Through several educational opportunities – including peer mentoring, capstone projects and placements – York University Libraries (YUL) is enabling students to gain experience in tackling real-world community problems.
Among its far reach across campuses, York University Libraries has a close connection with the innovative Cross-Campus Capstone Classroom (C4). Students involved with C4 often rely on the Libraries to aid their interdisciplinary efforts while looking to solve local, community-based problems that can involve helping the City of Toronto achieve net zero, advancing University efforts, embracing neurodivergent first-year students and more.
Teaching and learning librarian Jenna Stidwill has noticed, however, that when C4 courses challenge students, they sometimes face a hurdle. "Few students know where to look for information on what is already known or even know how to get started on their projects,” she says. As students try to research the communities – and the problems they are facing – they can find that local information ecosystems, like local archives, company records and more, are complex and can be hard to navigate due to multiple overlapping layers of government, community and organizational knowledge. “It’s my job as a librarian to help with that,” she says.
Stidwill, who joined the Libraries in 2023, is co-ordinating with C4 for the first time to do just that. In this role, Stidwill organizes interdisciplinary teams of library educators to visit classrooms for reference consultations on projects, helping connect students with resources and navigate their projects. In some cases, she even poses her own challenge question to a student team. For example, she prompts some students with the following query: “The Libraries just launched a new branch at Markham Campus. How might we build bridges with the local community in ways that will create benefits for student education?”
What that's led to is an interesting road ahead, says Ted Belke, digital engagement librarian, located at the Markham Campus. "Students will share their insights on how to connect with prospective students. We anticipate receiving suggestions for innovative strategies to engage with high school students in the community, introducing them to the rich learning opportunities available at the Markham campus library, including a Makerspace, Data Visualization room, Media Creation Studios and VR/AR technologies. Our goal is to ensure that potential students not only have the chance to explore what the Markham campus offers but also see themselves thriving in post-secondary education.
Stidwill is working with students throughout the term, guiding their projects until they are ready to showcase the results on Capstone Day in the Scott Library Collaboratory at the end of term.
Another YUL initiative is run by Tanya Prince, YUL’s student engagement manager, who is leading work-study students in the Becoming YU Library Student Success Mentors program. Now in its third year, the initiative enlists students as mentors to work closely with YUL staff to help with outreach. They assist with engagement events in Vari Hall, workshops and tours, as well as roam the libraries to help other students navigate the stacks. In the process, they gain valuable workplace skills related to communication, negotiation, networking and presenting.
The students also help with digital outreach, and they have had a significant impact. Last year, by creating social media content that informed and engaged students in library resources and services, they contributed to an 805 per cent increase in YUL Instagram Reel views in a single year. The mentors also create blog posts, videos and web pages for prospective and first-year students about their own York U student journeys.
Sheril Hook, associate dean of libraries, teaching & learning adds, “The mentors have an important role as the student faces and voices in the libraries’ outreach efforts.” That's critical for all students, as a real-world problem can be that first-year students, in particular, may not always understand the vast network of resources available through library portals - leaving them excluded in the process. Or, that they may rely on less reliable sources. "It’s a real-world problem that many people don’t understand that information has value and that they have access through their public and other libraries beyond what they may find on the Internet. We want university graduates to know where and how to fact-check and find quality, reliable information. Our student mentors are part of our overarching information and digital literacy strategy for graduating informed citizens,” says Hook.
To inform their peer engagement work in the Libraries, the mentors regularly present their findings to staff and contribute their valuable perspectives on library resources and services.
In a similar vein, YUL also empowers students with mentor roles and placements. YUL has a long history of offering placements that give students opportunities to apply what they have learned in the classroom to a workplace setting, drawing on experiences working in archives and special collections, participating in exhibit preparations and launch events, and more. Continuing this tradition, for the past two years, data visualization and analytics librarian Alexandra Wong and archivist Katrina Cohen-Palacios have been working together to host placement students in the course Public History, with a focus on Black history topics.
"The placement gives students the opportunity to meaningfully combat systemic information biases,” says Wong “We teach students how to edit entries in Wikipedia and Wikidata and, by doing so, students are empowered to improve the diversity of information, with an impact that extends beyond the Wiki platforms and into online information writ large. Their engagement then allows us to discuss and reflect on embedded biases within digital platforms.” For their research projects, students in the first year of placement chose topics that were personally meaningful to them, with information in the YUL archives like the history of Caribana and Congress of Black Women of Canada. Then, they were taught how to research using the archives, edit Wikipedia and Wikidata, and add their archival research to Wikimedia.
Students were also trained to become facilitators at the Black Histories Wikipedia and Wikidata Edit-a-thon. As such, they joined cross-institutional planning meetings between York, the University of Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan University and the Toronto Public Library. During the in-person and virtual edit-a-thon sessions, student facilitators guided participants who were new to Wikipedia and Wikidata on how to edit the platforms themselves.
Looking ahead with these respective initiatives – and the Libraries' experiential opportunities as a whole – Stidwill is busy working with departments in YUL to track the Libraries' involvement in experiential education in a comprehensive way. “The Libraries have always offered experiential learning opportunities to students, but we’ve never had a bird’s eye view of everything we do. The tracker will help us understand the big picture of [experiential education] at the Libraries and focus on those projects that are most impactful for the broader community.”
In all, these types of initiatives are rewarding for students and YUL alike. "In our experience, students value working on real-world issues because the impact is tangible – they've added missing voices through their wiki edits, seen social media responses climb because of their library-related posts and increased library-driven community engagement with their contributions," says Hook.
With files from Alexandra Wong, Sheril Hook and Tanya Prince