“It’s extremely difficult to break into the community college scene without at least a little bit of teaching experience,” said Deineh, who has worked at four community colleges. “At the majority of community colleges where I’ve worked, all the librarians provide bibliographic instruction (library orientations), so be sure to get some experience doing them.”

Deineh graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2003 with a degree in History and Art History. After working a variety of jobs that included K-12 substitute teaching and working at a customer service call center for a national online retailer, Deineh enrolled in our school’s MLIS program. He decided to focus on instructional librarianship after taking a course on the topic by the late Connie Costantino, an iSchool faculty member who Deineh said was “wonderfully inspiring.”

At MiraCosta, Deineh’s position entails implementing and overseeing a campus-wide information literacy program. He oversees for-credit library science courses, library orientations, instructional handouts, web-based instructional tools (learning modules, online tutorials, etc.), and working with classroom faculty to integrate information literacy into their curricula. “I’m very fortunate that MiraCosta College has a number of institutional student learning outcomes, one of which is information literacy,” he said.

In addition to Costantino’s class, Deineh also found Ziming Liu’s course on serving diverse library populations to be helpful in his current work, as well as a seminar in intellectual freedom taught by Carrie Gardner.

“Looking back on the MLIS program, I’d tell current students that what you put into any given class is what you will get out of it,” he said. “During the portfolio-writing process, I had a chance to see just how applicable and effective my coursework was.”