Statement from Matthew Collins, CCLI 2020 Chair

Greetings library instruction community. Welcome to the California Conference on Library Instruction 2020. We hope you, your family, and all who are close to you are well. CCLI has organized engaging in-person conferences since 1973. For this year, due to the pandemic, we changed to an asynchronous, virtual conference. We are pleased to present much of the same excellent scholarship planned for our original conference. We thank the presenters for their flexibility. We also want to thank the University of San Francisco for their continued support and hosting conference material in the Gleeson Library Scholarship Repository. 

This year’s theme is Deconstructing and Reconstructing Assessment. This is important work that we don’t talk about enough, particularly with critical and practical lenses, and I’m excited. I’m excited to investigate using reflective practice, pedagogy, and unconscious bias training to understand how my own perspectives and biases impact assessment. I’m excited to look into foundational theories underlying instructional program design and assessment. I’m excited to explore feminist assessment techniques employed in the classroom, at the reference desk, and in research consultations. These are just a few of the themes explored at CCLI 2020.  

Of great interest to our community is the timely keynote presentation by Nicole Branch: “Transformation is a Homonym: Critical Assessment in a Time of Crisis,” where  “divergent conceptions of transformation, crisis as a turning point, and the role of critical assessment in enacting change” will be explored. As you engage with all this material, we invite you to keep the conversation going and share with your colleagues. When you share via social media, please use the hashtag #ccli2020. 

I want to thank the entire CCLI steering committee. It was their labor that brought you this conference: Irene Korber of California State University Chico, Quincy McCrary of Notre Dame de Namur University, William Cuthbertson of California State University Chico, Amber Janssen of California State University Maritime Academy, Megan Kinney of City College of San Francisco, Anna Levia of Stanford University, Annette Marines of University of California, Santa Cruz, Stephanie Miller of San Francisco Theological Seminary of the Graduate Theological Union, Daniel Ransom of the California College of the Arts, Penny Scott of the University of San Francisco, and Jenny Yap of Berkeley City College. 

Finally, with great gratitude, I want to thank the vice chair of 2020 and incoming chair for 2021, Karen Tercho from Sacramento City College. She is dedicated, practical, intelligent and she has a wonderful patient kindness which helped me and the committee overcome challenges this year. She has been a member of the CCLI steering committee since 2016. I look forward to working with Karen as CCLI continues to explore trends and new approaches in library instruction in the future.

Statement from Karen Tercho, CCLI 2020 Vice-Chair

Greetings colleagues. It is with great pleasure that I take on the role of 2021 CCLI chair, and I so look forward to seeing you at CCLI 2021. I hope everyone reading this is safe, relatively happy, and able to recharge over the summer. On behalf of the CCLI Steering Committee, we hope you enjoy and benefit from the work of this year’s amazing and innovative presenters.

I would like to thank Matthew Collins from the University of San Francisco, CCLI chair, for his kind leadership, tenacity, and sense of humor, qualities that were especially valuable during the stressful times of many unknowns for this year’s conference.

After taking in the presenter materials, please do fill out this year’s evaluation form. Your feedback will be instrumental in helping us plan for our 2021 conference, especially your ideas for future CCLI speakers and your thoughts on this year’s format.

I leave you with a quote that resonates with this year’s CCLI theme. Take care and see you next year!

“Destruction is thus always restoration—that is, the destruction of a set of categories that introduce artificial divisions into an otherwise unified ontology.”

― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity