Can we play? Building Opportunities for Student Activism

andEngagement and why it matters.

Ka-Ming Pang and Jo NorwoodMA Information StudiesUniversity of Brighton

We live in challenging times. LIS

students have a vested interest

in the profession.

They needtake the

opportunity to engage and be more active.

Advocacy and Engagement: University of Brighton MA Informations Studies: A case

study.

Advocacy and Activism

Engagement

What has been done to engage the class

Class Survey on Activism and Engagement

Small data sample is not useful for formulating meaningful statistics.

Writing questionnaires is hard, but ooh look, written comments!

RESULTS!

No correlation between tools used and age, gender or type

of study.

Via Flickr Commons: Adactio

Reasons for joining CILIP:

•Cheap for students.

•Good for employability,

•Keeps Students up todate with library related information.

Reasons for not joining CILIP

• Expensive for students.

• Doesn't benefit them as students.

• Perceived lack of political activity.

“CILIP is supposed to join information

workers together to have a collective

voice, but I haven’t seen evidence of that. I don’t see organised

political activity during the current crisis in

our industry, or anything of use.”

Two thirds of students are active. They were involved in:

•Read ins. •Letter writing•Protests•Leafleting•Passing on information.

Conclusions and Action Points

Building an effective communication strategy: Use as

many tools as possible!

CILIP needs to reach out to students.

•Connect earlier with students.•Relate sessions to relevant events •Promote their advocacy work better.

Politically activity needs to be fed back into the class.

Stronger networks = Stronger Voice

Thanks for listening

Ka-Ming Pang (@AgentK23)

Jo Norwood (@DreamingEntity)