In early June, Ashelee and Rebecca travelled to Williamsburg for The Innovative Library Classroom (TILC) Conference. Hu has already written a wonderful blog post describing some of the highlights. Here are a few key takeaways from Ashelee and Rebecca.

Rebecca @ TILC

I attended the poster session and other sessions that Hu mentioned in his blog post, and agree that all of the speakers were impressive and inspiring. The session I was most blown away by was the “Pop-Up Teaching” session by Kelsey Hammer from Virginia Tech Libraries. Essentially, the idea of pop-up teaching is taking the best aspects of a workshop and a tabling event and leveraging those to have a high impact, high attendance, but low buy-in and effort from the intended audience. The examples Kelsey and the team of librarians at Virginia Tech include “Digital Cookies Game Photo Privacy Quiz,” and “Digital Wellness Quiz.” The designs are fun and engaging, deliver a learning goal, but don’t require buy in from students like a workshop might. Pop-up teaching is flexible, scalable, and is the perfect intersection between teaching and outreach. I have lots of ideas of how we can implement this in Special Collections & Archives and at ZSR. If you’d like to learn more or collaborate, let’s chat!

Ashelee @ TILC

As a first-time attendee, I already heard amazing things from ZSR colleagues about TILC and was excited to listen to some really great presentations. I share both Hu’s and Rebecca’s sentiments about the presentations they mentioned regarding student assessment and the creative approach to pop-up learning sessions. I really enjoyed Dr. Don Simmons’ keynote about “the Hidden Curriculum” in higher education. It’s an idea that can also extend to navigating professional spaces and career advancement. Lisa Nichols from the University of Kentucky delivered an engaging and interactive session, demonstrating strategies to implement minimal planning that still requires increased student participation and more intentional instruction sessions requested by faculty. Overall, I enjoyed my experience at TILC and look forward to seeing how these approaches and tools can be used in ZSR.