to highlight Division III works in progress. It was fun to wander around the library and see what our students are reading as they work on their capstone projects.

Just another afternoon at Hampshire College.

Happy Friday, dear Internetz! Above, the view from the bus stop in downtown Northampton.

Waiting for the bus to Hampshire, I saw the army of UMass teaching assistants waiting for their express bus to Friday sections. They were all wearing their Friday best, ready to impart knowledge and facilitate discussions among the undergraduates. Oh the memories! I was one of them during grad school part I; I learned to teach during those Fridays.

Teaching is a craft that requires a lot of care and feeding. I am skeptical that ‘natural’ teachers exist, but I do know that the best teachers are those who believe that their craft should always evolve, who wonder at the end of every session what he or she could have done better, and finally, those who know realize that you have to think about how to engage all the students in the room with you, not just the middle, not just the best, and not just the worst.

I’ve been lucky since grad school to worked in library positions where teaching is healthy part of my portfolio, but most importantly,  I’ve been extremely fortunate to have colleagues who are willing to watch me in the classroom and offer constructive suggestions about how to be more effective.

It takes a village to teach a class of students; may we all find ways of supporting each other inside and outside of the classroom so we can do the work of educating our students, and each other.