It’s Disability Pride Month, and I’m celebrating community and connection.
Last Friday, I unboxed some assistive listening technology. I’d had to wait for it, and so was worried I had only imagined the positive impact from the first time I trialled it. But it was still there, and I once again benefited from something I hadn’t realised could help because I’d relied so heavily on adapting.
I also did a final workplace presentation before moving. It was a reflection titled “Impact through connection,” and I had a lot of fun with it.
Beyond reflecting on projects (sometimes at my own expense), I discussed positionality, reflection, reflexivity, and some future directions. From my experience, evidence comes with aspirations and hope for how things might change. And that’s rewarding – it’s a privilege to have people share and trust you with their insights or experiences and to build new partnerships and connections from that.
Yet, as I wrote earlier this year, the risk in evidence-based practice is that “we focus on assessing change but miss celebrating the connection that created it.”
And that felt odd to write – why wouldn’t we want to focus on evaluating what change looks like? But, when we look at the different values surrounding our efforts to create value and impact, new ways of understanding and evaluating what makes a change meaningful to a community arise.
While the presentation focused on evidence-based practice, the themes wove across many aspects of my work. Values of connection and community are important to me, and I believe they carry across in much of what I do.
While having access to assistive tech feels like a very individual thing, for me it’s happened through connection and access to community. The great part is that it supports further access and contribution.
The assistive technology I use isn’t a perfect solution, and the social and professional spaces I exist in aren’t perfect either. So, I’m thankful that I have access to both. They are complementary, allowing me to call for and respond to change differently and negotiate the balance between each.
That balance between them reminds me of a paper by Nikki Andersen, where she reflects:
“Throughout my career, I have learned the power of self-acceptance and self-advocacy, whilst also realising there is a delicate dance between adaptability and advocacy. … Somehow, I have found a balance between well-being and productivity; adaptability and advocacy; resilience, and the courage to call for change” (Anderson, 2024).
For me, whether adapting, advocating, or (more often than not) doing both at once – it’s connection and community driving impact. Community has been a catalyst to call for change. I suspect I would otherwise have continued stubbornly sticking with complete adaptability.
I closed my presentation with ongoing thoughts on future directions for evidence-based practice across library sectors, which I will carry forward and have already written about in Creative inquiry in EBP: “It’s not just …” and Finding purpose & potential in library impact assessment.
My own experiences of higher education as an undergraduate student were challenging. So, my positionality has led to questions about who evidence is serving or benefiting, and how we can ensure it is an accurate depiction of what needs to change.
So, I do continue to think that – especially in libraries – connection and partnership is an important part of understanding not just how we collect evidence but why.
I started from an extremely critical – but also hopeful – perspective on what evidence-based practice could be when done well in any sector. And I would hope I continue to create value through that.
