Teaching through Activism: Service Learning, Community Archives, and Digital Repository Building in MLIS Classrooms

Abstract

This paper reflects upon a set of Service Learning (SL) courses taught in the University of South Carolina’s Library and Information Science (LIS) program. The classes discussed helped community archives build digital repositories and provided LIS students skills demanded by potential employers, while affording students chances to experiment with technologies and information organization practices in low-risk, innovative ways. While SL is not pedagogically new to LIS instruction, this paper expands discussion on how SL courses translate between undergraduate and graduate students and within in-person and online variants. The paper concludes with an exploration of the ethical challenges of teaching a course that worked with a community archive possessing express feminist politics, necessitating discussions of accessibility, organization and classroom engagement divergent from student’s previous experiences

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