Participation as pedagogy: Student and librarian experiences of an Open Access publishing assignment - UCL Discovery

"Education for Instruction Librarians has traditionally centered upon the acquisition of practical classroom skills. While this approach has merit, from a sociocultural perspective of learning, student development emerges more completely through engagement with the communal activities and values that constitute professional practices rather than through the achievement of individual competencies. Drawing upon these understandings, this paper reports on the experiences of an Open Access writing assignment that was librarian-reviewed. The assignment was designed to build student participation within Instruction Librarian practices and communities. Focused upon the 19 student and 19 librarian-reviewer experiences (38 total) of the assignment, the survey-based methodology that is used in this study reveals a lack of communication between student and practitioner Instruction Librarians as well as the importance of the assignment to both student and librarian learning. These findings demonstrate that developing student access to professional practices and communities can be beneficial for students as well as for Instruction Librarians."