Jeanette C. Mills
MLIS Portfolio
Teaching
For more than twenty years I have been a teacher. My teaching has primarily focused on adults and on topics associated with Northwest Coast Indian art and culture. I have taught in a variety of venues, including the ASUW Experimental College, at the Bellevue Art Museum, on cruise ships, and as a teaching assistant in a University of Washington art history course. I also regularly have done teaching and training for staff and users in the Art Slide Library. I enjoy teaching and public speaking when the subject is one I know well.
In the spring of 2000, Carrie Mikkelborg, an MLIS student who I had supervised as a volunteer in the Art Slide Library, invited me to be a guest speaker for one of her classes— Information Access in the Humanities taught by Professor Jerry Nelson. Carrie and the other student in her group wanted me to discuss information access issues for visual materials, both as it related to my past research and my present work as a provider of visual materials. I had never thought about my experience specifically in terms of information access, so it took some time for the three of us to talk about the possibilities for what I could say and to develop an outline for the talk.
Carrie took on the task of converting my outline to a PowerPoint presentation format and together we chose and shot images that could be used for illustration. I also learned how to edit the PowerPoint presentation. This was the first time I had used PowerPoint for a presentation, but long experience with giving 35mm slide illustrated talks helped me to feel more comfortable with the new medium.
It proved very interesting for me to think about and present the information access issues I had encountered as a researcher using visual materials and the information access issues faced by both the staff of the Art Slide Library and our users. I spoke for over forty-five minutes to the class, and then we had a lengthy question and answer session. The students had numerous questions about information access in the Slide Library, and our discussion covered many issues, including how copyright affects the work of an academic slide library.
This was an excellent opportunity for me to teach about information access issues that particularly relate to my own experiences. It helped me to bring together both my work and MLIS knowledge. It also introduced the students of the class to an area of library work that they normally do not hear about in the program. Jerry Nelson later expressed his appreciation for my presentation in a letter that he sent to both me and my supervisor in the School of Art.
A year after this experience I took LIS 560, Instructional and Training Strategies for Information Professionals, with Professor Matthew Saxton. This class taught me about theories relating to learning styles and preparing curriculum in the context of libraries, areas with which I had little or no knowledge. I also learned about teaching and evaluation tools. Particularly useful to me since then has been Catalyst WebQ. This class was a good way to round out my teaching skills.
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