Teaching: Part of A Balanced Intellectual Diet

Fall 2022 wasn’t just the beginning of my new job at SJSU. It was also my return to teaching after two years doing research full-time during my postdoc at UT Austin. I often joked when I was at UT that doing research full time felt a bit like eating an entire meal of desserts. It’s fun, it’s a privilege, and it’s tasty, but it’s something most people don’t keep up forever. To extend that comparison a bit further, teaching feels a bit like eating one’s vegetables. It may not offer quite the same sweet thrill, but I truly believe that teaching is good for us, intellectually speaking.

Why is teaching good for us? For one thing, it gives us a direct line of contact to students working in the field. They have jobs and internships outside of our home departments and institutions. Since they’re ostensibly seeking training in Library and Information Science, this also means they’re closer to the job market. All this means that students are directly exposed to changing trends in the tools, techniques, and economics of information technology; this is knowledge that they bring into the classroom and share with us every day.

During my postdoc, I started a handful of new research projects that were responsive to emergent information issues like mis- and disinformation, AI ethics, and support for overburdened healthcare institutions. I’m still using the forensic approaches to studying digital materials that I honed during grad school, and I’m still working with archival collections of digital objects, but my focus has expanded beyond the twentieth-century history of computing context that defined my grad school research agenda. It felt like a bit of a pivot at the time, but I was committed to using my position and my expertise to face some of the daunting technological challenges that rose up like tsunamis in the past five years.

Now, teaching students who work (or aspire to work) in fields like information ethics and health informatics, my new socially engaged projects are paying back dividends, because they put me closer to the interests and needs of many students in the LIS field. From a more personal standpoint, they’ve also created a path for synergistically matching my research with the interests of my students. This means that my research benefits from the experiences that my students bring to the classroom when they talk about their experiences on the job.

This academic year, I’m teaching SJSU’s required “Information Retrieval Systems Design” class, which represents another productive expansion on my previous work. The course covers topics like database design, data structures, and controlled vocabularies, and it’s structured around a series of projects that generate deliverables like a working searchable database. I learned information retrieval in grad school, but it hasn’t necessarily been a focus in my research. Yet I’ve spent countless hours in extracurricular training sessions keeping technical skills like these up-to-date over the years, and it feels great to work some of that into my teaching. It keeps my skills sharp, even if they aren’t currently finding their way into my research, which means a lot less re-learning when I do call on those skills (like when I was invited to write a chapter on working with web crawlers over the summer, for example).

Another nice thing about my current teaching work is that it has room for customization. So while most of the course covers well-defined topics, there was also room for me to add a unit on archives (my specialty). Framing archives in terms of information retrieval systems is intellectually productive, even for students who don’t plan to work in the archives space, because it gives us a chance to think outside the computing box. In other words, it offers an entry point to thinking about information systems beyond the digital, including card catalogs, finding aids, museums, and more. This all feeds back to my enduring core research interest (and book manuscript) concerning 20th century computing, which was characterized by the rapid iteration of new conceptual models, often pulled from surprising places like new age psychology, for example, which is something I covered extensively in my research to date and plan to continue investigating for a while to come.

Much like the elements of a balanced diet, teaching and research work together to create a wholistic intellectual practice. My research informs my teaching, and my teaching informs my research. Students bring new dishes to the table every semester, so to speak, and it’s always exciting to see what we can cook up with the ingredients at hand.