Intentional failure and Rhianna's tattoo as pedagogy

Abstract

Academic teaching librarians are often classroom visitors, with limited time to build relationships with students and teach them something useful. To maximize impact, librarians commonly deploy a canned search to demonstrate information seeking strategies. Demonstrating instant perfection is a detriment to student learning that reinforces classroom power inequities and portrays an unrealistic expectation of reallife searching and research. This column invites teaching librarians to instead demonstrate failure in classroom instruction as a way to bolster student confidence, experiential learning and mutual trust.