My first year with the Library Educator Course (LEC) was an experience that threw open different doors and windows in my mind, and left me floating in the ideas that emerged. LEC is a seven month professional development course offered by Bookworm that consumes and excites. I stood on the fringes and let everything wash over. LEC in the year after that, strengthened some of these ideas and rooted some of the thoughts and questions evoked in the time in between. And then came LEC 2020.
2020, has been a year of many firsts for many reasons. The library closed for two months, a first in its 15 years. We learnt to use google meet and zoom, to always use earphones, to mute and to unmute ourselves and others and not even consider this impolite, to use email at least a little more than before. And two months later, as we tumbled into the library, after months of withdrawal, the LEC continuation decision weighed heavily on everyone’s minds.
We have in the past been scathingly and irrevocably against any form of online workshops or training, knowing how valuable physical meetings and sharings can be. We have also in the past been firm in the decision to go on despite odds. And so, although we reasoned and shared and discussed and weighed the pros and cons, we were subconsciously already moving, and moving ahead.
We were fortunate to have both Alexis and Nayan join us this year. Nayan’s energy lifted us up and sustained the many tasks that descended fast, while Alexis’s gentle instruction made zoom and other online avenues accessible to all of us. We were fortunate to have Niju who patiently coaxed us into sitting in separate rooms, using earphones, and asking the most of our struggling internet. We were fortunate to have Lalita who made countless visits and phone calls to internet providers, scanned a multitude of books, and handled our many urgent requests gracefully. We were fortunate to have the team who remained post pandemic, who quietly packed materials, glued on stamps, took on new tasks and sent off thirty packages into the mailbox, time and time again. We were fortunate to have our faculty and mentors on the LEC who moved into the online offering rather seamlessly giving us hope.
And we were fortunate to have Sujata, who with quiet ease and positivity formed our time table, moulded the content into online feasibility, scaffolded the course with intimacy and connection, and nurtured this diverse team together. And so, with the larger LEC team, we stood shoulder to shoulder, and supported by innumerable hands and words of support, LEC 2020 began.
We met EVERY Monday as a working team, and spent 2-3 hours discussing, planning and sharing for the week ahead. Emails, packages, assignments, rubrics, reports, Sunday stories, budgets and expense accounts, session plans, time table, in between activities, moodle discussions, the virtual library, recordings, conversations that came up, concerns that needed sorting, moodle discussion topics, assignment review, posts on the fora and joys that sustained us through the week sped up the week.
LEC 2020 was many hours, but hours of purposeful intense engagement. It was coordinating within the internal team, and with the larger LEC team, with participants, and with associated organisations, and experiencing the kindness in each one’s words that came with every interaction. LEC 2020 was holding a unit with Nayan for the first time, plans and replans, questions, break downs, late night thoughts, and the stress of not getting it right; and it was the feedback, the support, the response, the constant words of encouragement from Sujata, Usha, and the larger LEC group that made everything alright.
As I look back at LEC, and with the final contact in January 2021 a week away, there is so much that I am still processing and internalising and allowing to settle within. Amongst it all, something that has been reverberating in me for some time, is the practice of working together with a shared purpose.
LEC 2020 has not been anything close to smooth sailing. But there hasn’t been a doubt in any of our minds that it was more than worth it. We know that the 27 participants, 6 faculty, mentors, various alumni, guest faculty and others who are part of LEC 2020 will have taken some part of the course with them. LEC reaffirms something about what we do. It reminds us that we are part of a larger community and a larger movement, and as we step towards year 5 of the Library Educators Certificate course, we know that the circle is slowly but surely growing and strengthening. And we are fortunate to be a link in this circle.
