User Instruction From A Former Tutor

Posted October 7, 2025 by Olivia McGovern

One of the classes I’m taking this semester is LIS 408: User Instruction & Information Literacy, and it’s reminding me of how I came to choose a career in librarianship in the first place. 

Before deciding to become a librarian, I was an English tutor. I started tutoring first generation, low-income students while I was in undergrad through a program called TRIO Upward Bound. Up until that point my Big Plan for my English degree was to write, copy edit, or get some other job at a publishing company and spend all my days surrounded by books. But tutoring opened up a whole world of other possibilities. So, I added a minor in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL), continued tutoring with TRIO for three years, and never looked back. 

What I didn’t expect was that my entire final year of undergrad would be spent on Zoom in my childhood bedroom. Most of my last classes were for my TESL minor, so everything I formally learned about teaching methodologies and pedagogy was from a screen. Luckily I had my TRIO tutoring experience to carry me through a few more positions in educational settings.

It was while I was tutoring English Language Learners that I made the connection between education and librarianship. Working one-on-one with students as a tutor is incredibly rewarding; you get to know each student individually and be first-hand to their accomplishments. But it is also draining, and I began to realize that I wasn’t meant to spend eight-hour days in a classroom or writing center. 

Now I’m two years into the program, taking User Instruction & Information Literacy, and I’m finally figuring out what I was supposed to learn in all of my TESL classes over Zoom all those years ago! I now have a few years of experience in the education setting and I’ve enjoyed making connections between my experiences and the work of an instruction librarian. Besides that, the class is organized in a purposeful way, where even the structure of an in-class activity, a homework assignment, or the Moodle page is designed to give students examples of instructional techniques in practice. It’s meta, but it’s effective. 

Whether you have past experiences in education, you know nothing about instruction at all, or you fall somewhere in-between, I think most people will still be able to draw from their experiences of either teaching or being taught and get a better understanding of instruction in library contexts. And as someone who initially learned how to teach over Zoom, I’m biased toward the in-person sections if it’s possible for you!