Instructions to Participants

Please read the article at inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/towards-critical-assessment-practice and reflect on any ways your practices incorporate critical assessment principles or ideas.

Learning Outcomes

Our aim is to invite attendees to engage reflectively and critically in a nuanced discussion about the nature of power, bias, and positionality in library assessment work and to share experiences and lessons learned from putting these ideas into practice. Following this conversation, participants will be able to:

• Examine underlying assumptions and power structures in current assessment practices
• Reflect on the assessment practitioners’ own positionality and institutional context and the ways in which that shapes our work throughout the assessment cycle
• Explore other disciplines and alternative methodologies in order to critically consider ways of engaging user communities in assessment work
• Build community with other critical assessment practitioners within the wider assessment field

Relevance to the assessment community

In 2018, the authors presented the ideas from the proposed article in a Library Assessment Conference paper designed to highlight questions related to power structures, equity, and social justice in library assessment. We revisited these ideas in 2020, focusing on the practical challenges of implementation and holding that in tension with the desire for “quick fixes” for systemic issues. Throughout our presentations, we posed a number of questions to the audience with which we have grappled, including:

• How do our own identities, institutional positions, and perspectives shape our work?
• What is the purpose of the assessment, who decides what to assess, and who benefits from the work?
• Are there elements of our institutional contexts (e.g., an emphasis on a culture of accountability) that create tension with the values we try to bring to our work? How might a more critical approach transform these approaches to assessment?
• What are the histories and contexts of the methods we choose, and how do these shape our work? How can we take account of the histories and inequities of qualitative methods such as ethnography, even while these methods are often posited as an antidote to an overemphasis on quantitative assessment?
• What is considered “evidence” and who decides?
• Are we working in ways that enable power sharing and engagement with user communities at all stages of the process, from question formulation and data analysis, to decision-making?

We continue to grapple with these topics and questions, and we think they still warrant a deeper engagement from the library assessment community. While we have had the opportunity to facilitate discussions and activities on critical assessment at other conferences, the format change to LAC 2020 meant that we have not yet had the opportunity to engage with our broader assessment peers in a similarly open discussion. In the intervening time, Critical Assessment has taken on a life of its own, with an American Library Association profile on “Keeping up with…Critical Assessment” and important expansions and reframing, such as “Moving from Critical Assessment to Assessment as Care.” While we have seen a general shift to equity-informed assessment and recent revisions to the ACRL Assessment Proficiencies, which now include a greater focus on equity and social justice, the core question remains the same: how do we translate this into practice in our day-to-day work? We propose returning to these original questions from the perspective of practitioners who have been attempting to translate our inquiry and reflection into changes to our assessment activities, program, and engagement with institutional colleagues. We also hope to learn from participants who have adopted, adapted, and made these ideas their own. By revisiting this article at LAC, we hope to exchange challenges and lessons learned over the six years since we began this conversation.

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