11 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 301 2020 Lorde’s sentiment here continues to be a guiding force in understanding that we must go a step further than creating student- centered programming and recognize that the diversity of UIC’s student population—with regard to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, ability, immigration status, religion, and many other facets—must be explicitly spelled out and focused upon that is to say, in order to instill the values that Lorde discusses and to truly take on community- centered-ness, we cannot minimize the differences and wide-ranging diverse sets of needs of our undergraduate student community. We must not only apply an intersectional theoretical approach to creating community but center these narratives in the decision-making process in order to have a truly student-centric approach. In feminist praxis, the theoretical is only as good as the ability to put theory into practice. As the UIC Library had already adopted a specific mechanism for illustrating its strategic planning, we opted to utilize the same mechanism—a logic model—in order to organize our thinking through enacting our methodologically guided approach. A logic model can be described as “a systematic and visual way to present and share your understanding of the relationships among the resources you have to operate your program, the activities you plan, and the changes or results you hope to achieve.”18 Implementing a logic model was not without its challenges. Though the model visually illustrated various resources and relationships, it was a difficult framework to grasp for undergraduate engagement for two reasons. Primarily, it was challenging to dissect engagement events and relationships that were already in motion, but the structure of the logic model itself brushed against traditional ways of thinking about library programming as well as our methodologies and theoretical approaches to undergraduate engagement.
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