HIP CHECK: Equity, Learner-Centered Pedagogies, and Student Employment Liz Vine
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HIP CHECK:
Equity, Learner-Centered
Pedagogies, and Student
Employment
Liz Vine*
A majority of students work while in college, and academic libraries employ students
in large numbers and are dependent on their labor—a dependency that only deepens
in a higher education climate of shrinking budgets and scarcity rhetoric. Given that the
students we employ are the same students whom academic libraries exist to support, we
have an ethical and educational obligation to ensure that their time with us is as useful
to them as possible—at the very least that it not interfere with their academic work, but
ideally that it integrate work and learning in ways that actively contribute to their intel-
lectual development. Due to the time we spend with them, we are in a better position to
support the needs of the students we employ than those we encounter at service desks, in
research consultations, in one-shot instruction, or even in for-credit classes. Identifying
student employment as educationally purposeful—as experiential learning (EL), or as a
high-impact practice (HIP) with the same characteristics as other HIPs such as intern-
ships, capstone projects, or first-year seminars—meets that obligation to align work with
learning and support students’ academic success. But for this learning experience to be
useful, effective, or transformative, it also needs to be accessible, equitable, and good—
rigorously designed and intentionally implemented so as not to become the second-class
HIP that suffices for working students who can’t study abroad.
Practicing student employment as EL or as a HIP presents a tangle of challenges for
pursuing genuinely learner- and learning-centered approaches, and for providing equi-
table work-learning opportunities that don’t simply perpetuate existing educational and
socioeconomic disparities. There is a fundamental equity problem in adding a glossy nar-
rative of educational value to the fact that students provide contingent, low-wage labor
for the very institutions they are accruing debt to attend. And that exploitative dynamic
only becomes more unpalatable as academic libraries instrumentalize the purported edu-
cational benefits of student labor to demonstrate the library’s value to campus adminis-
tration. An equitable and learner-centered approach to student employment necessitates
honest recognition of the context in which academic libraries are pursuing student em-
ployment as an engaged learning experience. It requires being willing to practice student
employment as equitably as we can within existing conditions and parameters, to be real
with students about the structural problems that nevertheless persist, and to consistently
check that we’re centering students rather than just leveraging them for the library’s gain.
Despite the tensions and challenges inherent in developing library student employ-
ment as an equitable and learner-centered educational practice, however, it does repre-
*Liz Vine, Assistant Circulation Supervisor and Student Employment Program Coordinator, IU-
PUI University Library, lizvine@iu.edu
321
322 Liz Vine
sent a significant opportunity to support students’ development not just as current and future employees, but as
reflective thinkers with the capacity to both look critically at the way things are and imagine them otherwise. As
Brian Pusser notes, student employment is “a site of contest between the reproduction of norms of the workplace
and higher education as a site for emancipatory student intellectual work.”1 That contest is perhaps exemplified
by the fact that the book A Good Job: Campus Employment as a High-Impact Practice invokes Paulo Freire and
the need for student-centered pedagogy, but also has in its chapter on student learning a section titled “What
Employers Want,” based on the competencies identified in the annual National Association of Colleges and
Employers (NACE) survey report.2 The friction between the values that inhere in Freirean pedagogy and NACE
competencies—between being able to question and transform the status quo and measuring up to corporate
norms—points to an acute equity-oriented issue in how to frame the purpose of student employment as an
educative practice. But it also suggests that the very elements of employment that appear to be in tension with
the practices and aims of active, learner-focused, anti-hierarchical pedagogies actually provide highly contextual
and applied opportunities to reflect critically on inequitable structures of work and learning. Navigating between
Freire and NACE, libraries must carefully evaluate how to articulate the aims and learning outcomes of student
employment; how to manage the basic logistical processes of student employment; and how to reconceive roles,
responsibilities, relationships, and hierarchies within our organizations around student employment.3
HIRING AND WORKPLACE CLIMATE
In their argument against higher education’s vocational turn and its market-based focus on reductive ideas
around job skills and graduate employability, Matthew T. Hora and his student co-authors suggest that “the most
important step that higher education can take in demonstrating its commitment to the well-being of its students
is to embody principles of cultural competence and fair labor practices.”4 But as Rosan Mitola, Erin Rinto, and
Emily Pattni’s survey of the literature on library student employment as a high-impact practice reveals, there
has been little attention paid to equity and diversity in hiring and managing student employees—we aren’t scru-
tinizing our own workplace practices and cultural competence when it comes to thinking about student em-
ployment as a learning experience.5 High-impact practices appear to be particularly beneficial for minoritized
students, but those students—particularly Black students, Latina/o/x students, and first generation and transfer
students—participate in HIPs in lower numbers.6 Intentionally designing library student employment as a HIP
would therefore appear to have promise as a means of lessening the tension between needing a paycheck and
participating in an enhanced educational opportunity for students who have historically had least access to
them.
That promise, however, is dependent on an equitable hiring process for library student positions—a pro-
cess which is often more decentralized and less subject to oversight than hiring processes for non-student staff.
Hiring processes for student employees should also be standardized across the library—from position descrip-
tions and job postings through interviewing and on-boarding—in order to ensure a consistent and intentional
approach to hiring for equity and diversity. As with hiring for full-time or non-student library staff, we need to
consider where we are publicizing available positions, and to reach out to campus offices and student organiza-
tions to develop communication networks that reach minoritized students. And we should involve current stu-
dent staff in the hiring process for numerous reasons of both equity and learner-centeredness, from recognizing
students as experts in the positions for which we’re hiring, to broadening and diversifying the range of staff who
determine who works for the library.
We can also look at the application materials we ask students to provide and revise our requirements in rec-
ognition of the fact that students “educated outside of privileged systems of education do not learn to compete-
speak” in the “right” ways.7 Job application materials and job interviews provide an opportunity to avoid another
moment in higher education in which people are sorted purportedly by merit, but in practice by a process
characterized by “competition, hoop-jumping, ass-kissing, and proof of belonging” that inevitably rewards the
already privileged.8 An equitable approach to library student employment requires that we design application
processes that deliberately seek to reduce barriers built on the assumption that applicants possess certain kinds
of social capital. That might include providing options other than writing a formal cover letter and resume, and
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finding ways to recognize the value of the kinds of knowledge and experience that don’t typically warrant a place
on standard resumes. We can provide applicants with interview questions ahead of time, and conduct interviews
in ways that center the experience of the applicant, making it a meaningful learning opportunity even for those
students who don’t get the job. And we can avoid the temptation of using Federal Work-Study awards as a proxy
for equitable hiring or hiring for diversity, given the inequities and limitations of that program itself.9
However, an equitable hiring process is not, of course, sufficient—as Jaena Alabi has argued in terms of the
diversity of librarianship, academic libraries need to focus not just on hiring processes but also on work climate
and retention.10 Similarly, for student employment in libraries to be both equitable and effective as a learning
experience, we have to retain the students we hire and ensure they have a supportive, affirming, and inclusive
work and learning environment for the duration of their employment. Many Black and Indigenous librarians
and librarians of color do not experience such an environment while working in academic libraries, and it’s
not the environment experienced on campus or in the classroom by many underrepresented students.11 While
academic libraries have attended to the experience of marginalized students as library users and in information
literacy classrooms, we also need to consider their experience as student employees: it seems reasonable to ex-
trapolate that library student employees are not exempt from the systemic and pervasive harms experienced by
minoritized students on campus in general, and by minoritized staff in our organizations specifically. We cannot
make claims for library student employment as a positive learning experience if we are not paying attention to
the work environment in which that learning is supposed to occur—which is also, of course, the environment
in which student employees’ supervisors and other staff are also working and learning. Workplace climate is
one of the many ways in which thinking about student employment from both a learner-centered and an equity
perspective requires thinking about equity in our organizations at large.
PROGRAMMATIC APPROACH
Beyond the details of who we’re hiring and the work-learning environment we provide them, we also need to
consider which students within our organizations work in positions designed from a learning perspective, in
order to avoid creating two-tiered systems of library student employment whereby only certain student work is
considered engaged learning. In the words of Matt Brim, “When we’re choosy about whom we teach, we limit
learning.”12 Thus far, however, published details of library student employment framed explicitly as a HIP, ex-
periential learning, or some other form of engaged experience aimed at deeper learning often focus on experi-
ences with limited participation: limited to the singular positions of just one or two student employees, to peer
research or reference advisors, to students in specific library units, to graduate students, or to students able to
participate in an unpaid internship.13 Internships, as a high-impact practice adjacent to student employment,
provide a useful point of comparison. Research shows an absence of equitable access to and participation in
internships, and suggests that these barriers may actually exacerbate disparities in educational and employment
outcomes.14 It’s certainly the case, as H. Bussell and J. Hagman note, that taking experiential learning practices
to scale requires time and resources, and “will inherently be less efficient” than traditional models of student
training and employment, but as David James Hudson points out, it’s hard to do the messy work of challenging
foundational assumptions if our “environment is governed by expectations of efficiency.”15 Limiting access to
student employment as a learning opportunity is consequential, as the example of internships demonstrates: it
reduces student employment’s potential to make participation in high-impact practices more accessible, intro-
duces another layer of hierarchy and differentiation into the employment structure of academic libraries, fails to
discern the ways in which engaged learning and reflection can be a part of all student positions, and risks further
amplifying existing disparities.
An equitable approach to student employment as learning therefore means a programmatic approach, en-
compassing not just some but all student employees. It requires re-evaluating student positions that are—or
are perceived as being—low- or no-skill, as rote or mechanical, and therefore as unassimilable to a learning
framework. Firstly, even those allegedly low-skill jobs require skills and training, and are areas in which students
build expertise through experience. Not acknowledging those skills or that experience is one of the means by
which student staff, like non-librarian staff and certain types of work in the academic library, are consistently
A P R I L 13–16, 2021 • V I RT UA L324 Liz Vine
overlooked, under-valued, and marginalized. Secondly, however, if we consider student employment to be a
potentially impactful, transformative, and learner-centered experience, we shouldn’t have student positions that
consist entirely of what we consider to be repetitive or mechanical work without any deep learning value. An
equitable and programmatic approach to library student employment entails all student jobs having a detailed
position description that considers the learner’s experience and identifies how the role will support their aca-
demic and professional development. Students in all positions should similarly, at the very least, have regular,
structured opportunities to reflect on their work and its connection to their academic and professional goals,
and to have constructive, supportive conversations with supervisors about their work and learning.16
These components can be incorporated into all student positions, but to make those positions yet more
learner-centered, however, we can also build in space and opportunity for students themselves to determine the
shape and scope of their role. Which isn’t to say that students should be expected or required to do work beyond
their regular duties, but rather to allow them some agency and autonomy in what their work looks like and how
they do it. That autonomy might include the scope to revise workflows or reimagine core tasks and responsibili-
ties, or to initiate or participate in project-based rather than just task-based work.17 Learner-centered student
positions would thus be able to evolve over the course of the relationship between student and library, and not
be designed only on the basis of the library’s labor needs or the library’s perception of what students should be
learning.
LEARNER-CENTERED SUPERVISION
But it’s not just student roles that need reevaluating in terms of equity and learner-centeredness. In a model
where student employment is an intentional learning experience, the principal facilitators of student learning are
work supervisors. The very term “supervisor” is laden with values and meanings antithetical to learner-centered
and critical pedagogies. Per the dictionary definition, a supervisor is “in charge of an employee,” “directs” people
and tasks, and, in the literal meaning of the word, “oversees” work, workers, or departments.18 As a term tied to
top-down authority, hierarchy, and the maintenance of compliance and productivity, it erases the agency and
autonomy of those who are supervised. As Kayo Denda and Jennifer Hunter note, this hierarchical model of
supervision operates to the detriment of the learning of both student and supervisor, and is at odds with learner-
centered and justice-oriented pedagogies that reject hierarchical relationships between student and teacher in
favor of thinking of students as “critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher.”19 While contemporary
understandings of supervision, in the library and elsewhere, might place more emphasis on mentoring and
coaching, thinking of student employment as an educational practice that foregrounds learners and equity re-
quires that we consider what constitutes learner-centered supervision, and how to bring to bear pedagogies that
recognize students’ knowledge and are responsive to their cultural practices and material realities in the context
of supervisory relationships.
Librarians have considered the application of universal design for learning, culturally sustaining pedagogy,
feminist pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and trauma informed approaches to various modes of instruction and to
the reference and other work performed at service desks.20 But many of the structural components of student
employment would appear to be at odds with such reflective and critical practices: hiring, firing, job training,
assigning work tasks, and reviewing work performance often happen within a fairly static set of authority re-
lationships, and are connected by an assumption that student employees should assimilate to the values and
culture of the library.21 A facilitative, learner-centered approach to supervision, that adheres to pedagogical
practices rooted in a concern for equity, will necessarily entail recognizing that supervisors almost always have
more power in any given situation. Nevertheless, it also involves making a commitment to student employees
as collaborators and co-learners, and practicing what we might term supervisory humility—acknowledging, in
Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s words, that “in any given exchange I likely have less to teach than I have to learn,” and that
it’s not necessarily the supervisor who always has the relevant knowledge or skill.22
Aligning learner-centered supervision and equity-focused pedagogies might also require relinquishing what
bell hooks refers to in a classroom context as “rituals of control”: having students design and write their own
performance reviews (taking cues perhaps from the practice of “ungrading”), for example, or co-create policies
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and procedures, including around the conditions of their own employment.23 We can choose to respond to what
we perceive as poor performance not with disciplinary measures, but from a place of care and curiosity, asking
first what might be happening in a student’s life that’s having an impact on work, or what it is about their work
situation that might be affecting their performance. In the context of student employment as engaged learning,
supervisory position descriptions, supervisor performance review, and the language in which we talk about su-
pervision—perhaps even the term itself—need to change, alongside the practice of supervision. It isn’t sufficient
to say that supervisors are educators; we also need to think about what types of educators they are, and how they
educate.
LIBRARY HIERARCHIES AND ROLES
Conceiving of supervisors as educators, as facilitators of student learning and participants in multidirectional,
cross-hierarchy learning relationships, also means examining their role in the organization—another way in
which student employment as learning requires us to consider equity, inclusion, and stratification in our orga-
nizations at large. Some student employees are supervised by staff with the title “librarian,” who may or may not
have instructional responsibilities. But many student employees are supervised by non-librarian staff with no
formal instructional responsibilities. Those supervisors are already teaching and mentoring in myriad, often un-
acknowledged, ways; participation in teaching and learning is therefore already distributed throughout library
organizations, rather than being the purview of a single group of staff, and formalizing student employment as
educationally purposeful only underscores that fact.24 However, while participation and expertise in the work of
teaching and learning is distributed throughout the library, respect, status, and remuneration for that work are
not distributed in the same way. And there is the potential, as Jill Markgraf points out, for there to be multilay-
ered resistance to the very idea of supervisors as educators, both from faculty and from supervisors themselves.25
To focus on equity in how we pursue student employment as a high-impact or experiential learning opportunity
means recognizing that issues of equity for student staff are not separable from issues of equity for other library
staff, and that supervisors are learners too. An equitable, learner-centered approach to student employment has
to encompass recognition, support, training, and development for supervisors as facilitators of learning.
And it has to encompass honest conversations about how labor is distributed, valued, and rewarded in
academic libraries. Supervising student employees is only a fraction of most supervisors’ responsibilities, and
formally adding educational work and facilitation of student-centered learning to those responsibilities partici-
pates in a trend of shifting labor down the library hierarchy without a commensurate increase in compensation
or a reduction in other workloads.26 Shifting or expanding work and responsibilities down the academic library
hierarchy means shifting them from the least diverse strata of staff—librarians—to more diverse and lower
paid non-librarian staff. And this dynamic, of course, encompasses student staff too, particularly those in roles
that readily lend themselves to a high-impact framework, such as research consultants or peer tutors, or those
undertaking project-based work in addition to their regularly scheduled tasks. Here too one of the lowest paid
groups of staff in the library take on work previously considered the domain of staff in more privileged positions.
And if the logic that justifies passing this work to low-paid student staff is its compensatory educational value,
for supervisors changes in roles and responsibilities come with the rhetoric of vocational awe, participation in
the educational mission, and the selfless necessity of “supporting our students.” Making a meaningful commit-
ment to student employment as a learner-centered and equitable educational practice necessitates examining on
whose labor this practice will depend, how their work will be supported, and what changes might be required in
our organizational structures to ensure it is supported fairly.
EMPLOYABILITY AND SOFT SKILLS
Figuring the educational value of library student employment as part of the compensation package, and using
it as justification for expanding the responsibilities of student staff, is a narrative familiar from the logic that
underpins unpaid internships: badly recompensed or uncompensated labor is pitched as a skills-building ex-
perience, an investment, that will pay dividends in the student’s future. Libraries can thus legitimize expanding
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student employment “by positing that we are paying students fairly in intangible value (education), even though,
and especially because, we are not paying them fairly in the form of wages.”27 This future-oriented focus on the
educational and employment benefits that will accrue as a result of the student’s work experience is a consistent
theme in arguments for student employment as engaged learning, in libraries and elsewhere, and conforms to
what Ross J. Benbow and Matthew T. Hora identify as the employability narrative. It’s a narrative that they sug-
gest is driven by business interests and policymakers, and results in skills-based educational imperatives that are
codified in various lists, frameworks, and taxonomies.28 And it’s a narrative of which libraries must be wary in
seeking to frame student employment as a learning experience.
The concept of employability or career readiness—and the collection of skills, achievements, experiences,
and attributes that feed into it—individualizes responsibility for students’ success, suggesting that those who
invest in themselves and commoditize themselves in the right way will be rewarded with a future return on that
investment in the form of employment. This logic often overlooks the fact that students are current and not just
future workers, who need to eat and pay rent in the here and now as well as after they graduate. But it also fails
to acknowledge structural problems that affect employability, such as increasing job precarity, stagnating wages,
the expanding gig economy, the growing wealth gap, and evaporating job pensions and benefits, and ignores
the persistence and impact of discriminatory hiring practices.29 By the terms of employability discourse, failure
is the result of individual deficits rather than structural oppression, making minoritized students responsible
for what are actually the effects of systemic inequities.30 Libraries carelessly deploying ideas of career readiness
and employability in regard to student employment therefore subscribe to educational discourses of individual
responsibility and private gain that reinforce inequitable racialized economic structures.
Furthermore, ideas of employability or career readiness are inextricable from an emphasis on developing the
“soft skills” (or non-cognitive or essential skills) deemed desirable by employers, like those detailed in the widely
referenced NACE reports. Emphasizing such skills as a key component of the educational benefits of student em-
ployment again presents libraries with a multifaceted equity issue. Suggesting that the needs of students are self-
identical to the needs of corporate employers reduces and constrains possibilities for students from the outset,
and cedes the purpose of higher education to the demands of the marketplace—to producing employees rather
than thinkers or citizens, and to shoring up capital rather than participatory democracy. As Ian Beilin points
out, this framing of higher education manifests in pressure on libraries to teach assessable skills with workplace
utility in order to demonstrate that they are contributing to definitions of student success that equate to produc-
ing “job-ready graduates.”31 But more than this, the “soft skills paradigm” posits as universal and neutral a set
of skills that are actually value-laden and culturally specific, and that often embed whiteness and class privilege.
Ideas about what constitute “good communication skills,” for instance, are “based on racial, gendered, and class-
oriented judgements and ‘common sense’ about what is good, normal, and acceptable.”32 Orienting the educative
value of student employment solely to these skills runs the risk of student employment simply being another in a
long line of means by which libraries have reproduced whiteness and sought to assimilate, discipline, and civilize
working-class and racial and ethnic “others” into a particular set of race-class ideals.33
The soft skills paradigm also insists that certain desirable skills are generic and universally applicable, and
that “getting a job is simply a matter of a student possessing the ‘right’ skills,” when research suggests that useful
job skills are actually “interconnected assemblages of skill, knowledge, and ability” that “cannot be understood
if divorced from specific geographic, professional, and cultural contexts.”34 Recognizing the contextual, con-
tingent, and culturally determined nature of the skills required by a particular profession or discipline means
recognizing that they are not quick or easy to teach or learn, can’t be approached in a vacuum or developed in
a stand-alone workshop, and are enmeshed with the development of other kinds of social and cultural capital.35
Students then not only need to learn those skills in context, but need to understand skills in general as situated
and contextual, and recognize and respond to the different work and learning contexts in which they find them-
selves. Library student employment has considerable potential for supporting this kind of learning, in that it
provides a real-life, embedded opportunity for learning and applying particular skills in a specific context, and
for reflecting on and discerning that contextuality. Promoting reflective awareness of how definitions of “good
communication” or “teamwork” might vary in differing situations is something that can be consciously threaded
through students’ work experience, as can reflection on how such skills and concepts are inflected not just by
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workplace context but also by gender, race, and class. Any framing of the learning value of library student em-
ployment in terms of skill development must, therefore, acknowledge the complexity of teaching and learning
such skills, their situated nature, and the cultural values they index and reproduce.
STUDENT SUCCESS
Discourses of employability, job or career readiness, and soft skills point to the ways in which library student
employment as an educational practice is pulled between the two poles of NACE and Freire, but also constitutes
an opportunity to serve the differing definitions of student success that those two poles represent—success as
corporate employability, and success as the critical ability to ask why the world is as it is, and to participate in its
transformation. In Beilin’s words, the challenge for academic libraries “should be to teach success on two levels.
We ought to encourage alternative definitions of success while at the same time ensure success in the existing
system.”36 For working-class students, first-generation students, and students of color, acquiring workplace skills
may in fact be a necessity “for the survival of students themselves.”37 Navigating both the material realities of
students’ lives and the socioeconomic and political realities of our institutions requires identifying, in Karen
Nicholson’s phrase, the “constraints and affordances” presented by this neoliberal context.38 Beilin suggests that
“focusing on the immediate local needs of a specific context can allow us to effectively promote dual success,”
and the local context of student employment certainly affords us the opportunity to both help students survive
within the inequitable systems we have while encouraging alternate definitions of success and developing the
critical capacity to see how those systems might be changed.39
How we engage, then, with narratives of employability and soft skills can reflect the fact that “capitalism does
not set the only or exclusive terms for thinking about students and/as workers.”40 Adopting a learner-centered
approach and taking a cue from Beilin, we can ask students themselves what constitutes success, in their work
with us and longer term, and not adhere to one-size-fits-all learning outcomes informed by the needs of corpo-
rate employers. We can also prepare students to deal with the discrimination that can shape the job-seeking pro-
cess, and we can acknowledge the fact of precarity and the gig economy. We can consciously avoid propping up
meritocratic myths, and use the daily realities of library work as occasions for critical conversations about work-
place skills and labor conditions.41 What better situation, indeed, to think through authority as constructed? In
short, we can strive for greater transparency in discussing the social, economic, and cultural context of employ-
ment in order to prepare students for that reality, raise their critical consciousness about it, and “discover ways it
can be challenged, opposed, and overcome.”42 The very real work context of the library provides an opportunity
to engage students in conversations about not just how things currently are, but also how they might be different.
NOTES
1. Brian Pusser, “Of a Mind to Labor: Reconceptualizing Student Work and Higher Education” in Understanding the Working College
Student: New Research and its Implications for Policy and Practice, ed. Laura W. Perna (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2010), 142.
2. George S. McClellan, Kristina Creager, and Marianna Savoca, A Good Job: Campus Employment as a High-Impact Practice (Ster-
ling, VA: Stylus, 2018), 86. For Freire see: Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970; New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).
3. Though I use the term equity throughout this paper, I want to acknowledge critiques of equity as a concept, including as part of
the now proverbial DEI package. Scholars such as Rinaldo Walcott and Sara Ahmed have identified how DEI discourse works to
maintain the inequitable structures of the university and forestall radical change. But in a recent talk, Walcott noted that equity
can nevertheless be understood as a “transitional idea,” an “opening, a beginning, a bridge,” a “causeway to a different set of human
relations,” and a way into thinking about how “inequities frame our everyday lives at both the macro and micro levels.” And it’s in
that spirit that I use equity here—aware of its compromises and limitations, wary of its institutionalized usage, but as a way to start
asking questions and thinking change that might help us on our way to somewhere fundamentally different. See Rinaldo Walcott,
“After Equity: ‘Another University Now’” (lecture, Diversity: Its History & Purpose Speaker Series, Department of African and
African-American Studies at the University of Kansas, March 4, 2021), https://youtu.be/-1Zv1OHKpkA.
4. Matthew T. Hora, Rena Yehuda Newman, Robert Hemp, Jasmine Brandon, and Yi-Jung Wu, “Reframing Student Employability:
From Commodifying the Self to Supporting Student, Worker, and Societal Well-Being,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning
52, no. 1 (January/February 2020) 44.
5. Rosan Mitola, Erin Rinto, and Emily Pattni, “Student Employment as a High-Impact Practice in Academic Libraries: A Systematic
Review,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 44, no. 3 (2018): 360-61.
A P R I L 13–16, 2021 • V I RT UA L328 Liz Vine
6. George Kuh, Ken O’Donnell, and Carol Geary Schneider, “HIPS at Ten,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 49, no. 5 (Sep-
tember/October 2017): 8-16.
7. Matt Brim, Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 36.
8. Brim, Poor Queer Studies, 36.
9. See: Judith Scott-Clayton and Rachel Yang Zhou, “Does the Federal Work-Study Program Really Work—and for Whom?” (re-
search brief, Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment, Columbia University, New York, March 2017).
10. Jaena Alabi, “From Hostile to Inclusive: Strategies for Improving the Racial Climate of Academic Libraries,” Library Trends 67, no.
1 (Summer 2018): 131-46.
11. See: Kaetrena Davis Kendrick and Ione T. Damasco, “Low Morale in Ethnic and Racial Minority Academic Librarians: An Expe-
riential Study,” Library Trends 68, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 174-212; Jennifer Brown et al., “We Here: Speaking Our Truth,” Library Trends
67, no. 1 (Summer 2018): 163-181; Sylvia Hurtado and Adriana Ruiz, “The Climate for Underrepresented Groups and Diversity
on Campus” (research brief, Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA, June 2012); Chrystal A. George Mwangi et al. “‘Black
Elephant in the Room’: Black Students Contextualizing Campus Racial Climate Within US Racial Climate,” Journal of College
Student Development 59, no. 4 (July-August 2018): 456-474.
12. Brim, Poor Queer Studies, 38.
13. For one or two student employee positions, see: H. Bussell and J. Hagman, “From Training to Learning: Developing Student
Employees Through Experiential Learning Design,” in The Experiential Library: Transforming Academic and Research Libraries
Through the Power of Experiential Learning, ed. Pete McDonnell (Cambridge, MA: Chandos Publishing, 2017), 147-59. For peer
research or reference advisors, see: Cara Evanson, “‘We Aren’t Just the Kids That Sit at the Front’: Rethinking Student Employee
Training,” College & Research Libraries News 76, no. 1 (2015): 30-33; Erin Rinto, Rosan Mitola, and Kate Otto, “Reframing Library
Student Employment as a High-Impact Practice: Implications From Case Studies,” College & Undergraduate Libraries 26, no. 4
(2019): 260-77; Jamie Seeholzer, “Making It Their Own: Creating Meaningful Opportunities for Student Employees in Academic
Library Services,” College & Undergraduate Libraries 20, no. 2 (2013): 215-23. For students in specific library units, see: Tracy
Grimm and Neal Harmeyer, “On-the-Job Information Literacy: A Case Study of Student Employees at Purdue University Archives
and Special Collections,” in Learning Beyond the Classroom: Engaging Students in Information Literacy Through Co-Curricular
Activities, ed. Silvia Vong and Manda Vrlkjan (Chicago: ACRL, 2020), 75-87; Beth Hoag and Sarah Sagmoen, “Leading, Learn-
ing, and Earning: Creating a Meaningful Student Employment Program,” in Students Lead the Library: The Importance of Student
Contributions to the Academic Library, ed. Sara Arnold-Garza and Carissa Tomlinson (Chicago: ACRL, 2017), 1-20. For graduate
students, see: Beth Thomsett-Scott, “Creating a Formal Program to Train LIS Students for Reference Services,” The Reference Li-
brarian 53, no. 1 (2012): 41-59; Rinto, Mitola, and Otto, “Reframing Library Student Employment as a High-Impact Practice.” For
unpaid internships, see: Maggie Gallup Kopp, “Internships in Special Collections: Experiential Pedagogy, Intentional Design, and
High-Impact Practice,” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 20, no. 1 (2019): 12-27.
14. Matthew Hora, Zi Chen, Emily Parrott, and Pa Her, “Problematizing College Internships: Exploring Issues with Access, Program
Design and Developmental Outcomes,” International Journal of Work-Integrated Learning 21, no. 3 (2020): 235-52.
15. Bussell and Hagman, “From Training to Learning,” 156; David James Hudson, “The Whiteness of Practicality,” in Topographies of
Whiteness: Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Science, ed. Gina Schlesselman-Tarango (Sacramento, CA: Library Juice
Press, 2017), 212.
16. Olivia Baca, Cindy Pierard, and Anne Schultz, “Connecting Student Employment to Student Learning and Development” (Na-
tional Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, University of Illinois and Indiana University, Urbana, IL, June 2020).
17. Kayo Denda and Jennifer Hunter, “Building 21st Century Skills and Creating Communities: A Team-based Engagement Frame-
work for Student Employment in Academic Libraries,” Journal of Library Administration 56, no. 3 (2016): 263.
18. OED Online, s.v. “supervisor, n.,” updated December 2020.
19. Denda and Hunter, “Building 21st Century Skills,” 254; for “critical co-investigators,” see Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 81.
20. See, among many others: Chapel Cowden, Priscilla Seaman, Sarah Copeland, and Lu Gao, “Teaching with Intent: Applying Cultur-
ally Responsive Teaching to Library Instruction,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 21, no. 2 (2021): 231-51; Meredith Knoff and
Maya Hobscheid, “Enacting Service Policies Through Pedagogy to Create a More Inclusive Student Experience,” Public Services
Quarterly 17, no. 1 (2021): 12-25; Maria T. Accardi, Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press,
2013); Eamon Tewell, “The Problem with Grit: Dismantling Deficit Thinking in Library Instruction,” portal: Libraries and the
Academy 20, no. 1 (January 2020): 137-59; Maria T. Accardi, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier, eds., Critical Library Instruc-
tion: Theories and Methods (Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press, 2010).
21. Examples of such assimilative approaches to student employment include: Jane McGurn Kathman and Michael D. Kathman,
“What Difference Does Diversity Make in Managing Student Employees?” College & Research Libraries 59, no. 4 (1998): 378-89;
Patti Gibbons, “Training Tomorrow’s Workforce: Teaching Lifelong Job Skills and Cultivating Professionalism During Student
Employment,” in Library Volunteers Welcome! Strategies for Attracting, Retaining and Making the Most of Willing Helpers, ed. Carol
Smallwood and Lura Sanborn (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016), 103-110.
22. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2019), 34.
23. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 5. For ungrad-
ing see: Susan D. Blum, ed., Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (Morgantown: West
AC R L 2021 • A S C E N D I N G I N TO A N O P E N F U T U R EHIP Check 329
Virginia University Press, 2020).
24. Kate Burke and Belinda Lawrence, “The Accidental Mentorship: Library Managers’ Roles in Student Employees’ Academic Profes-
sional Lives,” College & Research Libraries News 72, no. 2 (February 2011): 99-103.
25. Jill Markgraf, “Unleash Your Library’s HIPster: Transforming Student Library Jobs into High-Impact Practices,” in Creating
Sustainable Community: The Proceedings of the ACRL 2015 Conference, March 25-28, Portland, Oregon, ed. Dawn M. Mueller (Chi-
cago: ACRL, 2015), 773. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2015/Markgraf.pdf
26. Max Bowman refers to this phenomenon as “librarian flight.” Max Bowman and Monica Samsky, “Access Services: Not Waving,
But Drowning,” in Veronica Arellano Douglas and Joanna Gadsby, eds., Deconstructing Service in Libraries: Intersections of Identi-
ties and Expectations (Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, 2020), 90.
27. Elliot Kuecker, “Ideology and Rhetoric of Undergraduate Student Workers in Academic Libraries,” Progressive Librarian 46 (Win-
ter 2017/18): 52.
28. Ross J. Benbow and Matthew T. Hora, “Reconsidering College Student Employability: A Cultural Analysis of Educator and Em-
ployer Conceptions of Workplace Skills,” Harvard Educational Review 88, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 483-607.
29. Hora et al., “Reframing Student Employability,” 37-45; Lincoln Quillian, Devah Pager, Ole Hexel, and Arnfinn H. Midtbøen,
“Meta-analysis of Field Experiments Shows No Change in Racial Discrimination in Hiring Over Time,” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 114, no. 41 (2017): 10870-75.
30. Matthew T. Hora, Ross J. Benbow, and Bailey B. Smolarek, “Re-thinking Soft Skills and Student Employability: A New Paradigm
for Undergraduate Education,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 50, no. 6 (2018): 31.
31. Ian Beilin, “Student Success and the Neoliberal Academic Library,” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 1, no. 1 (2016):
16-17.
32. Hora, Benbow, and Smolarek, “Re-thinking Soft Skills and Student Employability,” 34.
33. See, among others, Gina Schlesselman-Tarango, “The Legacy of Lady Bountiful: White Women in the Library,” Library Trends 64,
no. 4 (Spring 2016): 667-86.
34. Benbow and Hora, “Reconsidering College Student Employability,” 508.
35. Hora, Benbow, and Smolarek, “Re-thinking Soft Skills and Student Employability.”
36. Beilin, “Student Success and the Neoliberal Academy,” 18.
37. Beilin, “Student Success and the Neoliberal Academy,” 17.
38. Karen Nicholson, “The McDonaldization of Academic Libraries and the Values of Transformational Change,” College & Research
Libraries 76, no. 3 (March 2015), 333.
39. Beilin, “Student Success and the Neoliberal Academy,” 19.
40. Brim, Poor Queer Studies, 102.
41. Pusser, “Of a Mind to Labor,” 149.
42. Hora, Benbow, and Smolarek, “Re-thinking Soft Skills and Student Employability,” 36.
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