Tag: makerspace

A place of failure, a place of play: Academic libraries as third place

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking to the Faculty of Arts on the declared topic of integrating library instruction and support to increase student belonging and academic engagement. As enthusiastic as I was to deliver this talk, I admit that I first needed to check in with myself to make sure that I did in fact agree with my premise-that libraries support student belonging and academic engagement. Much of the research supporting this point is correlative rather than causative, and student socioeconomic status is often the elephant in this particular room. I do, however, believe that academic libraries play a central role in student belonging, and upon reaffirming this, the question became why this should be so.

Ray Oldenburg’s work on third places is surprisingly underused in the library field, because it seems to me to cut right to the heart of libraries’ role in building academic community. In brief, third places “host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work” (Oldenburg, 1989). So, if home is your first place, and work is your second place, third places are the other places to go and chat and build community. Not just any place can be a third place; there can’t be a price of admission, there can’t be pressures, there can’t be obvious socioeconomic distinctions. Conversation and play should be the main activities, which isn’t what a lot of people think of when they think of libraries, but it’s what we want to be. Not just a place of quiet study and research, but a place of failure, of play, of experimentation, of trying.

Public libraries are some of the last lingering third places in any community. Academic third places are always slightly complicated by the fact that there is quite a hefty price of admission to being part of the academic community at all. But if we permit (as I think we must) universities to exist as learning communities in their own right, these must have third places, where members can gather and where grades and success are not of primary concern. Waters (2023) posits that not only are libraries the academic third places, but that librarians are unique in being “third people,” not centrally located within home and school groups. Which means that we are people who can provide guidance but also who can accommodate failure.

Going over the interviews from the Makerspace research, I came across this student quote:

I like the idea of this place, that it is a place where you can make mistakes. And I think really getting the understanding of that creates so much [thinking pause] comfort in coming here and trying things. So, I would try, and then when I get only so far, I know that there’s someone will help me get a little bit further

Makerspace user

I think this wonderful attitude is so prominent in the Makerspace right now, but it actually describes ideally what the library is or should be to the students. This is what we want to encourage from the students who currently feel like experts when they use Google. To let go of the need for expertise and embrace the curious unknown.

I didn’t entirely realize when I put the talk together that what I was asking is for me to help them help students fail, but I think that failure is key to building our academic communities, and the role that libraries can play in student success is bound up in their capacity to be a safe place for failure.

“I can see that being unobtrusive will be difficult:” Brief notes on Makerspace observations

I took advantage of some increasingly rare downtime this afternoon to continue writing up the results of the Makerspace study. While I hope that we can get shape this into a fully submittable form at some point before my sabbatical in July, my project for today was to massage the results from the naturalistic observations into a narratively digestible format.

I remember doing this observations, almost a year ago now, and honestly thinking that these weren’t much, these tiny thoughts. Part of the goal of having me carry out this exercise, of course, was to fumble towards the futility of objective research. I’m not connected to the space; I don’t have a preconceived picture of it on any scale. I don’t have built relationships with the users there. I’m almost surprised when I find patterns in my own notes, the same words used over and again in disperate sessions.

A note from my very first session reads, “I can see that being unobtrusive will be difficult. People want to talk to me.” And then, in talking through the observations with the staff, hearing their thoughts about their influences on the space culture. It’s the same for the library as a whole of course, not to mention the university, but in these larger spaces we lose sight of it: there is no firm line between users and staff, and for a productive pedagogical culture, we don’t really want there to be. Learning is playing, discussing, and collaborating, and the way that works best is when no one is truly separate.

500 dollars, a room of ones own, and a secret third thing

It’s time, mostly. The secret third thing.

I think a lot about the library as a space for play, because whenever I wonder what exactly what we’re for, I come back to thoughts about third places, which I think, for adults even more than children have to be for play. In the past, I’ve been frustrated by liminality during times when I’ve been focused on progress, but that’s not what liminality is for.

I don’t know if the academic library can always be a true third place, because for most of these students, we essentially are their workplace. But I think there are still degrees to which we can cultivate safety: for experimentation, for difference, for freedom from regular expectations.

Though the trend I see in academic libraries is that we don’t want to.

We don’t take student cards at the doors here like some academic libraries, but our study rooms are very clearly for study only and the list of rules about them has always been longer than I’m comfortable with. The resistance against coffee shops and relaxing furniture always simmers in the background. The academic library is a place to study, of course, but particularly with the diminishment of print collections and the distribution of research help away from building reference desks, there needs to be something to mark the library as place other than a giant study house. We should the place on campus where you don’t get graded, where you can think about things and try things out without judgement and with structures to encourage you.

I spent the morning coding interview data from Makerspace users, which I think is one place in the library that does this very well. Students go in, specifically to experiment, often with no particularly academic purpose, and they feel welcome, they feel encouraged, and then they feel inspired. The staff are seen as helpful and present, and the community and space encourage creation and accept failure. It would be hard to replicate that atmosphere for the entire library, simply because the Makerspace is relatively compact and the library building is very large, but when our mission is “Inspiring knowledge creation” I sometimes wonder, how exactly we are doing that, beyond the regular provision of study carrels, and books and journals. What could make our library spaces more welcoming? More inspiring?

But of course, it’s not just the space, it’s not just the price of admission. When I ask the students about barriers, there’s a number of things, but the one that makes me sad is time. I don’t know if it’s just the third places that have disappeared, it’s the time to engage with them. Basically, the time to think about concerns other than home, other than work. When do we do that? The library can create the space, but who creates the time?