When we first enter the library profession, we quickly become surrounded by the pressures of pretending to know more than we do a breeding ground for imposter syndrome. Developing expertise is a good and fulfilling goal, but it can be punitive, intimidating and limiting especially to early career librarians. To grow in the profession sustainably, it is important, and even necessary, to address those concerns early with experimentation and collaboration. In this unconference-style workshop, we will collectively build a temporal environment where we share strategies, activities, and approaches to meaningful one-shot library instruction. Using the workshop as an instruction template, we will collaboratively build a toolkit crowdsourced from participants of every level of expertise. In doing so, we learn various practices used by librarians from different fields and institutions. Participants will come away feeling empowered in their current level of expertise around library instruction. The workshop is experimental by nature, and is being tweaked and iterated upon to submit to various conferences to gather the perspectives of all types of individuals engaged in instruction. In doing so, we want to recognize the work, experiences, and identities of the participants while acknowledging the gaps, biases, and positionality each one of us holds when we teach and instruct students from equally different and diverse backgrounds. We hope to provide a productive space in the hands-on workshop for participants to collaborate in a low stakes way, sharing successes and pain points surrounding their instructional practice and experiences by relating and connecting with one another.
