Pretentious…language…dork
I usually get perturbed with faculty who refer to our instructional services as presentations, orientations, and other non-teaching language. It’s recently occurred to me that this mostly just makes me a pretentious dork.
I still think it is important that our colleagues value and understand what we do (teaching) but I’m realizing that many of them are simply lacking the language to describe what we do. It might sound ridiculous to suggest that a teacher cannot describe teaching but from their perspective they lack the language to describe librarianship. It’s just that no one’s ever told them that we teach. After all, the last librarian many of them spent any time with was 15-30 years ago in primary and secondary school. If that was your most recent experience with a librarian you might not know what we do either.
Add to this the fact that most of them have never seen our styles of instruction (creative, innovative, multimedia, collaborative, etc.) and…well, you see where I’m going.
I’m trying to look for the intent behind the language to help me understand how to respond. For instance, a health sciences faculty member contacted me for help with something recently and after I connected her to what she needed, she thanked me for giving her a tutorial. At first I wondered who in their right mind would call that a tutorial, but then I realized what she was saying was “thank you for the service you provide.” And isn’t that enough? Maybe I can let the semantics go for once…
We’ve been haggling over semantics in our instruction committee now that we’re making plans to start a series of *actual* orientation sessions at the start of the fall semester. There’s the concern that we’ll confuse the faculty who refer to instruction sessions as orientations, the concern that faculty will think that library orientations will suffice and not schedule library instruction and concern that we’re far too concerned about it altogether.
It might be important for everyone in the library to get their lingo straight, so we can talk to each other intelligently, but for faculty and students, I think you’re right. A preoccupation with jargon, whether it’s “OPAC” or “database” or “instruction vs. orientation” is just us missing the point.