If you’re lucky enough to talk pedagogy with Phyllis Kayten, the longtime pillar of Green Library who currently serves as Outreach and Instruction Librarian, expect to hear the word “embedded” a lot. It describes every aspect of her relationship with PWR, Stanford Libraries, and the university as a whole.
So, how does someone that committed to intellectual fellowship handle the pandemic levels of dislocation that COVID-19 has inflicted on this campus community?
The short answer: more easily than you might think.
“There were things I preferred about it,” she explains with a laugh. “The kids … really wanted to have connections. So, I actually did have some people who made appointments to do Zoom sessions with me, and I really liked that. I find that students are still intimidated by talking to a librarian, coming to the library, and somehow my visiting online and being able to do it—I obviously wasn’t standing in front of a class. It was more informal. So, I think some of them felt more comfortable asking for help.”
It was in 2001 that Phyllis became embedded in Stanford’s landscape of research and instruction, but her passion for both was kindled much earlier, while studying Developmental Psychology at Stony Brook University. In an arrangement that her grad student self considered almost too good to be true, she paid the bills by teaching her own psych class, curating the tools of discovery that make knowledge production possible. As she lectured about the ongoing discourse among major theorists in her field, her students would sometimes grow impatient and ask, “Well, what’s the answer?” The answer, she explained time and again, was to keep putting texts in conversation.
After earning her Ph.D., Phyllis served as a Human Factors Research Scientist at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the Deputy Scientific and Technical Advisor for Human Factors to the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, and a Human Performance Investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. Perhaps you can’t discern a smooth trajectory from these roles to that of Stanford librarian. Rest assured, neither can Phyllis. “I just kind of fell into this librarian career, and I never realized how much I was interested in it before I actually did it.”
Adaptation, then, has been a hallmark of Phyllis’ professional life. So has empathy. She has no formal education in library science, and that non-traditional path to her current duties has made all the difference. Her work with students, which I observed firsthand this quarter when she visited my PWR1 course, benefits from a rare facility for seeing everything—the stacks, the databases, even Green’s imposing façade—as if through the eyes of a newcomer.
“My approach to working with the students is to start off talking about the research process. ‘Okay, you have to write a paper, you’re going to make an argument. What do you need to support it? And now, explain that as a research strategy.’” That last part is crucial. In Phyllis’ view, students become researchers by learning to explore with purpose. Discrete sources on the page or the screen are less important, she insists, than one’s own evolving plans and proclivities as a rhetor.
PWR instructors know Phyllis well. On hearing me pitch this newsletter article, several colleagues could not (and did not try to) suppress a swell of admiration for her long years of service to Stanford Libraries and our program. Those years have been dotted by an array of collaborations with instructors, many of them highly successful, all of them boldly student-centered. Relationships run deep with program luminaries such as Wendy Goldberg, who joined with Phyllis to create a pilot course featuring its own “totally embedded” librarian. When Donna Hunter passed through Sweet Hall Third Floor during our interview, Phyllis could not contain her admiration.
What about the students? Have they changed in twenty years?
“I think there are peaks and valleys of passion and interest. I think that a lot of them in the last few years have been really socially conscious. I feel that more.” She has long enjoyed working with student athletes, not least because of their laser light focus on topics of great importance to them, from leadership to biomechanics. “I think they’re fascinating.”
(Football fans rejoice! According to Phyllis, former Cardinal and Indianapolis Colts QB Andrew Luck was a frequent presence in Green throughout his time at Stanford, showing quite a profound interest in library research.)
As a collaborator with PWR, Phyllis continues to develop her process, which, like all good rhetoric, has no finished form. “Every time I walk into a classroom, I do it differently, because I’m experimenting. [In some library workshops] I would start out the class by having each one of them introduce themselves and tell me what their topic is. And then as they were telling me I’d say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. I have some ideas where you can go.’ And then, after they were all finished, I would use one of their topics as an example.”
After a pause, she adds: “Sometimes that’s a disaster! You just don’t know what you’re going to get. But I always use that as an example of ‘You see, research isn’t easy. It’s not easy.’”
Risking disaster comes with the territory that students, instructors, and librarians share. Like Phyllis’ first pupils at Stony Brook, today’s Stanford undergraduate needs a space where “the answer” is not the goal—where language unfurls and stretches itself, the better to soar in all directions, including those least expected.
“I like the PWR program,” she says, sounding like a formidable ally. “It really is the place where students discover.”
