Instruction: What People Think I Do vs. What I Actually Do

Have you seen that meme/graphic widely shared on the internet which depicts what other people think of your profession as opposed to what you actually do all day long? This year we will be featuring content on our blog which uses that format to describe what your law librarians here at RWU Law Library do all day long. Today we are talking about instructional services.

A lot of what librarians do is teach. We teach in one on one interactions at the reference desk. We teach in drop in sessions on Zoom. We teach in small group classes in the LP program. Several of the librarians teach for credit classes. Every day is a school day in the law library.

As part of the school’s Legal Practice program, the law library staff teaches about 4 weeks per semester in the Fall and Spring. We believe that legal research teaching is best done in small groups and using hands-on pedagogical tools. We teach basic legal research instruction and those four weeks are very busy here at the library! We teach several class sessions a day during these teaching weeks and run around trying to make sure reference questions are answered when we are not actually in class. Outside of the classroom, we spend hours as a team meeting and writing hypotheticals and preparing assessments and hands-on exercises for these weeks. These weeks are busy but also challenging and fun.

The teaching librarians are also asked to come in and do research presentations in seminars and experiential classes and programs throughout the curriculum. You might see us in international business transactions or in the corporate counsel externship seminar or in the immigration clinic. These are great opportunities for us to teach the students about specialized databases related to the class topic or about more advanced legal research strategies. We also find ourselves often teaching about administrative law and researching regulations since that type of research doesn’t usually make it into the first-year classrooms.

In addition to this formal instruction as part of the curriculum, we also provide hours of research and technology instruction to new members of the RWU Law Review, Moot Court, and the Journal of Maritime Law & Commerce.  We also provide other specialized research instruction by student request, usually from a student organization.  

During the day librarians might be doing a lot of different activities, but we are always teaching as we go. Every reference interaction and every research class session is another opportunity to share our excitement and knowledge about legal research.