Social Justice Design and Implementation: Innovative Pedagogies to Transform LIS Education

The article discusses an instructor’s critical pedagogies and reflective practices in three graduate library and information science (LIS)-related courses on topics of social justice and inclusion advocacy, diversity leadership in information organizations, and community-engaged scholarship that were taught at the University of Alabama since spring 2019. Until recently, mainstream American LIS education has resisted adopting social justice vocabularies and implementation in its teaching, learning, and research owing to a professional cultural inertia of discarding outdated concepts (e.g., academic or library neutrality and passivity, solely Anglo-/Eurocentric research roots, privileged position assigned to post-positivistic paradigms, etc.). The article contextualizes three applications of innovative pedagogies in the LIS classroom that centralized social justice, diversity and inclusion, and community engagement by providing a glimpse of student learning outcomes, assignment requirements, tangible deliverables, student evaluations, and course opportunities and challenges. The courses explore a new theory- practice-impact discourse that is deliberate, systematic, rigorous, impact-driven, and action-oriented. Students’ “community-immersive” course projects integrated social justice contexts of learning, scholarship, engagement, and action. Responding to urgencies of moving beyond diversity lip-service and tokenism in LIS education, they disrupt traditional pedagogies and embrace critical information-applied activism in the white-privileged LIS academy. This is relevant, especially as we learn to aggressively confront racism in our ranks, re-establish cultural credibility situated in the recent epistemic waves protesting racially motivated police hostilities (e.g., Black Lives Matter movement), and confront political lethargy in redressing past wrongs.