Teaching and Learning Symposium

For years, the UCSB Library has invested in dynamic learning spaces and curated, trustworthy resources to support student success. But a 21st-century academic library is more than just study space and collections. In this keynote address, University Librarian Todd Grappone will explore how the Library actively partners with students, TAs, and instructors to both support student academic success. 

At a time when faculty and employers increasingly expect students to have foundational skills in coding, data science, quantitative analysis, and artificial intelligence, the Library plays a vital role in preparing students to navigate today’s complex information ecosystem. Through a broad spectrum of digital literacies–including information literacy, data literacy, and AI literacy–the Library equips students with transferable skills essential for academic success, career readiness, and civic participation.

Todd will highlight practical examples of how the Library collaborates to design accessible, engaging learning experiences grounded in reflective inquiry and critical analysis of how information is produced, used, and shared. These partnerships can take many forms within and beyond the classroom, including through the use of affordable, digitized, and open educational resources (OERs), experimentation with digital scholarship technologies and methods, experiential learning, and community participation.

Studies show that students whose courses include information literacy instruction have higher retention rates and GPAs. But beyond these measurable outcomes, critical literacy skills are indispensable to a functioning democracy in an era marked by pervasive misinformation and disinformation. As the Library works toward a future where information is not only accessible but truly open, human expertise and collaboration will remain vital for teachers and learners as they navigate that future thoughtfully and ethically.

Todd Grappone is the University Librarian at UC Santa Barbara. In this role, he serves as the chief executive officer of the UCSB Library, providing strategic vision and operational leadership. He joined UCSB in July 2025 from UCLA where he served as Associate University Librarian from 2010 to 2025 and was responsible for leadership, management, policy, and planning for multiple enterprise- and system-wide departments and leadership groups. A leader at the intersection of libraries and technology, Todd has developed and overseen many large-scale initiatives in digital preservation, global collections development, and post-custodial community archives.
 

Digital visual storytelling offers a powerful way for students to engage critically with primary sources, but technical barriers to building compelling digital narratives have often kept these projects out of the reach of most classrooms. In this keynote, we share the story of how we developed tools to address this need, starting with Colonial Landscapes, a bilingual digital history project that uses a 17th-century painting of the Bogotá savannah to teach the history of colonialism and environmental change in Latin America, first within the university and later for public audiences beyond it. Out of this experience came Telar, an open-source platform initially designed to allow other educators to make pedagogical content like Colonial Landscapes, but which we soon reimagined as a tool for students to use to develop projects of their own, and in disciplines beyond History. 

We reflect on three dimensions of this work: the layered design, which lets users move from broad narrative to close analysis of individual sources, making the same material work at different levels of depth; the narrative strategies we developed to use details within visual sources as the building-blocks of analysis, with each step pairing a specific feature of a source with interpretation, so that arguments unfold through the images themselves; and the open-source, minimal-computing approach that underpins both projects — producing static sites that cost nothing to host, require no ongoing maintenance, and are designed so that any instructor or student can build and publish a project quickly, allowing users to focus on narrative and analysis rather than technical details and making digital storytelling genuinely accessible. Through examples from graduate and undergraduate courses and public-facing work in Colombia, Austin, and Santa Barbara, we show how these tools can be incorporated into teaching and community outreach.