By Drew Wallace

In September 2024, the Sprague Library at Montclair State University officially opened its newest study room, the Sensory Space. As the librarian who planned and implemented this project, I’d like to explain why the Sensory Space is so important and invite my peers from other New Jersey academic libraries to create sensory-friendly study areas at your own institutions. My intention here isn’t to say “Check out this awesome thing we did!” but rather “Check out this awesome thing that YOU can do.”

Here are a few reasons why you should create a sensory space at your library followed by a step-by-step plan to make it happen:

 Neurodivergent students are already here: The LIS literature indicates that neurodivergent students view the academic library as their safe space on campus and, accordingly, spend more time at the library than their neurotypical peers.

 Small changes make a big difference: Many library facilities are inaccessible to neurodivergent students because of sensory stressors like bright fluorescent lighting and excessive noise. Recalibrating the sensory profile of your study rooms can make your facilities more accessible to all students.

 Student success: Having a sensory-friendly space on campus is shown to improve academic performance and retention for neurodivergent students.

 Mental wellbeing: The de-stressing effects of a sensory space can also improve neurodivergent students’ sense of belonging and personal wellbeing.

 Low cost/high return: Small, relatively inexpensive modifications to existing library facilities can have an outsized impact on improving neurodivergent experiences in the library.

 DEI: Neurodiversity is a critical aspect of DEI that is often overlooked in academic communities. As an intersectional form of diversity, neurodivergence often amplifies existing inequities experienced by students from marginalized communities.

 Everyone benefits: Following the tenets of Universal Design, the benefits of a sensory space are shared among all users. Increasing accessibility for neurodivergent students doesn’t come at the expense of others.

How to create a sensory space at your academic library:

1. Discuss the idea of a sensory-friendly room with your peers. If you have any self-identifying neurodivergent colleagues, consider asking them to either lead or co-lead the project with you.

2. Communicate the benefits of a sensory-friendly room to your library administration. The support of your administration is essential since you’ll be asking them for space, money, and staffing resources.

3. Establish your working budget. Financial resources are understandably limited at many academic libraries, but you can make a functional sensory space for under $1,000. That being said, a larger budget will give you more flexibility and increase the capacity of your space.

4. Identify an appropriate room within your library for conversion into a sensory space. This should be a self-contained room with working doors that can be closed to provide sound isolation from adjoining areas. A well-ventilated, carpeted room generally works best. The size of the room you select should align with your budget; that is, the bigger the budget, the larger the room you can afford to retrofit as a sensory space.

5. Determine the potential student capacity of your room. While you may be tempted to set this number as high as possible, keep in mind that seating in a sensory-friendly room will be spread out more than in a typical group study room.

6. Coordinate with your facilities department to address any maintenance issues with the room, such as painting the walls or repairing visible damage. Walls should be painted a cool, soothing color like pale grey or blue.

7. Select your furnishings:

a. Lighting: Overhead or fluorescent lighting should be avoided if at all possible. Instead, corner lamps can be angled toward the walls to create a diffused lighting effect. A dimmable work lamp can be provided for each seat, allowing students to choose the lighting level that’s just right for them.

b. Sound: Acoustic dampening wall panels are the gold standard for noise reduction in your sensory room. However, they can be quite expensive, so using a combination of noise-canceling headphones and white noise (from a white noise machine or, even better, a HEPA filter) can be a budget-friendly alternative.

c. Seating: Privacy lounge chairs make for the best seating because they provide a sense of physical isolation from all types of sensory stressors. Like the acoustic wall panels, however, they tend to be rather pricey, ranging from $3,000 to $15,000 per chair. If privacy chairs don’t align with your budget, make sure to choose the most comfortable seating options you can afford. A variety of seating works best, such as a mixture of chairs with adjustable work surfaces, bucket seats, beanbags, and even yoga mats and cushions for floor seating.

d. Extras: Don’t overlook the small details like extension cords, phone charging cables, storage containers, and fidget toys.

8. Set up the space. Experiment with different furniture and lighting configurations. Recruit a group consisting of neurodivergent and neurotypical students and staff for user testing.

9. Determine and advertise your room policies and booking procedures. Remember the student capacity you calculated earlier? You can easily designate this number of bookable seats through LibCal. Your new sensory space can then be integrated with the other bookable spaces in your library.

10. Create the appropriate signage to help with wayfinding, communicate room policies, and provide QR codes for walk-in reservations. You can also link to feedback systems, like a Qualtrics survey, for documenting user experiences.

11. Train any relevant staff, particularly openers and closers, on room setup procedures to ensure the lighting and other elements are appropriately configured each day.

12. Marketing, marketing, marketing! Advertise your new sensory space anywhere you can, from the library website to university social media accounts to the local student newspaper.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to creating a sensory room, these steps should help get the ball rolling at your library. There are many ways to create a more accessible sensory experience for neurodivergent students regardless of your budget, so feel free to email me if you’d like any suggestions for your library.

Drew Wallace is the Research and Reference Librarian at the Sprague Library at Montclair State University. He can be reached at wallaced@montclair.edu.

By Alyssa Valenti

At Raritan Valley Community College, inclusive teaching has always been part of our work, but only recently have we brought it explicitly to the forefront with the college’s Access2Success initiative which “aims to engage the RVCC community in promoting students' short- and long-term success, working towards closing the opportunity gap that persists with disadvantaged and underrepresented students, particularly Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic, first generation, and under-resourced.” Over the last academic year, many faculty at RVCC have participated in book discussions and events centered on the book Inclusive Teaching by Viji Sathy and Kelly A. Hogan. I wrote about the Access2Success initiative in the Fall 2019 edition of this newsletter discussing the abolishment of overdue fines, but not about Access2Success through a pedagogical lens. 

In September, I attended the LibraryLinkNJ one day Inclusion Conference and heard a statement that really resonated with me regarding DEI work in that we often overlook the ‘I’ of inclusion. So much fantastic and meaningful effort is spent doing diversity and equity work that sometimes inclusion ends up being an afterthought, a box to be checked, or something that perhaps should occur organically if diversity and equity needs are met.

As a community college faculty member, teaching is probably the most important part of my work. Ensuring that all my students can succeed in an environment that supports them from where they are is mission critical. Some pedagogical inclusion strategies are fairly obvious: include your pronouns, ensure you have desks that students in wheelchairs can use, make sure your slides use big enough fonts for the back of the room to see. If you have visually impaired students, are you able to provide them with complimentary instructional material that a screen reader can process? Do your videos have captions? Are you approaching your teaching with the understanding that people with lots of abilities and learning styles will be in your classroom and engaging with your materials? And of course, so much more! 

For me, one of the things that was missing from the narrative was how we can make the classroom inclusive for the instructor as well as our students. Much of the literature assumes the instructor is free of the need for accommodations and focuses primarily on the learner. In fact, there is research demonstrating that faculty members disclosing disabilities or accommodation needs may be seen as unable to do the job as well as a non-disabled, or neurotypical instructor (Freidensen et al., 2021; Castro et al., 2004; Dolan 2023). The literature about faculty with disabilities is sparse yet incredibly insightful. Dolan (2023) explains that ableism could ultimately put institutional health in jeopardy and consequently, many professors regrettably live with the fear of being perceived as incompetent (693) and that “coming out” with one’s disability can be dangerous (696)!

I am going to focus on hearing impairment/hearing loss/hard of hearing (HoH) because that is my disability, but I recognize there are so many other elements of inclusion for faculty who may have other physical, invisible, learning and/or cognitive disabilities, be neurodivergent, mental health, chronic pain, etc., or need other accommodations, and so on. I also recognize my privilege to be able to “come out” as HoH because of my position as a tenured, full professor at my institution. I (and the research studies I’ve read) acknowledge that contingent employees and those in positions of precarity may not be so lucky as to disclose their disabilities.

I grew up with a mother who had a profound hearing loss since her birth, but I didn’t start losing my hearing until I was in my mid-30s. I am now diagnosed with moderate level, low-frequency hearing loss and require bilateral hearing aids. Although the library instruction classroom at RVCC has made strides in improving acoustic challenges (which I’ve also written about for this newsletter in the Fall 2022 issue). I continue to struggle to hear my students and other instructors while teaching. In a classroom that supports active learning, everyone being able to hear each other is essential! 

During the spring 2024 semester, I learned about a product called a Catchbox via the blog ‘The Mind Hears,’ a blog written by Deaf of Hard of Hearing (HoH) academics. Paige Glotzer, an HoH history professor uses a Catchbox for her lectures. Basically, it’s a soft, tossable cube with an embedded Bluetooth enabled microphone that connects to the classroom’s amplification system. Do you remember elementary school where your teacher would toss a Koosh ball and whoever had it was the speaker?! This is the same idea but with a built-in microphone!

(Left to Right) The Catchbox itself on the wireless charging base. The receiver hub for the Catchbox that plugs into the classroom amplification system.

RVCC implemented an innovation grant program available to the entire college community to challenge us to think outside of the box (pun intended here) for innovative ideas, projects, and initiatives. No request would be considered too big or too small. I knew mine was relatively small, but I knew its effect on my teaching would be huge. I wrote a grant to be considered for funding from the innovation grant program to purchase a Catchbox system for use in my classroom. In July, I received notice that my grant was approved, and I received the system early this semester to begin use in my fall teaching. 

The system consists of the Catchbox cube, a charging base, the receiver, and all necessary cables. There are additional microphones and accessories, but I only wanted the base model at this point. Setting the system up was as easy as plugging things into the wall, into each other, and into the classroom’s stereo system. You pick up the cube, speak into it and it works! 

I’ve created additional accommodations for myself in my classroom by live captioning all my presentations using the built-in caption function in PowerPoint online. With the combination of the captions and enhanced amplification, I can continue to move around the classroom as I always did, but I can count on being able to hear (and read) most of what my students are saying. I had the realization that with these accommodating teaching strategies, I had included myself in my own classroom when a student was using the Catchbox and I was writing what he was saying on the board with my back turned to him – I could hear his words! It was a moment of personal joy that I was able to do something so many of my teaching colleagues take for granted. 

References

Castro, F., Cerilli, C., Hu, L., Iezzoni, L. I., Varadaraj, V., & Swenor, B. K. (2024). Experiences of researchers with disabilities at academic institutions in the United States. PLoS ONE, 19(8), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299612

Dolan, V. L. B. (2023). “…But if You Tell Anyone, I’ll Deny We Ever Met:” The Experiences of Academics with Invisible Disabilities in the Neoliberal University. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE), 36(4), 689–706.

Friedensen, R. E., Horii, C. V., Kimball, E., Lisi, B., Miller, R. A., Siddiqui, S., Thoma, H., Weaver, J. E., & Woodman, A. (2021). A Systematic Review of Research on Faculty with Disabilities. Journal of the Professoriate, 12(2), 1–25.

Glotzer, Paige. 2020. Profile: Dr. Paige Glotzer. The Mind Hears. https://themindhears.org/2020/07/14/profile-paige-glotzer/

Hogan, Kelly A., and Viji Sathy. 2022. Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom / Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy. West Virginia University Press. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=386903be-9d59-3031-83c2-09625c9cfdcd 

Raritan Valley Community College. (n.d.). Access2Success. https://commons.raritanval.edu/acadint/a2s 

Alyssa Valenti is the Electronic Resources and Web Services Librarian at Raritan Valley Community College. She can be reached at Alyssa.Valenti@raritanval.edu.

By Joe Louderback, DeVry University & Ruth Christina Ware, Yoseloff Business Research Center, NYPL

In 2009, NJLA-CUS/ACRL-NJ published the Information Literacy Progression Standards for Use in New Jersey Colleges and Universities. This was the culmination of the two-year effort of a committee of New Jersey academic librarians to map ACRL’s 2000 IL Competency Standards for Higher Education to the first two years of college for New Jersey students.* 

The 2009 Progression Standards effectively analyzed the ACRL Competency Standards with the goal of establishing benchmarks for competencies students should have at the end of their freshman and sophomore years. In the spring of 2023, members of NJAL’s Reference & User Education Committee discussed the need for an update to the Competency Standards. The rationale for the update was clear given developments in the information landscape, e.g., the explosion of social media and the widespread adoption of smart devices. The adoption by ACRL of the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education in 2016, which reflected and addressed these developments, was also a major impetus for the update. As the initiative was being discussed, our librarian colleagues in the K-12 environment were busily updating their own information literacy standards. Early discussions led to the recognition that this initiative would be of interest to more than just the Reference & User Education Committee. With the approval and recommendation of then-president of NJLA-CUS/ACRL-NJ, Nicole Potdevin, currently Associate University Librarian for User Services at Fairleigh Dickinson University, a new task force was created to address these developments and bring the Competency Standards up to date. 

The task force has been meeting on nearly a monthly basis since June 2023. To date, the group has assembled the most commonly used rubrics for information literacy from K-12 to higher education. A preliminary literature review has been conducted. A major part of the recent activity has been analysis of the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Discussions of each Frame and the attendant Knowledge Practices and Dispositions often cover multiple meetings. These discussions have generated working documents that summarize the discussion and include commentary and avenues for further questions. The immediate goal of the Framework analysis is identifying learning objectives that can be put into practice in information literacy instruction in the higher education classroom. A more long-term goal will be creation of a document that will help translate the Framework into actionable instruction objectives and show the connections between IL instruction in the K-12 and higher education environments.

The membership of the task force represents all types of academic libraries in NJ, including community colleges and public and private four-year institutions. The committee believes there’s always a place for another perspective, and we welcome folks to join us in this effort. If you’re interested in participating in this ongoing project (or know someone who might be) or would just like to learn more, contact the co-chairs of the task force, Joe Louderback (jlouderback@devry.edu) or Leslie Murtha (LMurtha@atlanticcape.edu), or visit our poster at the New Jersey Academic Libraries Conference on January 10, 2025.

*For more information about the 2009 Information Literacy Progression Standards for Use in New Jersey Colleges and Universities and the committee members who made it happen, visit https://cus.njla.org/sites/cus.njla.org/files/ILprogressionstandards2010.pdf

Joe Louderback is the Reference and Instruction Librarian at DeVry University. Ruth Christina Ware is a Senior Manager at Yoseloff Business Research Center, New York Public Library.