14 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 292 2017 event, who said it looked good. During the class, however, we received little participation from the students. Two weeks after, the coordinator came back to us and said that several students were offended by our presentation, feeling that it was too basic an introduction to cultural competence and that our examples about cultural competence in the classroom should have included learning points for students of color as well. We also learned that the students who attended that day were mostly experienced TAs, not new TAs, and that they had a background in critical cultural communication, not education. As a result of this experience, we are conducting research to learn more about how we can improve the library’s services for students of color. © 2017 Lorelei Rutledge and Lis Pankl. This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Catherine Soehner, Associate Dean for Research and User Services, The University of Utah When I first became a new manager in a library, I was surprised to learn just how many difficult conversations I would need to have. People weren’t doing their jobs to the stated expectations, or there weren’t any stated expectations, or I needed to ask someone to do something I was pretty sure they didn’t want to do, or other people showed up late (or didn’t show up at all) to classes or desk shifts, and yet still others were consistently negative in their approach to the work in front of them. I knew I needed to have conversations with each of these individuals, but had no idea how to do that. Further, when I tried to have these conversations, they went badly, people were more upset and stormed out of my office, and behavior did not change. I was terrified. I hated conflict, so maybe I should reconsider by ability or desire to do this job. Maybe I should re-think my life choices and every decision I’ve ever made up to this point. Or, maybe I should ask for help. I did all of these things. However, it was finding someone who knew about having difficult conversations and who was willing to
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